After posting that inadequately named string piece yesterday, it occurred to me that a preponderance of my recent postings have leaned toward minor keys, so I thought it might be nice to whip up something a little brighter, especially as I've probably got more of the dark stuff coming up next. I started this thing just this afternoon, and despite a few interruptions and the temptation to get all meticulous about it and play with it for weeks, I finished it and shoved it into the Windows Movie Maker, a process made easier by the fact that I just did one yesterday.
As I may have mentioned before, one of my two favorite composers is Joseph Haydn (the other being Sibelius). While I wasn't thinking about any particular piece of his while writing it, this is about as obvious as his influence shines through in anything I've posted. Stuff like this runs through my head all the time, so it was kind of nice to let some of it out.
I'm not going to complain about this one's title, even though it's along the same lines as the much more substantial previous posting, because in this case it fits -- it really is nothing more than a sketch, thrown together in just a couple of hours (including playing with it just a little bit). It's only a minute and a half long, but what do you expect for just a couple hours of work?
Edit: 12/2 Had to smooth out a couple of rough edges and vary the repeat of the opening section a little more (the ascending scale passages pretty much demanded corresponding descending passages for balance, you know). Nothing structural, though.
This really deserves a better title, but during the time I worked on it, nothing satisfactory came to mind -- which is weird, because I'm always coming up with neat titles for things that I haven't yet written... and yet none of those fit this one. Go figure.
It started with the initial idea of a slow, chant-like theme consisting of four phrases played over a drone, initially with the cellos (theme) and basses (drone); I wanted a full string section rather than just a quintet, both for the texture and to be able to maintain longer-held notes than single instruments could do. It's in G minor; close to Aeolian mode apart from a handful of F-sharps (but no E naturals)... and a single C# in the first violins almost exactly halfway through the piece; what a coincidence!
Both the theme and drone (which is prevalent but not continuous throughout) are passed between the sections of the orchestra, and the theme is varied, split up between the sections, fragmented, and toward the end telescoped, each of the four phrases starting before the end of the preceding one. I really like that part. And then the first half of the opening phrase makes a return in the final cadence.
This was started sometime in 2015, and had been close to being finished for some time now, with just the ending and a few small details to finish. I had the ending mostly done earlier this week, then just this morning it occurred to me that it would be really neat if I could shove some of the opening theme right into that final cadence, and it just happened to fit right in. Another one of those coincidences; it's almost as though I planned it that way! Maybe I did. Actually, I did try using even more of it, but additional notes, while pleasant enough in themselves, seemed to undercut the sense of finality, so my first try ended up being it -- knowing what not to say can be as important as knowing what to say.
Another thing that slowed me down on this is that I kept hearing timpani in spots, and then trumpets and horns in other spots (particularly the 16th notes in the violins), even an entire brass section... and woodwinds... so I set it aside to ponder whether it should remain only for a string orchestra or to add in the rest. What removed this particular roadblock was the realization that it's my piece, so if I want to I can do a rewrite for full orchestra, which will be even longer than the seven minutes of this one. Here it is:
