This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License and ©2012 Gregory Weaver.
It’s hard to believe that it’s been so long since I’d posted my preview draft of this tune, but alas, it has. The good news is that I was able to buckle down for a couple of hours yesterday and shell out a draft that I deem worthy of the “v1.0” label. Check it, if you will:
*Please listen to this draft here on my original blog site, which has embedded audio.
I don’t know what the deal was, but when I started to work on this tune again I couldn’t shake the notion of having the bridge go minor. It was my intention to keep everything light and super major when I started, yet when I sat down all of my ideas were shying away from that goal. I blame the fact that in my description of the scene last post I wrote something about an assassination attempt—at one point while writing something I ended up scrapping I had even thought that if I just slowed down what I wrote it could be some kind of sinister theme that would be great if the dignitary introduced by the fanfare was actually a tyrant! Then I snapped back to reality and remembered that wasn't really the point of this tune. In any case, I think that the mood stays rather jubilant, despite it taking a different turn.
It’s been a lot of fun working with different instrumental pallets because – and I may be stating the obvious – one really gets a sense of how one instrument fits in with others. I constantly want to feature different instruments in different sections to add variety and to inspire new ideas, and sometimes I find that maybe it’s just not a good time to use the particular one I’m thinking about based what has come before, what’s to come after, and the overall mood I’m trying to convey in the section for which I’m writing. Sometimes the timbre that one gets from doubling parts between different instruments is a better solution. For example, in the bridge I wanted to be a bit more oboe focused, but the lack of flute and clarinet, as compared to the first section, left a lot to be desired. All I had to do was add their parts, reharmonize a bit, and viola! The bridge sounded so much more a part of the tune; not to mention, configuring the instruments a bit differently allowed me to think about adding more, different parts in to support my original ideas.
Next, I did something in this draft that I kept saying that I would do in other drafts of tunes but wound up not: I varied the hand drum part slightly on the second pass through of the A section. I know, I know, it’s not much, but I think it really does positively affect the energy of the piece. Look for me to play with it a little more before next draft.
Speaking of next draft, the end of this one is a teaser for the next. I don't know how much I'm going to get to this week, and next week I'm going to be on a cruise (hooray for vacation!), so if you're intrigued how that part's going to pan out, well, sorry! You'll just have to make due with what's here.
Let me know what you think! And, as always, thanks for listening.
