[Abhorred]

This past Monday, I had my first "orchestral" (in this case, a chamber orchestra) work premiered at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa, Canada. While the audience for contemporary classical music is small enough that the venue opted to have the audience on the stage, rather than in what would have been a mostly empty hall (seen in the back of the photo below), it was still pretty surreal to hear my music on such an iconic stage.

This picture is from the dress rehearsal.

A recording will follow once it's in my hands.

 

[eleven59]

Awesome, dude :yesway:

A guy I went through school with recently submitted a piece to the Canadian Composers Guild which resulted in his piece being performed and recorded at the Glen Gould Theater (CBC Studios).

I can only imagine how cool that would feel :yesway:

 

[robanomoly]

Congratulations! Composing fascinates me. Do you hear the music in your head and write it down, or sit with an instrument and work it out?

 

[The Dark Wolf]

Pretty damn cool. I didn't know you were classically trained, Duncan. That's bad ass. :yesway:

 

[Josh]

^ More like classically insane.

[action=Josh]is speaking as someone who read the sheet music for one of Duncan's compositions. :lol:[/action]

 

[Abhorred]

I can only imagine how cool that would feel :yesway:

It's pretty damned cool to hear so many people working toward realizing what you wrote on paper.

In my case, I'd been workshopping it with the orchestra for several days prior to performance, so this wasn't the first time I had heard them play it - still, the concert was their best performance of it (this is not always the case), which was a really nice surprise.

Congratulations! Composing fascinates me. Do you hear the music in your head and write it down, or sit with an instrument and work it out?

It depends on the context, and the goal toward which I'm working.

Generally, I do have ideas in my head that I work to transcribe. Usually, these will be small things - melodic fragments, chordal rhythms, percussive rhythms, etc.

If it's simple, I can sometimes do it right from my head to paper. Anything more complex and I need some assistance, normally in the form of a guitar or Finale (software for music notation), whose MIDI playback I use to help me confirm the notation of the idea.

Once I have some basic ideas down, I generally start thinking of ways to extend, permute, or otherwise transform it to allow long-term development.

From there... It gets complicated, and greatly varies depending on the piece. I can say more about my personal working methods, if you're interested, but that may be a bit more than you wanted to hear.

Pretty damn cool. I didn't know you were classically trained, Duncan. That's bad ass. :yesway:

^ More like classically insane.

[action=Josh]is speaking as someone who read the sheet music for one of Duncan's compositions. :lol:[/action]

Hahaha, yeah. I'm doing my Master's in composition at McGill. It's come up on MG/SS a few times before, but I don't go out of my way to draw attention to it.

Once I've finished the post-concert revisions to the score, Josh, would you like to see the results of this one, too? I know you saw one page of it a few weeks back, but there's 52 that you haven't. Same offer goes to Bob, too, since I know you've got a classical guitar background.

 

[Drew]

Kickass.

 

[Josh]

I'd definitely be interested to hear any recordings or see any video you might well have... and reading the music is always interesting too