Three Bagatelles for Wind Quintet--Movement II. Lively

[Matt]

Check it out! Movement two of my first wind quintet, written in 2006. I was inspired by Ligeti's Six Bagatelles for wind quintet, with their variety of chord spacings/voicings and extremely economic use of materials--they say all they need to say in a short amount of time. Score in C. Comments welcome! :)

Thanks!

Matt

[Tyler]

I really really love this piece. To me it sounds more post minimalistic then Legeti, but that just me. I loved the harmonic language used in this piece and I wish I could hear the other movements to get a full idea of your vision for this piece.

The only problems I had with the piece was the signature changes and the fact that its scored in C.
I am not a fan of changing time signatures from #/4 to #/8. to me it just seems like a headache waiting to happen for your performers, especially since you you indicated that the tempo is quarter note equals 148 when clearly quarter notes are rarely used. I not a fan of scores in C mainly because I cant transpose in my head that fast yet :P.

Other then that, I love the piece and I would love to hear more of it.

[Fredrick zinos]

Very nice. I detect a little of John Adams in it, but thats not at all a bad thing. We are all imitative of someone because I suppose there is no such place as "away." I thought the rendition (to borrow a word from the CIA) had too much reverb and so sounded a little muddled. I think the music would benefit by being performed tres sec.

[Ray Kemp]

I like it and I don't get Ligeti so perhaps you are a better composer for my ear.
As has already been said, too much reverb. Also there is a problem with the machine gun effect of using singular virtual instrument samples but that can be solved in the future by having real players play.

Ray

[Ehsan Saboohi]

Congratulations. It was beautiful.

[Matt]

Hey everybody, thanks for the comments! Please check out the new MP3, though--I inadvertently uploaded the MIDI version, which I still had for some reason (and yes, there was probably too much reverb!). This performance was by Midnight Winds, on my doctoral recital at USC in 2007. Let me know what you think!

Thanks for listening!

Matt

P.S. If there's interest, I could post the first and third movements of the piece as well.

[Tyler]

I really liked the live performance of that piece. Very well performed. I would love to hear the other two movments.

[John McIntyre]

This was awesome. Great use of articulation and I like how you throw the melody all around the ensemble. Nice contrasting sections as well. Performance-wise, one can the player struggling technically in (just) a few places. the low horn line(bar 35) is slurred and may be easier if it was not. These are little things, really. I thought this was masterfully done, and the final cadence with the clarinet and horn dropping out was cool. The cadence reminded me of late Stravinsky. Bravo!