April 2015 Blog Posts (10)

Richard Wagner's answer to a question was: "9 - W"

Can any of you bright sparks out there stretch your minds and tell me what was the question?

Enjoy!

In the vein of impractically large instruments, here's a video of the world's largest playable violin. It takes 3 people to play this monster: one to stop the notes, and two to draw the bow! It's tuned 3 octaves below the standard violin, meaning that its E string is only an octave above the bottom string of the double bass, and the two lower strings are off the charts. :-) Apparently, somebody actually composed a piece for this giant…

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So, the past few days I've been revisiting one of my old pieces and re-orchestrating it. After finishing the first main theme, I decided on a whim that instead of continuing to the second main theme as I had previously written, I would insert a fugato passage based on a variation of the main motif, just as a fun embellishment. So I spent the past 2 days writing a mini fugue-like passage and today I got to the climax of the fugato... The new passage sounds totally awesome (if I do say so…

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I have uploaded this small carnatic raaga influenced piece called eastern. Usually there is only one melody in carnatic I have tried to add counterpoint.. It is scored for violin and cello.. Rendered through finale..Your views are welcome. It is modally thought about rather than tonally.. Mainly using different pentatonic modes..

Has anybody on this forum heard of the so-called Violin Octet or the New Violin Family? I just found out about this today... Basically, some years ago some luthiers and physicists got together and extended the standard violin into an entire family of 8, with refined tone quality that has much better carrying power and timbral compatibility with each other, also adding instruments to fill in the gaps between the instruments in the standard string orchestra. Here's the first of…

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In my childhood I had a fantasy about an orchestra that features gigantic upright brass instruments, so imagine my surprise when today I stumbled across a real instrument very similar to what I had imagined. What a humongous tuba!!

I'd love to compose a grand symphony featuring this instrument... Unfortunately I can't imagine it being particularly agile, so it'd probably be mostly confined to…

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brass%20trio.PDF

Just competed this piece for full orchestra. It's is full of emotion and feeling. It is a memoriam to my Granddaughter who passed away on this date in 2010 age seven. You can hear this on my soudcloud which you can obtain through my website www.andytownsendaminor.com.
Love some opinions on this piece.

So, I have been working on my overture for mid-sized orchestra, and have finally completed the score, which represents a major revision of the piece (it's almost a complete reorchestration of the original piece, which was written back in 2007 but was poorly orchestrated). The orchestration is much better now, but there are still some seriously problematic passages.

Am I the only one who is having serious doubts about the score right after finishing a major rewriting effort? Right now…

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