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Post by driscollmusick on Oct 8, 2018 16:05:26 GMT
Much cooler than I could do... Here's the Bach original
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Post by Tim Marko on Oct 9, 2018 12:44:34 GMT
Interesting. To me, the orchestrated version creates a dark atmosphere whereas the original seems much lighter.
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Post by driscollmusick on Oct 9, 2018 13:48:00 GMT
Interesting. To me, the orchestrated version creates a dark atmosphere whereas the original seems much lighter. I find this happens a lot with orchestrations of keyboard works. The weight of the orchestra seems to darken the work's mood. Especially with Bach, where the character of the music, even in minor keys, is fleet-footed. Hard to maintain that same feeling with the orchestra...
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Post by Bob Porter on Oct 9, 2018 15:09:27 GMT
And from another viewpoint, even the keyboard version seems like kind of an eerie sifi kind of thing. This is captured by the orchestral version. On the other hand, Bach orchestrations tend to be heavy handed and slow. It could be because there is so much meat to work with. I have heard some orchestrations that are light and moving.
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Post by Dave Dexter on Oct 10, 2018 12:38:35 GMT
I shouldn't feel like a heretic for disliking any Bach, but there it is I prefer the pure piano, but both versions leave me cold. I've heard better from many people on this and other forums, and I think your approach to orchestration - while I couldn't compare until you'd both worked on the same piece ofc - is more interesting and characterful. Though the Fantasy is much more to my taste. I'm just not a fugue guy, really. *fumbles shamefacedly for coat*
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Post by gx on Oct 10, 2018 16:07:21 GMT
Hey John, I felt there were a few interesting effects affecting the tonality … but the jazz wink in particular, (though which can w/o too much trouble be fused, in some way..) , didn't work for me… Im not sure what it is that you are appreciating, but I feel, as Dave mentions, that you'd easily give this guy a run for his money..
I reviewed the Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Webern, and Stokowski take on Bach transcriptions… though they were quite modest in their enhancement, I remember enjoying one particular piece by Schoenberg which I can't find… fwiw, the trombone player in the Stokowski orchestra says that He wrote the score, and Stokowski just took the credit… (I think that version is quite successful.)
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Post by fuguestate on Oct 16, 2018 23:16:31 GMT
I've never (to my shame) heard this particular piece by Bach before, but it struck me as being awesomely chromatic despite the era in which it's written.
To be quite honest, however, I am not impressed by the orchestrated version. For one thing the slow tempo IMO drags the music out too much, and the overlapping melody notes between the instruments compromises the clarity and sharpness of the original. The overall style of the instrumentation is IMO trying too hard to bring out the "eerie mood", to the point of making a caricature of Bach. It might work in a comedy show, or in a society of Bach-haters, but it's not working for me.
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Post by driscollmusick on Oct 17, 2018 15:29:07 GMT
Hmmm... so no one else seems to like it!
Although I don't have rigid rules, I do approach my orchestrations primarily through the concepts of *effectiveness* ("What would be the most effective orchestration of this musical moment, given whatever limitations are imposed?") and adherence to the composer's original. But even following these somewhat general principles, my orchestrations do often end up sounding somewhat similar to orchestral pieces by the same composer. I question whether that's just a combination of my knowledge of the composer's other work and a lack of creativity, but I do think there is something to the theory that a great composer's musical ideas are unique and if they were also a good orchestrator, orchestrations of their non-orchestral work by a decent orchestrator should be somewhat similar to the composer's own orchestral music.
BUT this orchestration takes a different approach. This isn't anything like the orchestral music of Bach, nor is it the plushy late 19th-century-style Bach orchestrations of Stokowski. This is orchestral music of the 20th/21st century and the Bach is just a skeleton to structure the work--a sort of post-modern mashup. I think it works in particular because the Bach original is so odd, so highly chromatic and ends so abruptly. Yet it is a Bach fugue and so the underlying structure holds it together.
One of the comments the orchestrator made on Facebook was that he read that there is some debate as to whether the first part is actually by Bach. To highlight that, he delineated the second section by making it really jazzy. Style as structure...? To me, that's all very interesting conceptually, if perhaps not super effective as concert music.
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Post by fuguestate on Oct 17, 2018 16:25:44 GMT
Actually, I have no problems with taking a Bach work and doing modern things with it. (I mean, I did ste^Wborrow from Handel's overture for the royal fireworks and do what one might arguably call infelicities to it, in my Threnody, faithfulness to the original work be damned.) But you can do it well, or do it poorly, and IMNSHO this particular example isn't very well executed. It just sounds overdone and overly exaggerated. Exaggeration, of course, works well in comedy or satire, but serious concert work it is certainly not.
But yeah, the Bach original is rather ... interesting, for that era. Then again, Bach did write some stuff that's pretty "out there" as far as the Baroque era was concerned, sometimes with more daring chromaticism even than the irascible Beethoven. OTOH I do notice that he often does this as a consequence of using the ascending melodic minor, so perhaps it's not really as daring as it sounds to our ears biased by our preconceptions of the Baroque era, merely a perfectly ordinary use of a perfectly ordinary melodic minor scale. Nevertheless, it does add huge amounts of tension to the harmony at times, that sometimes even I find a little extreme. However you look at it, Bach certainly had more of a chromatic side to his music than most people might realize.
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Post by driscollmusick on Oct 17, 2018 16:38:35 GMT
Actually, I have no problems with taking a Bach work and doing modern things with it. (I mean, I did ste^Wborrow from Handel's overture for the royal fireworks and do what one might arguably call infelicities to it, in my Threnody, faithfulness to the original work be damned.) But you can do it well, or do it poorly, and IMNSHO this particular example isn't very well executed. It just sounds overdone and overly exaggerated. Exaggeration, of course, works well in comedy or satire, but serious concert work it is certainly not. But yeah, the Bach original is rather ... interesting, for that era. Then again, Bach did write some stuff that's pretty "out there" as far as the Baroque era was concerned, sometimes with more daring chromaticism even than the irascible Beethoven. OTOH I do notice that he often does this as a consequence of using the ascending melodic minor, so perhaps it's not really as daring as it sounds to our ears biased by our preconceptions of the Baroque era, merely a perfectly ordinary use of a perfectly ordinary melodic minor scale. Nevertheless, it does add huge amounts of tension to the harmony at times, that sometimes even I find a little extreme. However you look at it, Bach certainly had more of a chromatic side to his music than most people might realize. We need more humor in our concert works!!
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Post by fuguestate on Oct 17, 2018 17:49:41 GMT
Sure, but it still has to be better executed.
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Post by Bob Porter on Oct 17, 2018 21:56:04 GMT
4'33 is serious concert music. Sigh. I think we all have different definitions of "serious" and "well executed". I don't really care for either version. At least the orchestration is more interesting to listen to.
I find most traditional orchestrations of the Toccata and Fugue very fun to listen to. All the way from full bombastic big orchestrations, to the Canadian Brass (which is very spirited as I remember. It helps that it's great music.
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Post by fuguestate on Oct 17, 2018 22:19:15 GMT
Frankly, I think 4'33 is a pile of bullcrap hoisted upon a deluded audience that has gone off the deep end. The same way "modern art" in its worst incarnations would accept a piece of blank canvas as "art" because of the hoodoo new-age spiritualist UFOistic significance attached to it. (And let's not bring up the "art" of painting faeces on canvas and putting it up on display, and then having the audacity of charging an admission fee. But hey, we're in a "modern" Politically-Correct society where we are expected to accept anything and everything, including outright bullcrap. And so charlatans continue to rejoice and rip off poor sods too deluded to see through the emperor's invisible clothes.)
But, to get back on topic, even Mozart's Musical Joke IMO beats this attempted orchestration of Bach in terms of humor value, so I remain unimpressed by it.
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Post by Dave Dexter on Oct 17, 2018 23:08:26 GMT
Frankly, I think 4'33 is a pile of bullcrap hoisted upon a deluded audience that has gone off the deep end. The same way "modern art" in its worst incarnations would accept a piece of blank canvas as "art" because of the hoodoo new-age spiritualist UFOistic significance attached to it. (And let's not bring up the "art" of painting faeces on canvas and putting it up on display, and then having the audacity of charging an admission fee. But hey, we're in a "modern" Politically-Correct society where we are expected to accept anything and everything, including outright bullcrap. And so charlatans continue to rejoice and rip off poor sods too deluded to see through the emperor's invisible clothes.) But, to get back on topic, even Mozart's Musical Joke IMO beats this attempted orchestration of Bach in terms of humor value, so I remain unimpressed by it. I do actually like the concept of 4'33, just dislike the fact that it is a "composition" and money is spent on venues and musicians to non-perform it when they could give that money to me and get four minutes of whatever. The wrapping of philosophy around it is just bizarre.
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Post by driscollmusick on Oct 17, 2018 23:18:24 GMT
4'33 is serious concert music. Sigh. I think we all have different definitions of "serious" and "well executed". I don't really care for either version. At least the orchestration is more interesting to listen to. I find most traditional orchestrations of the Toccata and Fugue very fun to listen to. All the way from full bombastic big orchestrations, to the Canadian Brass (which is very spirited as I remember. It helps that it's great music.
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