Hey, it’s Monday night, and yes, I had Masterworks Chorale rehearsal, but guess what? I got some orchestration done this afternoon beforehand!

In fact, not only did I orchestrate 6. The King of Cats Orders an Early Breakfast, I orchestrated it twice, so now you get to compare and tell me which one is better. One has a piano, and the other doesn’t.

In both, I’ve used a clarinet to stand in for the vocalist, because he’s a capella for the first half, and the mp3 just was silly, with trumpet fanfares then seconds of silence. The clarinet sounds dumb, but at least you’ll know what the King of Cats is singing.

So here’s the piano score, the mp3 with piano, and the mp3 without piano.

The ones of you who have been paying attention have noticed that I’ve skipped No. 4 and No. 5 in our sequence. So sue me. 4. The Sun and Moon Circus Soothes the Wakeful Guests is almost done; I just want to even out some of the last part of it. 5. The Man in the Marmalade Hat Arrives involves a whole battery of percussion, up to and including a ratchet, and I hate dealing with percussion in the sequencer. Ick, ick, ick.

Actually, this was another of those “life of glamor” days, where we attended the reception for Françoise Gilot and the renaming of the gallery at the Centre in her honor.

Still, every little bit helps, and today I fixed the harmony on that one transition in “Milky Way” that has bugged me, and probably everyone who had heard the piece. It’s the one where we’re moving into the Rabbit’s plaint that he’s getting cold. In the sequence of far-ranging chords that come after the main theme, we originally land on E major. This time, we hit E minor for the Rabbit. The problem was that chord between the E minor chord and the Rabbit’s entrance in E minor. Now, you might think that this was easy enough, just back off to B7 or something and come back in. But that didn’t really work for me.

So I played around and ended up going from the C minor chord in the far-ranging sequence into an F# min6 (who knew?) instead of a G# minor and dropping the entire “resolution” measure entirely. I think it works a lot better.

update later: I tinkered with the bass line and now it’s a B9. I’m getting so adventurous.

I was prepared to finish up “Sun & Moon Circus,” but I got dragged to a social event for a Chinese delegation, where I had some interestingly frank discussion with the coordinator of the program. He kept looking around while we talked.

Still, it’s not like I’m not working on the project. I have a CD of all the piano score arrangements of the entire work, and I’m listening to it in the car, getting in my head the kinds of orchestration I want before I sit down to do each piece.

At this point, I have to brag about one of the pieces, “The Wise Cow Makes Way, Room, and Believe.” It’s really nice. Here’s the mp3 and the piano score.

I also had a lovely idea for staging of the end of “Milky Way.” The poem ends with Blake handing out stars to everyone, but “a handful of dirt to the rat.” The basses speak that line, then the coda sweeps up and out into the night sky. The other members of the cast continue their walk, but the rat is left alone downstage. As the music fades, a star comes within reach, and he reaches up hopefully for it as the lights fade. Good, eh wot?

I worked on the orchestration of “4. The Sun and Moon Circus Soothes the Wakeful Guests” tonight, but it’s not ready for public viewing yet. Still too clunky, in my opinion. Perhaps tomorrow night.

The problem is smooth, musical transitions from one section to the other, and the growing fear that the music I wrote many years ago no longer matches what I think the poem is saying. I will have to revisit the scoring to see if I can couch the melody in orchestral terms that make sense.

Here’s a fun game: go download the score on the Wm. Blake’s Inn page and see if you can tell what I’m shooting for. Then, when I post the mp3, see how close you came to matching me. Or, to put it another way, how far off I was.

This one’s a little bit of a cheat, since it’s from the post-2003 period of composition. When I started this project twenty-plus years ago, the thing was a song cycle for chorus and piano. Everything I wrote was for the piano. After we went to Scotland and decided to stage this, it became bigger, and everything I wrote was with an orchestra in mind. Some pieces, like this one, I wrote already orchestrated. However, I did get it up and running with the GPO sounds today, plus tweaked dynamics.

Here is “3. A Rabbit Reveals My Room” in score and mp3.

I think I’m going to create a page for all this so that people who visit here don’t have to track down all the posts.

OK, so this morning I’ve whined and struggled and come to accept the fact that my little PowerBook G4 isn’t going to be able to handle even a small orchestral ensemble (although actually as I look at it, it’s pretty much a full orchestra with a whole bunch of percussion).

So I took “Blake’s Wonderful Car” and muted everybody. Then I added instruments back in one at a time, testing the opening to see if the distortion returned. I got the strings and the woodwinds, the bass drum, the harp and piano. The cymbals brought back the distortion, but if I deleted the roll in the second measure, we were OK. The xylophone blew it out, so it stayed mute. I got the two French horns back in, and that’s where I’ve stopped for the time being.

I’m still missing the trumpets and trombones, but I may not need them. The tubular bells are probably gone for good.

Some discoveries: If I create markings for pizzicato and arco, then Finale automatically switches the GPO strings back and forth. This is good, because otherwise I have to input, in a second voice, a note so low that my keyboard won’t go there. It’s a pain. Also, the solo flute has flutter tongue available, which I needed for this piece, but it only plays one note. The “flute player 1” will play the two parts, but has no flutter tongue.

Anyway, here’s the resulting mp3. Here’s the old SoftSynth instrumentation. Preference, anyone? I’d really like comments on which one is more appealing. Here’s the piano score if you don’t have it.

UNRELATED UPDATE: There was a photo on the front page of the paper this morning that I thought was instructive, so I’ve included it in a previous post.

Today I began to explore the possibilities of orchestral sounds in Finale, the music software I use. Last year’s upgrade included a version of the Garritan Personal Orchestra, an AudioUnit instrument set. The sounds are sampled from the real thing and are quite subtle, especially if you can tweak them.

The problem is that they’re a huge memory hog. My poor little laptop is three years old and can barely keep up, even after upgrading the memory to 1 GB, its capacity. Still, I took “Blake’s Wonderful Car” and switched over the SoftSynth orchestral sounds to GPO.

Problems immediately arose, of course. Huge distortion marred the opening measures, “blowing out” the music entirely for a couple of measures. When it settled down, the sound was incredible, at least until the trombones and trumpets re-entered at forte, at which point the distortion took over again.

I wondered whether the distortion would transfer to a sound file. I went to Save Special, and lo, the mp3 option was no longer there, only AIFF or WAV. I tried both. Of course, the file is huge: 16MB. “Wonderful Car” is only 33 measures and still uses a chamber sound; I can only imagine what “Milky Way” will be like, with its 101 measures and full orchestral sound.

So I go to my desktop to hear the AIFF file, huge as it is. No distortion, but no coherence either. It sounds as if the separate tracks simply slid forward to their first note and started playing. This made no sense, because the program plays through the piece to record the GPO instruments to disk. How can the AIFF be anything but what I heard?

Oh, and the other issue: no vocal sounds. I am not the only one who has complained on MakeMusic’s forums about feeling snookered into the upgrade based on the Garritan AU instruments, only to find that there is no choral pad available. And one cannot mix SoftSynth and AU instruments in one piece. So what I’m ending up with is the orchestral accompaniment. For those pieces where the voices are not doubled in the orchestra, you’ll just have to sing it yourself. I’ve looked for an AU voice instrument online, but I can’t seem to find one.

This is getting way too complicated, and I can see where it’s leading: a new laptop. An expensive new laptop. Or an even more expensive desktop.

So close, the sounds are really wonderful, and yet so far. Onward.

And now… “Blake’s Wonderful Car Delivers Us Wonderfully Well” in score and mp3.

I’m becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the limits of what Finale can do in terms of aping a real orchestra. But better solutions are both expensive (like Finale is not??) and time-consuming. This will have to do till we get into rehearsal.

Ha! Just because I’ve goofed off for a couple of days, albeit in Greensboro, NC, doesn’t mean I’m worthless.

Here for your perusal is the piano score for “William Blake’s Inn for Innocent and Experienced Travelers” and an mp3 of the piece orchestrated.

Double-ha.

I’m finished.

After twenty years of working on it, I have finished the main composition of A Visit to William Blake’s Inn. At 8:40 pm, tonight, I wrote the last notes of “10. Blake Leads a Walk on the Milky Way,” the piece which I have avoided for nineteen years and which I finally blundered my way through.

I still have some tweaking to one or two parts of “Milky Way,” I probably still have to write a prologue and an epilogue, I still have to orchestrate the whole thing, and I probably have to rewrite nearly every other piece in the whole work, but I have done it.

I think I’ve been successful with “Milky Way.” It’s complex, it’s structured, it sounds like walking through stars, it has wry humor, it has joy. Can’t wait to hear it orchestrated.

For those who care, here is a PDF of the piano/vocal score, and here is a link to an mp3 of the score. Try to imagine it with a small orchestra. Harp included.