Sunday 12 November 2017

The Master Waits

I've composed and recorded a new song! :) It's called The Master Waits and it's a duet for either two cellos, or viola and cello. Here's a recording:



I'd be honoured if anyone else were to play this (not that I expect many cellists read this blog ;) ), so here's the sheet music:

This composition came about when I was improvising a bit and discovered that you get a pretty cool sound if you pluck the open C string at every beat and then add various chords on top of that. I had so much fun with that that I decided to write a composition around this idea. :)

Initially I thought this one was pretty easy to play, but it turned out to be really hard to get the pitch exactly right for all of those chords. Keep in mind that unlike a guitar, a cello doesn't have frets, so if you're finger is only 1mm off, it already sounds bad. There's quite a lot of dissonance here (on 0:19 the plucking part even plays G and g# together) which is always difficult to play. On top of that comes that when plucking you can't listen and adjust the pitch as you go: it needs to be right immediately. Luckily I made different mistakes each time I recorded this piece, so with 4 recordings for each part I got every note right at least once. A somewhat sad score, but after stitching those recordings together it sounds great so it really doesn't matter.

I had a lot of fun composing and playing this one, so I hope others will have fun listening to it. Enjoy! :)

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