Sketch of orchestral piece

Well, below is a sketch I am going to start to put in to the computer, hopefully to meet a deadline on Friday, which is very ambitious. It's a TAXI listing, not a gig deadline, so if I miss it, it's not the end of the world. But I'd like to challenge myself to come up with a big orchestral piece and have it be big and powerful yet not over complex orchestrationally.

So, briefly, here's what I've done so far:

I set up a form and a harmonic structure and played it in to the sequencer roughly using a piano patch.

Then I printed out some sketch paper with the piano part on the top and 4 staves below.

I already knew that I was going to use strings, brass, percussion, woodwinds and voices.

I'm going to distribute the accompaniment amongst the brass and strings, starting with the strings and then moving to the brass later and then the combined "band" doing punches with the voices doing a simple long melody. I think that will be dramatic and will allow for good opportunities to build, which is one thing the listing mentions. It looks like the strings won't be doing much melody on this one.

As far as woodwinds go, I'll probably use flutes, clarinets and oboes and probably will have them doubling each other playing three note chordal melodies because I'll need the power. I may have them do some trills or flourishes near the end if it doesn't make the texture too complex or make the sequencing take too long!

That's all for now. Time to go boot up the Mac and get rolling!

See the pages of the sketch below (there's two page 7's, oops!) :)

Mazz