Landscape 12: Autumn Forest is complete, and I have started the first phrase of Landscape 13: River, which will be the last piece in the series. I edited and mixed an orchestral reading of Landscape 7: Mountains. The reading, which was done in early November, was by the Musiversal Lisbon Orchestra https://www.musiversal.com/).
There’s been some changes on the Musiversal front. They are discontinuing the 30 piece Lisbon orchestra, and are adding a different 30 piece orchestra. This comes with some good news and some bad news. The bad news, as a consumer, is that they are raising their prices a bit. However, this is really good news, when you worked out how little the musicians were getting paid, they really do deserve more money. On the good side of things, they are allowing composers to purchase only seven minutes of time again, rather than having a 14 minute minimum, making it a bit more economical.
They’re also changing the instrumentation a bit. The new 30 piece orchestra only has 2 horns instead of 4, but they are adding a harp and percussionist. I’m actually pretty enthusiastic about that change. I don’t get to write for harp much, and who doesn’t love some timpani? Accordingly, I recomposed the orchestral part I wrote for Landscape 10: Rocky Coast, which I will hopefully have read in late winter 2020.
I’ll leave you with the new realization of Landscapes 7: Mountains with the added orchestral part, as well as Carl Bugbee’s guitar tracks. This piece was a bit tricky. Four phrases in work have orchestral backing. Two of these feature a dotted quarter hemiola, so I rewrote these to be in a compound meter in a different tempo to avoid syncopation in the orchestral part. Another difficulty for the piece is that it is in Gb major. However, only one of the phrases was easily notated in concert Gb major. Given instrumental transposition, it made the most sense to notate the other three phrases in E major, and add sharps where needed. Ultimately it made the most sense to write each phrase with a measure of rest of the entire orchestra between phrases, and to put the phrases in a different order than they appear in the piece in the arrangement. Even though two of the phrases segue into each other, it was easier to have the orchestra record them in separate passes, and edit them together in LogicPro.