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  4. Once Upon A Midnight Grimm - A Symphonic Halloween Tale

  • Once Upon A Midnight Grimm - A Symphonic Halloween Tale

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    "On Halloween night, fog and mist hang over the old abandoned graveyard. As a distant bell strikes midnight, apparitions slowly begin to gather: ghosts, ghouls, skeletons, trolls, goblins and all manner of scary things. All turn to look upon a particularly ugly and disgusting ghoul holding a large gong. He strikes the gong. Stillness hangs over the old graveyard for a moment, and then the smaller ghosts and ghouls begin to dance. Soon all of the creatures are dancing and prancing across the graveyard. When the largest trolls and goblins take a turn, they frighten away all the other creatures, who only slowly return when the big trolls and goblins wander off. As their time is drawing to a close, they all jump, whirl, and leap with the greatest of abandon. Then the far-off bell strikes one o'clock, and quiet stillness settles upon the old graveyard until the next All Hallows Eve."

    Once Upon A Midnight Grimm

    Here is a link to the score for anyone interested:

    Printed Score

    This is a concert piece that I hope might be performed live one day. All VSL with the exception of CSS strings doubling the VSL Orchestral Strings.

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    Hi Paul,

    Your symphonic poem sounds absolutely great as a composition and as rendition. A very good tale translated in orchestral music. Could easily be set to a movie or picture series.

    The orchestra sounds pretty clear and transparent, the overall room ambience seems a bit small for such a large orchestra though. That can be fixed in a minute if you would like. This is only a matter of taste and within that theme (Halloween), some exaggeration wouldn't be that strange...

    Congratulations and thank you for sharing,

    Jos
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    Hi Jos,

    Thank you for listening, and for your comments. I would like to say that I am completely satisfied with the piece, as I have been working on it for months and months. I am in doubt regarding the tempo. I tried a number of different tempos for the middle section, and eventually sort of just gave up on finding the best. There are many small tempo changes in this midi-performance, but no major tempo changes. Do you have an opinion regarding the tempo of the middle section?

    Regarding venue, I am using MIR Pro and was initially using Sage Hall. However, I have a tendency to overuse reverb, so I may have overcompensated to the other extreme. The VSL instruments can get muddy with too much reverb. The version is MIR Pro in Teldex, with just a bit of Miracle to lengthen the reverb a bit.
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    Paul,

    I think the middle section is fine as it is, but to my taste I would raise the tempo a little bit or at least bring in some audible tempo variations to create more tension. But as said, that's merely a matter of taste.

    As to the room, I like Teldex a lot and too much reverb kills all the nice VSL sounds. Here a tiny nit more wouldn't harm, maybe in MIRacle.

    Have a nice weekend,

    Jos
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    Hi Paul,

    Impressive! It's a great work, well written, well developped and nicely orchestrated. A lot of good stuff in this piece. It's an enjoyable Halloween tale with humor, such as the bassoon melody at the beginning, mixed with drama. Maybe might of been cool to have one really scary short section with some evil chords. 😈

    The mix is quite good, although I agree with Jos about the hall, occasionally we feel cramped in a room while the orchestra is big. If you could fix that while keeping the same clarity that would be ideal. It will also help to not feel the solo instruments too upfront.

    Regarding the prgramming, this is a pretty challenging piece, mainly due to the lenth and the several times you have fuller sections, so a bit of harshess is to be expected, especially in the tutti sections such as at 5:20, but you could probably tame some instruments there and adjust the mix balance.

     Congratulations! Looking forward to hearing more of your pieces.
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    OK I can not tell very much about the quality of music since I am personally not that much engaged and interested in filmmusic. So do not take me too serious when I ask for the title and the scenery it relates to.:

    As far as I know Grimms Märchen might be magical, enchanted and a bit heroic but finally always very harmonic and seem to me definitly not that much dominated by the dark gloomy sentiments which characterizes your scenery and allusion to midnight and Halloween.

    Grimms fairy tales are (in germany at least) read for little childern for sleep - not to make them afraid for the dark night to come - but to make feel them save in the magical world of dreams in which finaly always the good ones prevails as everybody expects as soon as the fairy tale beginns with "once upon a time..." .

    So since the scenery of your text does not appeare very much like any fairy tale I would perhaps think a bit about he title.  Since the music also reminds more a ghost, vampire  or atrocity story than any kind of fairy tale I would perhaps prropose not to mingle in the title those two in my impression pretty different kinds of litatery allusions. 

    If you really meant to get something more fairy-tale like in your music you know of course aswell Mendelssohns Midsummernights dream or Engelbert Humperdinck famous late romantic Opera "Hänsel und Gretel" In my eyes this is an also very inspiring, but quite different world of musical thinking.
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    @Guy Bacos said:

    Hi Paul,

    Impressive! It's a great work, well written, well developped and nicely orchestrated. A lot of good stuff in this piece. It's an enjoyable Halloween tale with humor, such as the bassoon melody at the beginning, mixed with drama. Maybe might of been cool to have one really scary short section with some evil chords. 😈

    The mix is quite good, although I agree with Jos about the hall, occasionally we feel cramped in a room while the orchestra is big. If you could fix that while keeping the same clarity that would be ideal. It will also help to not feel the solo instruments too upfront.

    Regarding the prgramming, this is a pretty challenging piece, mainly due to the lenth and the several times you have fuller sections, so a bit of harshess is to be expected, especially in the tutti sections such as at 5:20, but you could probably tame some instruments there and adjust the mix balance.

     Congratulations! Looking forward to hearing more of your pieces.

    Thank you Guy. I'm not much of an engineer and not very knowledgable about mixing. It was a real stretch for me to ge this far! 😊 But as I learn more, I hope, someday I will return to this piece and try to improve upon the midi-performance and the mix.
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    @fahl5 said:

    OK I can not tell very much about the quality of music since I am personally not that much engaged and interested in filmmusic. So do not take me too serious when I ask for the title and the scenery it relates to.:

    As far as I know Grimms Märchen might be magical, enchanted and a bit heroic but finally always very harmonic and seem to me definitly not that much dominated by the dark gloomy sentiments which characterizes your scenery and allusion to midnight and Halloween.

    Grimms fairy tales are (in germany at least) read for little childern for sleep - not to make them afraid for the dark night to come - but to make feel them save in the magical world of dreams in which finaly always the good ones prevails as everybody expects as soon as the fairy tale beginns with "once upon a time..." .

    So since the scenery of your text does not appeare very much like any fairy tale I would perhaps think a bit about he title.  Since the music also reminds more a ghost, vampire  or atrocity story than any kind of fairy tale I would perhaps prropose not to mingle in the title those two in my impression pretty different kinds of litatery allusions. 

    If you really meant to get something more fairy-tale like in your music you know of course aswell Mendelssohns Midsummernights dream or Engelbert Humperdinck famous late romantic Opera "Hänsel und Gretel" In my eyes this is an also very inspiring, but quite different world of musical thinking.

    Hi Fahl5,

    This is quite an interesting post. First the piece is a concert piece, no film associated with it. I wanted it to be something children would enjoy, sort of like "Peter and the Wolf" or the "Sorcerer's Apprentice" in spirit. My goal was to maintin a mock seriousness while letting a good bit of playfullness creep in.

    In the United States every holiday is very special for children, but Halloween is arguably the most fun for them. The children dress up in outlandish costumes and go from house to house collecting candy from everyone in their neighborhood. Some of the boys dress up as soldiers, superheroes or policemen, girls might dress up as a princess, or a superhero, but most of the boys and girls do their best to look and act in a "scary" manner, Costumes such as skeletons, zombies, witches or ghouls are very popular, but everyone knows it is all just play. My piece is written in that spirit. I'm sorry if you didn't enjoy it.
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    It dont mean anything if I enjoy something or not. What you do is OK, as far it realizes what you intended to do.

    It is just a kind of my personal impression that the wonderful world of innocent child-fantasy like we feel being akin to the world of Fary Tales (also the world of Shakespears Midsummernights dream, Lewis Carols Alice in Wonderland, Frank Baum's Wonderful Wizard of Oz) is something quite different to the world of Halloween, scary things, super heros etc. which is characterized by emotional superlatives and do not have that background of as I said unbroken innocent harmony and play. Both are undenyable things which can be reflected in music but imho not both at the same time, since. As I said do not take my objection to serious, it is just my spontaneous impression of something I feel being a bit inapt. I personally would if I would do something in music like that either do one thing or the other. For me it is just cleraly something very different especially when I think of its musical realisation. But this just my personal view.

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    @fahl5 said:

    OK I can not tell very much about the quality of music since I am personally not that much engaged and interested in filmmusic. 

    A symphonic poem is quite different from film scores or incidental film music. You probably skipped over Paul's initial post, he doesn't mention anything about this being related to film music.

    As for me, music is music. you enjoy it or you don't 😊
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    I know, that the title and the given scenery are intending something alike the program music of the 19th. Century.

    I did not talked about Filmmusic because I ignored that, but since what I have heard sounds to me indeed very similar what I understand as an filmmusic approach to music. An approach I personally never tried myself and never had the intention yet to do so. that is why I am not able to judge how good this is done, or even what I would think to do in musical aspects.

    And yes there always has been exactly thoses discussion already in the 19th Century about how literal ideas and musical ideas are able to relate to another and how far one can "paint" any story, scenery or happenings in music and I am far from disputing this very influencal and productive approach to composition. 

    My only point was that I feel on the level of the text on which Pauls music is based things are mingled, which in my mind do not go together well. For me it seem to be, as if you would try to combine the "Songe d’une nuit de sabbat"of Berlioz Symphony fantastic with "Fürchtenmachen" in Schumanns Kinderszenen. Even if there are superficially some aspects that seem to be similar, In my humble opinions this would be as if you try to force together of two completly conflicting esthetical positions (idealistic for the sentimental view on innoncent Fears in Childhood and kind of a more or less ironic, negative esthetic referring to the pleasure on exaggerated, and/or gloomy, more or less scary things.) I even would not dispute the musical potantial of both esthetical positions in music. I just have the impression that to just mix them up in anyway weakens both in their certain musical potential. This is just my very personal and very humble impression.

    And yes for me seems to be nearly the opposite true For me "music" is never just "music": As "language" is not just always "language" but the always very individual, so many so different things, one can express in the same language, so "music" is for me never just "music".

    What I enjoy is that every musical idea has its own certain character what makes for me every music interesting to discover in its very own way. Sorry when I bother you discussing from that point of view. This is just how I personally spontaneosly react on music.
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    This is an interesting discussion.

    I understand your point, but I think it's a bit rigid. It is not easy to listen to new music without our knowledge creeping in guiding us on how to approach this and what should we say about it. 

    Countless times we've seen this over the centuries, composers who took exception to what was considered sacred forms and styles., and thank God for that! Let's take a few examples, Chopin's Sherzos, the word "sherzo" means "a joke", and traditionally, all composers used it that way, with playful compositions, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven etc. Comes along Chopin who writes scherzos, and his scherzos are no joke! So should that take away anything from the work? It's Chopin's way of expressing a scherzo. 

    Other example, Tchaikovsy's piano concerto No 1 in Bb minor, has that famous opening which is totally unrelated to the rest of the piece and at first considered like a disaster concerto by the pianist who was suppose to premiere it, the structure was definetly different from the traditional concerto forms. People got use to that and it ended beeing really cool. 

    We could find countless examples of exceptions that became the rule. So knowledge is great and essential, but is also a hurtle sometimes if we take it too seriouly.

    Ok, I'm not saying, it should be the free for all,, however, music is made of rules and exceptions, Brahms and Tchaikovsy had opposite views on music, and both are geniuses. 

    Once again, I know what you mean, and it has its merit, no doubt about it, don't get me wrong, and I agree to some degree, however I try, don't always do that, but I try more and more to seperate the knowledge from the listening.
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    Paul that is a very imaginative symphonic poem and well done!   I agree the ambience should be bigger - partly because more reverb in general can be more creepy.  I felt the high violins should be darker - some of the shrill sampled violins was audible - though I am always harping on that.  Anyway it is an excellent piece and a huge  project to do - congratuations.

    btw Grimm's fairy tales were not originally charming innocent children's stories - that is a conventional misconception based on sanitized versions of the stories published for commercial exploitation in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  They were orginally collected by the Grimm brothers as pure folktales, which include many stories that children normally would not even be allowed to listen to and were shown out of the room, while the adults stayed to listen.  Including Fitcher's Bird with a sorceror chopping virgins to pieces in a large basin of blood and an ending - featured in several tales - of a murderous witch being rolled alive into a creek inside a barrel studded with nails. 
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    Sorry this is not exact: The common Idea of a fairy tale was definitlly not "a conventional misconception based on sanitized versions of the stories published for commercial exploitation in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. "

    The Idea to collect them was an original romantic Idea of the Brothers Grimm, directly inspired aswell from Clemens Brentanos Collection "Des Knaben Wunderhorn" as by Herder's Theory of sentimental education by those deep rooted stories which hitherto survived for long time only in aural tradition not at least characterized by the stories the old womans (grand mother) of the traditional family told when they took care for the children while the Parent worked.

    The Grimm Brothers expressivly intended this collection to be for Children and called them from the beginning "Kinder und Hausmärchen". Yes there are some passages of atrocity in some tales but the overall character is dominated even in those tales by the always very conciliatory end of each tale. It might even be that some tales have been mitigated by the Grimm Brothers. But of course not "in the late 19th and early 20th century". This is simply not true. It was Grimms Collection that shaped the common Idea of a fairy tale and it was from the beginning in Grimms very romantic understandng of the fairy tales inteded to do so exactly in the way it does.

    Sorry for bothering you with german literary studies but since the Grimm- Brothers startet their work nearly 200 Years ago exactly in the town where I write in this moment this posting, this might clear some misconception about the Idea of the Fairy Tale and who have had which conception of it. So believe me it is no misconception to make a significant difference between atrocity stories and the fairy tales in Grimms Collection.

    To get an impression of the musical understanding of "Märchen" in the early and middle 19th century just listen to Schumanns Märchenbilder, for Viola and Piano which is very warm music full of very romantic emotions. I do not think this might be in any way a "a conventional misconception based on sanitized versions of the stories published for commercial exploitation in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. "
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    @William said:

    Paul that is a very imaginative symphonic poem and well done!   I agree the ambience should be bigger - partly because more reverb in general can be more creepy.  I felt the high violins should be darker - some of the shrill sampled violins was audible - though I am always harping on that.  Anyway it is an excellent piece and a huge  project to do - congratuations.

    btw Grimm's fairy tales were not originally charming innocent children's stories - that is a conventional misconception based on sanitized versions of the stories published for commercial exploitation in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  They were orginally collected by the Grimm brothers as pure folktales, which include many stories that children normally would not even be allowed to listen to and were shown out of the room, while the adults stayed to listen.  Including Fitcher's Bird with a sorceror chopping virgins to pieces in a large basin of blood and an ending - featured in several tales - of a murderous witch being rolled alive into a creek inside a barrel studded with nails. 

    Thanks for the positive comments William. I am still very much a novice concerning mixing and engineering. The problem I experience with ambience is that when I add more reverb, the mix becomes cloudy, the clarity is lost. Can you please give me any advice on how to achieve a bigger ambience without losing clarity? Your mixes always have a good sound. Your latest post "Tomorrow" being no exception. 

    Regarding the violins, I agree. I did a cut of -3db at 2750hz. I tried additional cuts but ended up with a very dull sound, so not sure what to do. Do you have any advice on the strings?
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    Anyway, this thread should really be about Paul's fine work, not a history lesson on Grimm's fairy tales. 
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    You're absolutely right Guy.

    However I do have to correct something stated falsely by fahl5 - the fact is the Grimms collected both children's and "household" tales, and those were NOT for children originally and were later sanitized in order to present them more widely.  But this had led to folktales in general being thought of as children's stories, which is totally false.  They were originally just stores of any kind including adult.  

    The leading scholar Jack Zipes on the Grimms has just published the original edition of the tales.  He gave an interview about the changes made to the real stories:

    Zipes describes the changes made as “immense”, with around 40 or 50 tales in the first edition deleted or drastically changed by the time the seventh edition was published. “The original edition was not published for children or general readers. Nor were these tales told primarily for children. It was only after the Grimms published two editions primarily for adults that they changed their attitude and decided to produce a shorter edition for middle-class families. This led to Wilhelm’s editing and censoring many of the tales,” he told the Guardian.

    Sorry Paul!  I don't mean to hijack the thread.  I just had to respond to that.  
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    Paul, you've done a terrific job and I've enjoyed listening to you piece.  And thank you for including the score.  I will have a listen and study more in-depth.

    As for the sematic arguments, I agree with Guy Bacos that the real focus should be on Paul's work and not semantic and historical detail relating to the title (as interesting as they may be).  It is enough for us today to try and simply enjoy a creation sucy as this and to help each other out with suggestions and ideas that might improve our craft.  Symphonic poems have also been done by many other composers such as Dvorak and impressionisitic as they are, they can also simply be enjoyed for the wonderful and creatively inspired music.  And this is how I look upon Paul's work.

    Its quite a job to get beyond all of the technical details involved in composing and creating for samples in a hyper-critical world and for this I greatly applaude Paul's work, plus I whole-heartedly enjoyed it.  We need more of these types of creative compositional efforts as well as focus on constructive criticism and inspiring rather than creating critical divisions.

    As for constructive suggestions, I've shared some mixing thoughts privately with Paul that are somewhat of a reflection on some of the comments in this thread so I won't repeat them and he has numerous ideas to try out.  However, despite the suggestions, I also really enjoyed it just the way it is.  Its not always necessary to achive technical mixing perfection for a musical piece to simply be fun and enjoyable.

    Thanks for sharing Paul!
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    to return to the thread - concerning the mixing I simply felt it should be in a very reverberant space.  To stop muddiness often one would make lower instruments less wet.  Though that is a normal procedure for mixing.  

    However on high violins I am doing more EQ partly based on going to a concert of a live orchestra while thinking about the problem of sampled violins sounding shrill and tinny.  I listened throughout the whole concert for this effect.  The real violins - in a good concert hall - sounded much darker in the high range than sampled.  I tried to reflect this with a large amount of high shelf EQ.  The music is not trying to reproduce every frequency the instruments create like a good recording engineer  but rather represent what one hears in a concert hall, which is very different.  It is something to think about and then listen to the effect.  
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    Ok just put an end to simply wrong speculation and misinterpretation. The very first Edition Vol I 1812, Vol II 1815 of the Grimms Collection was often incomplete fragmentaric in order to motivate the audience to contribute more tales., It has had very little resonance and was scarcly sold.But even thhere was defenitly no remarkeable tendency to any domination of literal atrocities, those aspect always have been only one aspect among others on the enchanted world of the fairy tales. 

    The most important and influencal Edition was the II. Edition from 1819 which was already explicitly called "Kinder und Hausmärchen"it was of course made by Wilhelm (and Jacob) Grimm and the Grimms themself shaped in this edition the very romantic very sentimental tendency in the understanding of Grimms Märchen and of course not the late 19th century or 20th century or what ever..

    There are no Fairy Tales collected and published by the Grimms which was exclusivly restricted for adults at all. this is just completly wrong speculation. And I am sure you misunderstood profoundly what Zipes intended to outline. And what ever the collected Tale include, does not change the fact, that Grimms interest in fairy tales was notably inspired by Herders Idea of sentimental education by those very old stories, since that was already one of their dominating origin in the history of literatiure in aural tradition.

    In short, William you are musician, no one expects that you must have any deeper expertise in german literature. So it is nothing wrong to admit, that you still can to learn something about a perhaps a bit superficial misunderstanding.

    Still I feel that this is very interesting when it comes to discuss the musical intention this composition refers to. We have wunderful examples in the music of the 19th centuryof music likewise inspired by literature. And how the music refers to and what Ideas inspire what musical intention is of course nothing off-topic as far a composer reffers explicitly to literature and literal terms. Even if myself like to post and discuss concrete music here and make more than enough use of it as most of the users will know. I still appreaciate what makes this forum great, that we do not stop at the very technical details of sample usage, but also discuss the context a compositions refers to.