@William, if you could post your MIDI, VE setup details, you'd be doing a tremendous service to the entire community, I frankly do not understand why that is not s.o.p. for -all- the VSL demos. There is no end of frustration for noobs to hear those wonderful sounds, dole out thousands of dollars and then... sound -worse- (initially) than the 'out of the box' sounds of some other libs. The learning curve of VSL is steep and seeing how the sausage is made is fantastic. I've PMd several demo composers for this info and it's striking that they all seem puzzled by the request... because for them, the techniques are so basic... like riding a bicycle, I guess. But one forgets just how tough it was to learn to ride after one has been doing it for a while. PLEASE DO!
@Winknotes: Musical criticism, like anthropology, seems to change with time. I can only tell you how -I- was indoctrinated... There was an inherent superiority ascribed to those composers who had internalised formal logic to the greatest level. Basically the Viennese. And in the 20th century? Bartok. Stravinsky. Webern. 'Beauty' and 'Romanticism' were given 2nd place in terms of 'greatness'. Beauty and 'feeling' were considered somewhat like 'empty calories.' And the latter works of Mozart or Beethoven were more highly regarded because they had grown more fond of counterpoint and less concerned with 'pure melody'. Brahms was so loved because his work was 'nutritious and delicious'. Wagner reviled as gluttony incarnate. I thought a lot of this was just rubbish; glorifying 'structure' the way some people admire 'engineering'.
But I now see the truth in a lot of this. The thing I realised is that Brahms natural setting was counterpoint, thematic development. He didn't have to -work- at it. It's who he was and that's why it was so good. Very few of the 'beautiful' pieces of the Romantic literature are as interesting to me now as the 'deep' pieces. Beethoven's Symphony even symphonies are much prettier, but much weaker than the odds. The early quartets more fun but far less satisfying than the latter. I think the 'Romantic' drive of just bathing in a beautiful melody doesn't fit within those boundaries. When I hear a Tchaikovsky symphony, I hear a very gifted -songwriter- struggling to escape from a formal straitjacket.
This is called: getting old.
---JC