Happy holidays, everyone! Here's my entry. I decided to go with this old piece from 1996 which is a piano piece wrapped in orchestral colors and it's part of a suite that tells a fairy-tale through music. Unfortunately I didn't have VSL at my disposal back then, so I went with a Roland JV2080 with orchestral expansion (anyone remembering that thing?). Enjoy!
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Happy holidays, everyone! Here's my entry. I decided to go with this old piece from 1996 which is a piano piece wrapped in orchestral colors and it's part of a suite that tells a fairy-tale through music. Unfortunately I didn't have VSL at my disposal back then, so I went with a Roland JV2080 with orchestral expansion (anyone remembering that thing?). Enjoy!
I do remember the Roland and you got a very nice sound out of it. Good recording, very clean.
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************************************************************News Flash***********************************************************
PEACE BREAKS OUT ON THE VSL FORUM!
You know when I first saw William's provocative thread here I thought for sure Dietz was going to shut it down in a matter of hours which was why I quickly responded.
So I took some time off for Christmas and when I come back, amazingly, this thread is still going strong with four pages of stuff taboot. I figured maybe Dietz is taking time off for the holidays and this thread slipped under the radar.
Well I love a good fight so I grabbed a bag of popcorn and took my ringside seat expecting to see a real slugfest between "The Usual Suspects."
I'm reading through the posts waiting for the first blow when to my pleasant surprise everybody is getting along😊 Everybody is posting their best and worst melodies and having civil discussions about melody makers, Physics, Classical Music, and Film Scores etc.
**************************************************************News Flash********************************************************
IT'S OFFICIAL, THE TEMPERATURE IN HELL HAS JUST FALLEN BELOW 0 DEGREES CELSIUS
I wonder if it has something to do with the holiday season🤔
Anyway, I wanted to keep the thread alive because I want to listen to the works that people have posted I just don't have time right now but I will be back.
Gosh! I'm just so proud of you guys😢
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https://soundcloud.com/errikos-vaios/fractured-city-main-title
For as long as I've known you here on the forum Errikos I do believe this is the first time I've actually heard your music.
You sandbagger! You've been holding out on us. Hording this talent of yours and not sharing. Shame on you!
This is truely a beautiful melody Errikos and if it's a not-so-favorite melody then I think we would all be in for a treat if you would share your favorite melody polished and produced or rough and raw. Honestly, there is a uniqueness I'm hearing that defines your own style. I'm usually pretty good at hearing influences in somebody's music but I'm having a hard time detecting any trace of this composer or that one in your example here. Maybe it's just that I'm not as astute in this regard as I once thought I was.
Thank you for sharing. Finally😃
When I get more time I will listen to other posters of this thread but I'm just going to focus on composers whos music I haven't heard yet.
Sorry Guy but I'm sure whatever you've posted is just shinning with brillance. I think you could drop a stack of plates on the floor and the breaking, crashing and clanking would somehow form a beautifully memorable melody. However, I wouldn't mind hearing something of yours that you're not so proud of.
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Xander that sounds really good - was any of that VSL?
Thank you, William. No, nothing of that was VSL. It's from 1996, I don't believe VSL has already existed back then (?). Coming from piano, I think I wrote the better melodies in my early time when I had nothing but a piano and later a KORG 01W and, again later, a ROLAND JV2080 at my disposal. Since I started working with VSL my focus as a composer has shifted towards colors and orchestration. Now as I'm writing this, I'm not sure that's a good thing. 😊
Anyway, if this thread was about my best melodies made with VSL, I'd consider THIS one my favorite. It's the main title for a short film I composed music for some years ago. It's very brief, but I like to think it's melodically intense.
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Congratulations to everyone participating in this (great thread Bill), and thanks for the kind words Anand and good work too. Since people started posting what they refer to as their good stuff, I thought I'd put up something I wrote in this century. It has been interesting for me to monitor people's musical backgrounds and interests through this exercise. It seems that most listen to film music primarily (a lot of music offered here screams this), and less to the classical tradition (by 'classical' I mean anything 800-1950 A.D.). I'd just like to say guys, that as much as I too love film music and I marvel at the great tracks this genre's masters have offered us, the real wealth lies in the other direction. If you wish to enrich your musical vocabulary significantly and listen to the best melodies that have ever been conceived, take a break from film for a while, shift the balance a bit. Just a suggestion.
https://soundcloud.com/errikos-vaios/wings
Very beautiful song indeed. Inspiring voice too. I like the piano part a lot. Not just an accompaniment, it provides an additional value to the song by creating atmosphere in an active way!
Jos
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Happy new year everybody!
Jasen: Many thanks for the excess praise, The Good Lord Knows a composer can use all the encouragement they can get (and discouragement in the right cases...). It was about two or three years after that track when I wrote something I felt was unquestionably mine, full flavour, and my confidence in continuing studies in composition was sealed (the vagaries of youth...), so top points for not discerning influences, I have none to my knowledge. I consider melodic writing to be my strongest point, and I never post anything of mine on the net, I don't know how William's 'challenge' and your post compelled me to do it. The "embarassment" in posting this track after so many decades since its creation is not the melody, but the most generic chord progression (even though so many beautiful melodies have been buttressed by just such a progression).
Jos: a/a, many thanks. Having posted that documentary track in good humour I thought I'd post something more recent and representative. If you can write melody you usually can do so from an early age, however harmonic and structural development can come over time, and over studying (usually the masters). The piano accompaniment is more than basic accompaniment as it develops the material, has three and four voices going on at times, pedal points, etc.
Now, it is BLASPHEME time! More so as this is a Viennese forum!! This is the track I should have posted to begin with (humourously):
Somewhere in the mid-late '90s I was approached by a girl (music dept. piano student) in a panic. The Music History teacher (a composer) had given the class an assignment, to compose a brief work in the manner of one of the early Romantics. The works (solo, duos, etc.) were to be performed in class! She had left this for the last minute and could come up with nothing, so she offered me about €300 today's money to ghost-write a song for her in the manner of Schubert! And she needed it 'tomorrow'!! Also it couldn't be sophisticated so as to not raise suspicions...
I smiled, thinking a) I needed the money, and b) my age was within Schubert's own lifespan, and he was reputed to go out for walks and habitually return with a full song (sometimes more...)
I accepted that challenge, went straight to the library to have a look at a couple of the great composer's song-cycles to get lyrics and look at accompaniment patterns. I chose Die Stadt from Schwanengesang. I went home, composed through the night, and gave her a song the following morning.
As a result the lecturer was enthusiastic (and somewhat suspicious), but the important part that makes this story worthy of posting is that years later a baritone switched Schubert's own song for mine(!!) in his recital of the whole Schwanengesang at the Liszt Academy Concert Hall (Budapest's premier concert hall), in front of what was and is an educated audience, and the whole thing went like a charm. In my unmitigated arrogance I attribute their acceptance and applause to their thinking there might have been an alternative/additional version that Schubert discarded... The following (ersatz) track is a bad recording from that concert:
https://soundcloud.com/errikos-vaios/die-stadt-m
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Thank you Anand, the song was good enough for that baritone to interpolate it in his professional recital of the Schwanengesang. The audience were actually expecting all Schubert (and I believe most thought that's what they got), as was printed in the programmes in their hands!
The student picked a singer and performed that piece in a lecture hall at university years before this here track was recorded, where everyone was supposed to think she had done it.
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This is a nice melody I had scored for a movie a long time ago, I think has some Brahms-ish qualities:
Scene from Eternal (2004) scored by Guy Bacos (All done with VSL back in 2003)
Later I used this same theme to write a "Theme and Variations" piece, and also did a version for piano and cello which will be performed in 2018, but this is the piano version.
Hi Guy,
You posted this already more than 2 weeks ago. I listened just to both versions. I like melody very much, but also the variations I like very much!
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My contribution is a piece for accordion, clarinet, and harp. I wrote it for my wedding and Becky and I got the chance to perform it live with one of the top Canadian harpists, Erica Goodman. This version though, features live accordion, clarinet, and midi harp (long before we knew how to really work with virtual instruments).
Passages for Accordion, Clarinet, and Harp
Sincerely,
Dave
Hi Dave,
I listened to your piece, and I liked it very much. The occasion I understand was of course very inspiring, and I can hear that in this music. Beautiful played also by you and Becky.