Friday 10 April 2009

Reworking Janacek's Sinfonietta

In 1995 I created a MIDI file of the first movement of Leos Janacek's "Sinfonietta", one of my all-time favorite music pieces. However, I never made an acoustic recording of it, as the MIDI synthesizers which I had available at that time, were not adequate. Also when MP3 became popular a few years later, I did not try to distribute an acoustic recording but rather gave away the MIDI file only, on my web site of the "Virtual Philharmonic Orchestra".

A few days ago, however, I decided that it would now time to get this piece into shape. I used the Garittan Personal Orchestra samples and the old MIDI file (which I had revised around 1999) and did a new recording. The first draft of it is now ready - sounds quite reasonable. This is at a stage where the instruments are played exactly as noted, no addition or changes from the original score. I do, however, believe that the recording could benefit from a bit of additional layering, adding and duplicating some voices to get a fuller sound.

The file is currently not published - I want to get the complete Sinfonietta done before I release parts of it.

2 comments:

  1. would it be possible to get your midi file of sinfonietta ? I'd like to rearrange it for a group of ten musicians.

    Best regards,
    Blured.

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  2. Hi,
    apologies for my late reply here.
    Currently I only have the complete MIDI file for the first movement of the Sinfonietta. The problem is that this file is highly specific to my set of synthesizers: it has controller values in it which would not match to the normal GM mapping. Also I exceed the 16 MIDI track, as in some cases one single instrument is mapped to a set of tracks. So the MIDI file would not be of good use for your purpose. I could email you the old MIDI file which I made more than 10 years ago with a simpler setup, but again I only have the 1st movement for this.

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