Showing posts with label composition. Show all posts
Showing posts with label composition. Show all posts

Sunday, 15 February 2015

"A fairly ordinary working day" - composition for string quartet

In summer 2012 the Crossover Composition Award was organised, asking for a composition for two violins. So I sat down and wrote a 5 minute composition for two violins. There were great other contributions to this competition, and my composition was not awarded anything.

After the composition was sitting for a while on the metaphorical shelves, I decided to extend it into a string quartet. So in February 2015 I added a viola and a cello voice, changed a few notes in the violin parts, and recorded the quartet again with the Garritan Personal Orchestra 4 sample library.

The result is here on SoundCloud:
http://soundcloud.com/reinhold-behringer/a-fairly-ordinary-working-day-for-string-quartet.




About the composition:

The music follows a program: a typical ordinary working day at the office. It starts out with night, sunrise, awakening, then some morning hectic. Rush hour traffic, fast cars, people running upstairs and downstairs. Then at work. Boring routine job. Daydreaming. Trouble with the boss. The day does not seem to end. Finally the work is over. Rush hour on the way home. Partying. Night.

The exact correspondences of these notions to the music are shown in my synchronous comments that appear when the music is played. I did try to put these notions directly into music, quite literally translating the mood and motion into musical elements.

I hope that you enjoy this music!

Tuesday, 14 October 2014

Delian Suite #8 - a collaborative music composition project

The "Delian Society" is currently working on a composition which involves several composers: The "Delian Suite #8" has several movements, each of which is one minute long and is composed by a different composer, as a letter to a person of the past. This is currently work in progress, but the preliminary site is already up. This suite will be performed in 2015 by the Octava Chamber Orchestra.
I am very glad that I have the opportunity to take part in this project with my own little composition "Letter to Ada Lovelace".

Friday, 15 November 2013

"Romantic Suite"

In 2001 I wrote this three-part suite for orchestra. It has the movements "Mirage", "Cheeky", and "Never Ending". "Mirage" is for full orchestra and piano, "Cheeky" is for piano with strings and a few woodwinds, and "Never Ending" is for string orchestra, harp, and two solo violas.

The first rendition was created in 2001, using a Yamaha MU-80 synthesizer and a few soundfonts. This new recording from November 2013 is based on the Garritan Personal Orchestra sounds. The music is available at BandCamp.

Wednesday, 15 September 2010

Free Workshop: Composing Music Using Your Computer

2.October 2010, 10:30 – 15:00
Bridge Arts, Sagar Street, Castleford, WF10 1AF

Content


In this workshop the participants will learn about the tools for making music with the help of a computer. Those tools are nowadays available to anybody and allow the creation of music in ways that were previously only available to music professionals. This includes sequencing of music in abstract notation, the sound generation, the inclusion of acoustic effects, and the final recording of the music onto a CD.
The presenter Reinhold Behringer will give an introduction about those computer tools and will demonstrate them on a custom-built computer MAESTRO-2 as an example of a music computer system. The principles of sequencing and the use of samples will be explained and demonstrated with Cakewalk SONAR 8.5 and the Garritan Personal Orchestra 4.
The workshop will then focus on the classical orchestra and its instruments. Through demonstration of the individual orchestral instrument samples the acoustic space of the orchestral sound will be explored. As an example of a classical music sequence, the Symphony No 1 of Gustav Mahler, whose 150th birthday was celebrated this year (2010), will be shown as a computer score, and with this work as an example, the various techniques of electronic digital instrumentation will be demonstrated.
In the second part of this workshop, the participants will collaboratively compose a piece of music, using these computer tools. This will result in a music recording which each participant will take home as a CD.

Prerequisites brought by the participants: none, except an appreciation of music.


Schedule


10:30 – 12:30 Introduction to Orchestral Computer Music
12:30 – 13:00 Lunch Break
13:00 – 15:00 Collaborative Music Composition

About the Presenter


Reinhold Behringer is Professor of Creative Technology at Leeds Metropolitan University. His technical area of expertise is artificial intelligence, computer vision, and automatic driverless cars. His interest in classical music already began at an early age, and he played piano and joined the high school orchestra playing cello. In 1993 he began to use computer technology to create "renditions" of classical music, and in 1998 he founded the "Virtual Philharmonic Orchestra". He has created computer-based renditions of many classical orchestral music works, including Prokofjev's Symphony Classique, Ravel's Le Tombeau de Couperin, several waltzes by Johann Strauss, and most recently Mahler's Symphony No.1. In addition he has collaborated with opera singers to create two duets from Puccini's operas using electronic digital orchestration.

www.virtualphilharmonic.co.uk

Book Your Place


To book a place on this workshop please call Bridge Arts at 01977 556741.
Alternatively you can call Bohemian Books on 01977 517262 or email info@bohemianbooks.co.uk

Friday, 13 November 2009

Upcoming: first public play of my music: "Nostalgia"

It is late at night, after 4am. I just finished composing and recording a little piece of music. I call it "Nostalgia". The usual slow sentimental lush string orchestral piece, quite tonal, with a few adventurous modulations. Just a bit over 2 minutes long.

Writing it went smooth, although I could have added a few more instruments and worked more on the theme and the structure. But the trouble came with the recording: Sonar 4 and Personal Orchestra did not want to work together well anymore... The audio, apparently in the reverb / ambience processing, got some hickups. I tried to change the audio settings in Sonar, but that made things only worse. In the end I could not even replay anymore, stopped by dropouts.

The only thing that worked was setting Sonra4 to ASIO. But that removed all the audio recording... Solution: I had to take my external digital mini recorder and record the audio on there.

This Saturday will be the Anual General Meeting (AGM) of the Guild of St. George in Sheffield. Brian Lewis and myself will talk about the Rivers Movement. Since this organisation is devoted to linking art with life, Brian asked me if I could write a piece of music, to demonstrate that there was also this link in our project. And so I sat down a few hours ago, around 23:00, and began to improvise on the Yamaha MU-80 soft strings, and then to fill in the other instruments.

And now I am tired and sleepy.

Wednesday, 11 March 2009

About "My Music"

Another addition to my blog universe: I decided that I should get my music out again. Since 1993 I have created MIDI files from orchestral music scores. I had a site on the old MP3.COM, had "founded" the "Virtual Philharmonic Orchestra". Due to some negligence on my part, the maintenance of this repertoire has been very bad, and right now I do not yet have one repository for the music recording which I have created in the past 15 years.

But that is going to change: recently I have created two new "renditions", that is recordings using the MIDI format, and I have posted them onto YouTube. Will report about it here in this blog.

And, I plan to make a repository of my music files, linked to my web site. Will be together with the publications repository that I am working on for the Centre of Creative Technology. This will also have the opportunity to store music made by my colleagues.

Stay tuned - I will provide updates on this blog about all my music-related activities.