"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!

Leos Janacek, String Quartet No.2 ("Intimate Letters"), 1st Mvmnt.

In 1995 I created a MIDI sequence of the first movement of Janacek's wonderful string quartet No.2, also known as "Intimate Letters". However, the standard MIDI synthesizers are not suitable to play solo strings - their sound is quite awful. So this MIDI rendition was mostly made for the academic purpose of studying the score.

Later I tried to make an MP3 recording using better sounding synthesizers, but the resulting recording still did not sound good. Finally I took the time to rework the MIDI sequence using the Garritan Personal Orchestra 4 samples. And now it was possible to create a more or less realistic sounding music, which conveys some of the qualities of this composition.

I placed the recordings on one single separate page as I am now doing on the Virtual Philharmonic Orchestra site for each uploaded music rendition.

For this recording I configured SONAR 8.5 on the new MAESTRO-2 computer in a spatial surround configuration from the start: violin 1 at the left, violin 2 at the right, viola in the left back, cello in the right back. I had tried to use the sonitus:fx surround filter, but somehow that had created only standard stereo recordings and had only changed the sound characteristics without actually positioning the source in a spatial arrangement, so I had to explicitly place the sources on a surround bus and locate them with the 2D placement tool. This time I disabled all the ARIA reverb and let the source play dry from the synthesizer, centred as basically mono, before applying the spatialization. I then added on each track a sonitus:fx reverb.