Presentation Plans

With my presentation date coming up in the near future, I need to start preparing for it to make it both educational and entertaining for my classmates. So far I plan on first giving a brief walk-through over how I transposed and arranged my music, and then explain what a fugue is with the Britney Spears string quartet video. During this time it will give me and my friends time to set up with our instruments, after which we will play the prelude and then the fugue with small introductions from me. I will work out the timing on this later after I have rehearsed it with friends, and if needed I will add in some other activity if I have time left over.

Completed Prelude!

As of this Sunday I have completed both the fugue and the prelude, and they are ready to be performed. I have selected a few french hornists already to play these pieces, and I'm hoping to rehearse with them starting this weekend. The prelude's arranging and software input took much less time than the fugue- I seem to have gotten the hang of muse score, however bad it is. I unfortunately had to cross some voices so they are no longer in their proper ranges while I was writing it, but I wanted to be kind to my friends and not force them to play incredibly low or high.

A Little More on Fugues

Since most people don't really know what a fugue is exactly, I decided to write one of these posts on it to better educate my classmates when I do finally present my finished project.

The definition of a fugue: a contrapuntal composition in which a short melody or phrase (the subject) is introduced by one part and successively taken up by others and developed by interweaving the parts.

So essentially, a fugue is a piece of music that has one distinct melody line that is played by every voice in the music (Soprano, Alto, Tenor, Bass) at different times so one voice will always have this melody or phrase while the rest accompany it. When playing a fugue, it is always very important to let this central phrase be the loudest voice in the ensemble (or hands, if playing piano) in order for the fugue to make any sense. 

Here is a beginner friendly example of a fugue, featuring Britney Spears' "Oops I did it Again" that I may use in my class presentation, as it's pretty entertaining while also educational. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aeZSlZBjGI

Horn Transposition Completed

The transposition is complete with voices 4 and 5 added in. I am glad to be done transposing- it's very tedious, and takes a long time. I am now ready to start plugging the notes into MuseScore when I am ready to publish my next post. 

Horn Voices 1-3 Transposed

Completed writing in the horn voices 1-3 with their transpositions. Horn voices 4 and 5 to follow. 

Second Page Voicing

The second page with the voicing highlighted. Again, using the same system: red for horn 1, orange for horn 2, green for horn 3, blue for horn 4, and purple for horn 5. Ready to start transposing the second page. 

Completed First Page Transposition

The first page of the quintet with Horn voices 4 and 5 completed (the blue and purple lines). Ready to move on to the second and final page of voice leading and transposition. 

Prelude Horn Lines 2 and 3

Just finished transposing horn lines 2 and 3. There were a few confusing bumps with some over-lapping harmony lines, but I think they've been straightened out. It will be interesting to see how this works with french horns as piano lines often jump around and skip several notes, which is harder for horns to play. I've already found a few mistakes here and there, and hope this won't be a new trend with the Prelude. The transposing work is tedious, and I still have horn voices 4 and 5 to complete yet. I'm a little concerned about trying to create a five voice horn piece in MuseScore; I'm not sure they have that function.

Horn Line 1 of Prelude Begun

I've begun the process of transposing my Horn 1 line in the Prelude. I have to call it "Horn 1" as this is a five part piece, and therefore doesn't fit soprano, alto, tenor, bass type part writing. I've so far found it a little challenging to distinguish between the voices, and often don't know which voice to give distinct separate melodies lines to as they appear randomly in the music. Some of it even goes so far as to create a single three-note chord in the treble staff with notes so close together, they have to write out a separate beam for the soprano next to it! Very funny looking, and probably the only time I have ever seen this in music.

Unbroken Connections

1) POWs are bound by many rules and regulations, as are music arrangers and composers.

2) All the voices in a piece of music must work together to achieve the end goal, as do people through a time of war.

3) Lots of stealing happens in music writing, and a lot of ideas aren't original. POWs often have to steal to survive.

4) Great composers often aren't appreciated until they've passed away, as many Japanese soldiers aren't considered "honorable" until they have died or made some other great sacrifice for their country.

5) Music is very complicated and complex and sometimes doesn't make sense to other people, like Louie's bogus drawing he made for the Japanese.

Color Coding, Once Again

I'm starting the process of transposing my Prelude by first assigning each voice to the notes (dividing up the music into the five parts) and color coding it for each specific horn part. This is already proving slightly more difficult than the Fugue as there is more decision making to be done in "who gets what" and more room for error. This may later require a little more editing and checking to make sure I have voicing and range correct to suit each player. 

Color Coding: 

Red= Horn 1

Orange= Horn 2

Green= Horn 3

Blue= Horn 4

Purple= Horn 5 

New Piece

Ironically done out of order, I have selected the prelude to the Fugue to work on as my next piece. The name of it is in Russian, so we'll just call it the Prelude for now. It was also written by Shostakovich and has a different structure from the Fugue: instead of mainly four part harmonies the chords have five notes each, meaning I will have to add one more horn player to make it a quintet. The Prelude has a faster tempo than the Fugue and is also shorter in length (two pages instead of four).

Fugue Completed!

Happy to announce I have completed the Shostakovich Fugue! Starting next time I see my horn instructor, we will begin sight-reading the parts to find errors and make adjustments before my friends and I play/record it for the class. My next step is to begin proofing it with my project assistant so my instructor doesn't have to do all the work in our next lesson, and to select a new piece to work on (preferably one with only four voices like this one). I also need to figure out how to print this off of Muse Score as it keeps adding a billion extra lines of rest even after I placed a double bar line at the end... 

^The lines leading up to the ending of the Fugue 

Completing the Part Transposition

     Before loading all of the notes into Muse Score, I had to transpose all of the written piano notes into french horn pitches to be copied accordingly. I have finished all of the "translating" (from piano to french horn) and have written in all of the note names above the staff on my piano sheet music to make it easier for me to copy into Muse Score. Thus far I have all of the voices (Soprano, Alto, Tenor) copied into my Muse Score quartet, except for the very last page of the Bass, which will complete the quartet once these notes have been transferred into Muse Score.

^ The completed last page