Choose Your Leaders

[steve]

Choose your leaders

with wisdom and forethought.

To be led by a coward

is to be controlled
by all that the coward fears.

To be led by a fool

is to be led by the opportunists
who control the fool.

To be led by a thief

is to offer up
your most precious treasures
to be stolen.

To be led by a liar

is to ask
to be lied to.

To be led by a tyrant

is to sell yourself
and those you love
into slavery.

And...

Beware:
All too often,
We say
What we hear others say.
We think
What we are told that we think.
We see
What we are permitted to see.
Worse!
We see what we are told that we see.
Repetition and pride are the keys to this.
To hear and to see
Even an obvious lie
Again
And again and again
May be to say it,
Almost by reflex
Then to defend it
Because we have said it
And at last to embrace it
Because we've defended it.

Both excerpts from Parable of the Talents by Octavia E. Butler.

Not too sure how great a song these could make, but therein lies the challenge!

[adrianallan]

Thanks. The second one looks slightly more aligned to my natural leanings, but we will see. I hope that a few people have a go - including you, Steve.

[steve]

We'll see... :-)

[Kevin]

Thanks for posting the words Steve.

[adrianallan]

thanks steve

That puts my mind at rest. I'm currently working on the poem you suggested and hope that I will be able to see it through. It's hard but rewarding...

[steve]

Adrian, I do think in the octave you're writing: an octave lower would be better for bass or baritone than tenor, at the written octave, I don't know the tessitura of your piece, but the range seems a little low for sop and a little high for alto, so if a female or even a tenor were in mind to sing, it may be the key more than the range which might be an issue, again depending on the individual singer.

[steve]

I took a shot at the Choose your Leaders with Wisdom passage. Nothing earth shattering, it's set for men's choir and is in the Jukebox. Attached is a PDF of the score.

Attachments:

[adrianallan]

Although I couldn't see the score as the PDF doesn't work for me I thought that your stately piece captured the mood of the words very well.

By the way I noticed that East West's Symphonic choirs was on sale at a 60% off price today( I was tempted). We could maybe do with a thread on VST vocals as it's an interesting issue....

By the way - nice clarinet playing. We could do a clarinet and guitar duet over the net somehow, maybe!

[whataguy]

Good work, Steve. You made the best out of a very difficult situation. The poem didn't read like something someone would sing, so it's hard to work with something like that. The ending to the poem just leaves a reader hanging, but your repeating the last line worked well. Very masterly.

[steve]

Thanks guys. Hope it doesn't loose too much with the sounds used. I have a great choral sound with Logic, not very realistic, but powerful and majestic. I'm thinking about making a recording, but I'll either have to learn how to manipulate the midi file or else play it in directly... Either one is a pain for me, but I'll get something soon. As for the PDF, let me know if the file is bad please.

[steve]

I'm going to check that PDF when I get home, I think something may be wrong...

[adrianallan]

Ok here is the response to Steve's challenge.

I hope people think it is ok - it was a very hard challenge for me.

please make any comments and suggestions

just noticed the last bit should be "defended it" not "defeated it" and this has now been changed and also "we see" for the last 2 notes. Sorry I was rushing to finish.

Attachments:

[Deleted]

So there is Vocaloid, East west Choir,..... What else is there in the land of virtual singers? Are there any man's voices for solo singing?
Can they handle foreign languages (like Dutch)? May be it would be good to have a separate item on the forum on this subject?

[steve]

Mar 27, 2011 20:07:25 GMT @peterg said:

So there is Vocaloid, East west Choir,..... What else is there in the land of virtual singers? Are there any man's voices for solo singing?
Can they handle foreign languages (like Dutch)? May be it would be good to have a separate item on the forum on this subject?

There is a thread on Virtual Instruments here including one specifically for EWQL Choirs. Check it out :-)

[steve]

Mar 27, 2011 13:34:17 GMT adrianallan said:

Ok here is the response to Steve's challenge.

I hope people think it is ok - it was a very hard challenge for me.

please make any comments and suggestions

just noticed the last bit should be "defended it" not "defeated it" and this has now been changed and also "we see" for the last 2 notes. Sorry I was rushing to finish.

My two immediate observations are that you've played loose with some of the words again (only minor discrepancies) ;-) and that the ending harmonies sound to me more along the lines of defeated instead of defended - small change in letters but to me a vastly different soundworld as the embedded intent or emotions are worlds apart. But musically another great piece - who ever said you wouldn't get performances obviously didn't know what they were talking about!

[adrianallan]

thanks Steve

I need to find a better working method as I obviously can't read my own scribble on a sheet wedged against my piano

I have checked the words again and I hope this version is now correct. I have made other small changes to the score as well

I had to do repeats of certain of the stanzas as just to read through it would have been too structually un-sound. By the way I just couldn't fit in the word "worse" without it sounding contrived so I took the conscious liberty to leave it out.

Now I need to think about the copyright of this one. Perhaps next time we choose an old poem!

Attachments:

[adrianallan]

now I've found out that hear has only one syllable so I will have to write hear- and not split it "he-ar" which looked wrong anyway. But I'm alos thinking that the splitting of this word so close to "others" also being split is not good, so I might have to stick to my amended "the others" after all and just deviate slightly from the text.

[steve]

Mar 27, 2011 22:16:10 GMT adrianallan said:

now I've found out that hear has only one syllable...

Funny! Yeah, these things are not easy... Hence the old arts! If they were easy, there'd be almost no point. I'll have another look/listen when I get a chance - got to run soon.

[Kevin]

Started by Steve

[steve]

I think you've missed a few critical posts for this thread Kevin.

[whataguy]

Adrian, could I trouble you to post a pdf file here and put an mp3 version of your piece in your jukebox? I'm not a Sibelius user and I'm very interested in hearing (and reading) your piece.

[adrianallan]

ok Whataguy (ps what's your real name?) it's on the player now and the PDF is here

please offer a bit of feedback etc

thanks

Attachments:

[Kevin]

Mar 28, 2011 8:03:15 GMT steve said:

I think you've missed a few critical posts for this thread Kevin.

Hope I have got them all in the right place Steve!

[whataguy]

Much thanks, Adrian. I'll check out your tune and leave feedback.

And my name is John, incidentally.

[adrianallan]

Please listen to the new mp3 done on pianoteq and gypsy

it is on my player and called Beware New

[steve]

Great recording Adrian - like the other, this one makes an excellent instrumental piece.

[adrianallan]

well, thanks to you steve for the good poem choice

I'm going to post the music on VI control to see what they think of it there.
www.vi-control.net/forum/viewtopic.php?p=268837#268837
cheers

adrian

[Kevin]

I have just listened to some of the piece Adrian and quite like it.

I have to add a few things though.

It is quite similar in texture etc to the last piece that you wrote, sometimes it is good to try to break away even just as an exercise.

I found the piano part a little heavy harmoncally in some places. I just felt that it swamped the solo line a little. (Mind you this might just be the playback. I am sure that a pianist would be sympathetic to the lovely melody.)

Maybe it might be worth going through the piano part and see if there is anything you can take out (harmony) that would not detract from the flow of the piece.

[whataguy]

Adrian,

I listened to Beware. I liked the recording. It was very clear.

I would have to agree with Kevin in that your song has a lovely melody. I had no problem with the harmony, though. I liked some of the chords you used. They were very interesting. The D major 7 in measure 66 was especially provocative. However, I felt the accompaniment was perhaps a little too busy for the tune. Kevin's suggestion to go through the arrangement and cut some of it is a good one. But it's not something I'd do right away. It's best to wait a while till it becomes easier to be objective.

I had issues with the notation in some places. Mind you, I'm from a jazz/commercial background so I usually look closely at the chord notation. In measure 34 you have a written B major chord with its 5th written as Gb. Granted, F# is its enharmonic, but it's confusing to me. Also, in measure 66 you've got a D major 7 chord written with the major 7th written as Db when a C# would make a little more sense to a sight reader. I've heard the classical vs. jazz argument before, but believe me when I tell you that one of the finest piano players (world class) I know, who can play almost equally well in any genre, will write chord symbols in a Debussy score. He says it puts things in perspective for him. So making the chords a little easier to see (and read) is usually a good idea.

You had one big melisma with the word "often" in measures 15 and 47. Melisma is an essential part of pop, country, jazz and blues, but you would usually write in a two note melisma and let vocalists embellish the melody with anything more than that on their own. A three note melisma can get rough on the ears and it's certainly rough to sing.

I liked the overall Latin feel of the piece, but it was somewhere between a bossanova and a tango or... I couldn't put my finger on it but it was definitely Latin.

Don't get me wrong, Adrian. I enjoyed listening to your piece, but I just thought I'd offer a few comments to give you something to think about.

[adrianallan]

thanks for the suggestions from you both

I did agonise over some of those chord spellings and was aware of the issues involved. I used the flat enharmonic as it had been used in the previous bar, so it looked weird to have one bar with Gb and then the next with f# even though the F# was the Maj 7th of G Major 7th. But in light of what you say I may revise that. Like you, I have studied pop harmony for a long time (probably not as long) and I know that a D maj 7th with a db on top is not enharmonically correct. I will have another think.

I tried to make the texture of the piano more interesting in this piece as in the last the comment from Kevin's piano friend was that the piano part was a little sparse. I tried to open up the octaves a little, but maybe it's over fussy now - who knows.

I need to get out more and meet some more musicians as there's a limit to what I can do on this laptop and the proof of the pudding is in the live performance, not the midi playback etc etc.

Glad you both seemed to like the melody in general. This is what I agonise over the most, and it inseparable from my harmony.

I probably work like you do John, as every bar on piano sketch has C maj 7, B7 flat 9 etc written above. I was brought up on songbooks and only moved to classical when I really felt ready for it. I'm glad I did it that way, as sometimes a straight classical approach is too bogged down with technique - give me some soul!