RONDO & RHYTHM

String Orchestra

Duration: 5.5 minutes

Program Notes

Rondo & Rhythm is a music composition that I wrote for String Orchestra in August of 2020. The work itself, harmonically speaking, is made up of a tone row using A flat, B flat, C, E and G. For the sake of extreme economy, I decided that I was going to work strictly with those five notes only using it as a cell and rearranging it in many different ways. All of the melodies and chords are based on only those notes and the octaves depending on the range of each instrument section. I implemented techniques such as fugal writing, colour, augmentation, retrograde, and using an extensive rhythmic vocabulary I developed from learning drum set performance. Hence why I included “rhythm” in the title.

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I had it recorded out in Los Angeles by Justin Lepard (@justinlepardcello) who is a cellist and composer in his own right. He recorded the music with overdubbed tracks of him and his wife playing on violin utilizing many takes to sound like a string orchestra. He then put in production editing using phasing, reverberation and many other tricks to make the recording sound clear and the individual instrument parts discernable and dynamically controlled.