Midsummer Update

After getting off to a brisk start in January, things here seem to have slowed down quite a bit, haven't they? I really expected to have hit at least a half dozen for the year by now, but that obviously hasn't happened. 

What went wrong? Mainly, it's the usual distractions and the limited stretches of uninterrupted time available, but it's also because of working on some larger-scale pieces and acquiring a better sound library that has required a lot of tweaking of existing stuff, particularly dynamics and phrasing (my next non-piano post will use this new library). Plus, I can't turn off the spigot of new ideas, each of which I have to at least get down enough to go back to later.

I have a piano fugue in F Major that is close to being done (as soon as I feel like getting back to it), a not-quite-jazz/not-quite-rock/not-quite-Dvorak/not-quite-Bartok thing at a similar distance to completion, and have spent a lot of time over the past couple of months on the first movement of a Symphony in G Minor.

What appears to be closest to completion at this point, however, is something I'm calling A Riparian Sketch for Small Orchestra in F Major (but not quite the same F Major as the fugue!), scored for strings, harp, and four each from the brass and woodwinds, with English horn taking the place of an oboe because its first note is a half-step below the bottom end of the oboe's range, and because I like the darker tone. I solved the last (I think) structural problem last night, and it may be done within the next couple of weeks, depending on how picky I get with it and whether I can stick to this one without going off onto other and newer ideas. I think it has my best brass writing to date (at least out of completed pieces), and as a bonus, a lot of material that I've removed from it could show up elsewhere.

So, hang in there a little longer, and I'll try to make it worth the wait.