And again, I say, ha!

After how many days of essentially nothing, I have produced this [an mp3 of the first 20 measures which has been superseded by further development], the orchestration of the opening of 10. Blake Leads a Walk on the Milky Way. The mp3 is missing some of the subtlety of the original file, and Finale/GPO wouldn’t know a tenuto from its ass, so you’ll have to imagine some finesse here, but boy, this is good. It’s really good. It’s so good I’m afraid to go on.

[note, 11/4/06: this post has attracted beaucoups of spam comments, so I’ve turned comments off for it. If you have a comment, email it to me and I’ll post it for you.]

After I posted Sun & Moon Circus last night on the William Blake page, I realized that I had never posted an mp3 of the piano score of the final piece, 15. Blake Tells the Tiger the Tale of the Tailor. So I whipped one up and posted it.

Now the collection is complete, for those of you who want your very own copy of the piano scores and a CD to go with them.

I keep saying Tale of the Tailor is the final piece, but it’s not. There’s an epilogue, and it must be set to music. But I’m going to write it later, probably during rehearsal. It’s going to be a quolibet of themes, ending as it began with the opening number’s music.

So there it is. Thirty-four minutes of music.

Now what?

I worked on cleaning up 4. The Sun and Moon Circus Soothes the Wakeful Guests. It’s OK, but I’m betting we revisit it in rehearsal. There are a couple of hiccups where my little laptop just didn’t have the computing power to get all the beats into each measure.

Here’s the piano score and orchestral mp3 of 4. The Sun and Moon Circus Soothes the Wakeful Guests.

I also updated one choral part in 10. Blake Leads a Walk on the Milky Way.

Now I burn this CD and pop it into the mail with the score.

I’ve always liked 14. The Tiger Asks Blake for a Bedtime Story. It’s such a sweet little scenario, the tiger with his tummy-ache asking for Blake to soothe his pain. Of course, Blake responds with the gleefully perverse Tale of the Tailor, but that’s another posting.

This is one of those pieces I composed very early, so it’s at least twenty years old. It was always very, very simple in its approach. However, as I was scoring the section where the tiger admits his fault and appeals to Blake, I discovered some interesting harmonies that I suppose were implied. They’re there now. Maybe later in rehearsal we’ll throw them all out and just use the bass line, as in the piano score, but for right now I’m kind of digging them.

Herewith, the piano score and the orchestrated mp3 of 14. The Tiger Asks Blake for a Bedtime Story.

And here concludes all the work I can do using the Garritan Personal Orchestra within Finale. The four remaining large pieces will have to be done using the Softsynth instruments, which are certainly not shabby in the least. However, they’re not as lively, and I will be missing some instruments and some control. Who knows? Maybe I’ll splurge on a new computer.

The other milestone we’ve reached here is that I can finally get the CD and score mailed to Nancy Willard. I promised it to her some weeks ago; after telling her I wanted to clean up some of the piano score sound files, I got wrapped up in the actual orchestration. Oh well, this is certainly better.

Mondays are Masterworks Chorale nights, so I never get a lot of my own work done.

I did open up an orchestral score file of the last piece, 15. Blake Tells the Tiger the Tale of the Tailor, to find that I had already done a lot of work on the first half of it in the SoftSynth instrumentation. I don’t like it, it doesn’t fit what I’ve been hearing recently in my head as I listen to the piano score in the car, but there it was.

It also drove home that I will most sensibly score my larger pieces using the SoftSynth option.

This one took a lot of work, and I’m not sure I’m through with it yet. The King of Cats returns with his second show-stopper, 13. The King of Cats Sends a Postcard to his Wife. I’m not at all sure that the KoC is not the “old man’s lunatic cat” referred to by the Bear in 3. A Rabbit Reveals My Room, and the music of this piece reflects that.

Here are the score and the mp3 file. There are some weird tempo issues near the end that I can’t get the computer to correct.

This morning, I orchestrated 12. The Marmalade Man Makes a Dance to Mend Us. This is one of those slight cheats, since the original piano score was easy enough to do with the eventual instrumentation: flute/pizzicato cello. As you’ll hear, the completed orchestration is not much more complex.

Here’s my question: does it need to be more complex?

Here are the piano score and the orchestral mp3.

I have two more smallish pieces to do, 13. The King of Cats Sends a Postcard, and 14. The Tiger Asks Blake for a Bedtime Story, and then I’m faced with a dilemma. Anything even approaching a full orchestra simply overloads my laptop. It doesn’t have enough memory. It’s clear that I’m going to need a new computer before going much further with this project. The remaining pieces, 5. The Man in the Marmalade Hat Arrives, 9. The Wise Cow Makes Room, Way, and Believe, 10. Blake Leads a Walk on the Milky Way, and 15. Blake Tells the Tiger the Tale of the Tailor, all of which are huge orchestrally-speaking-wise.

So can I get another laptop, which would be my preference, or will the memory requirements of Finale 2006/7 and Garritan Personal Orchestra force me to buy another desktop computer, which will be a great deal of money more than I want to spend? This will require a lot of research and a couple of extended visits to the Apple Store at Lenox.