Music Composition Program Week 3

First of all, if you notice I change the word "day" into "week" for my post about my composition program. I just think it's more suitable that's all. And I finally know how to put my audio file into this blog. So you don't have to open my soundcloud to listen. Fiuuhh...

Anyway my lesson this week is about Orchestration. It will guide us to know how we do the orchestration specifically with the strings instruments and the characteristic of each strings instruments.

We can do orchestra with small group, medium or full group. It depends on how much people available for this orchestra. Usually we have violin 1 player, violin 2 player, viola player, cello player and contra bass player for a strings orchestra. We can add horn and percussion if we want. We will talk about this later.

Even if you can't play strings instruments, it's important for you to know how to tune each strings instruments if you want to compose orchestra. So we could know the note range of each instruments.

And there are so many ways and techniques for playing strings instruments. Like bowing, Double steps, divisi, Glisando, Spiccato, Jete, Trill, and so many more. In my class, Mas Indra played the audio for each technique while explaining to us about the technique. So we would understand more.

I'm sorry that I couldn't share about my lesson in detail. But you can read the book written by Samuel Adler titled "The Story of Orchestration". The explanation is very clear and easy to understand.

In the end of lesson Mas Indra gave us some homework for the next week. We given 2 songs. For the first song we given the melody and we should arrange the strings orchestra. And for the second song, we given whole piano arrangement, and we should put the arrangement into strings arrangement. I've done my homework but i still need to finalize it in some parts. I'll post them in my later post.