Orchestrating a piano piece

[andreasvanharen]

Hi,
I want to dive more into better orchestration and orchestrated one of my piano pieces. I would love to hear comments on it from people who did orchestration work them selfs.

Here are the links to the score and mp3. in the score, I included the piano version as well, so it's easy to see what I did with it.

pdf score: http://www.box.net/shared/ob6d4no4cw
mp3: http://www.box.net/shared/vwki84xcs4

Best wishes,
André

[fundrazor]

Hi Andreas

Thanks for sharing this with us. I think it's an excellent attempt and sounded very Sibelian to me. It was a little difficult to hear some of the timbres owing to the quality of the midi sounds (I don't know what you were using but, ironically, Sibelius would give you more accurate orchestral sounds).

Nevertheless, I hope you will allow me to make some constructive criticisms. Orchestration is not about allocating lines from a piano score to specific instruments, neither is it a matter of retaining necessarily the same note values and rests. In order to get an orchestral sound which is a work in its own right one needs to be creative and manipulatrve of the original score.

What I am trying to say is that your piece was "blocky", it had a vertical rather than linear feel because you allocated sections of the score to sections of the orchestra most of the time, and the rests became stop points rather than natural breaks in the sound picture. Try reinforcing certain lines within the accompaniment when they are important (for example by doubling a cello part on a horn, or adding a solo cello line to an oboe), and perhaps use subtle arpeggios in the strings rather than just the same block chords that were in the piano part. By all means uses sections of the orchestra on their own, but perhaps overlap them with other instruments as they move to the next section (Mahler is a master at this).

You clearly have a natural ear for orchestration and an outstanding feel for the registers and timbres of the various instruments - all I think you need to work on is the orchestra as a whole rather than the different bits that make it up. A good place to start might be Ravel's orchestration of Pictures at an Exhibition - the differences between the piano original and the sound picture that Ravel conjures up are quite dramatic without the music itself being compromised - or Schoenberg's orchestration of Brahms' first Piano Quartet which is a real orchestral feast.

Hope this helps.

[andreasvanharen]

Hi,
thanks for the comments. I will have a look at Ravel's Orchestration, I'm sure the lib ary here has the score of it. And btw. for my midi bounce, I did use Sibelius contact player... I already made a new version of my orchestration and want to use another sound libabry instead, i think it will give better sounds result than the contact player in Sibelius 4.

The new score is here:
http://www.box.net/shared/ewlhdwhogs
the mp3 is here:
http://www.box.net/shared/ybjmkdcjoo

thanks!
André

[DonKubicki]

I agree with fundrazor and would like to add one suggestion. In the softer parts try overlapping the notes in the woodwinds especially the clarinets and bassons for a softer sounding chord.