Hello again good peoples!
I may be a grinch usually when it comes to Christmas, but I thought, with how depressing year 2020 has been, I’d put up some lighter, fun Christmas music. I have taken the traditional piece, “Deck The Halls” and re-orchestrated it into a full orchestral piece.
I wrote this piece about two years ago, but now that I have a better grasp of composition/orchestration, I rewrote some of the parts and re-mastered it to fit in with my project of composing pieces in the Golden Age of Hollywood style, circa the 1950’s. What I’ve discovered about my style over these last months and looking back to this piece, is that I’m good at utilizing and writing based on motifs, which fits well for this style.
Just about all of the melodic bits in this piece were written using the main melody from “Deck The Halls,” and just taking bits of it to form different motifs using different rhythms, scales, in different keys, inversions, even taking two different parts of the melody and placing them on top of each other to create two-part counterpoint.
The piece begins in F Major, allegro moderato (120) in 4/4. After a short rallentando, allegro con brio (140) for the main A section. Then a short repeat of the intro, a tempo primo, before another rallentando and then the B section, l’istesso tempo, but in 2/2 to give it a more sweeping and cantabile feel. It also modulates to A Major at this point. This builds to the finale, which continues to build up the tempo bit by bit and modulates to E Major, the dominant of A.
Orchestration:
2 Flutes
Oboe, English horn
2 Bb Clarinets
2 Bassoons
4 Horns in F
2 Bb Trumpets
2 Tenor Trombones
Tuba
Timpani
Percussion (Vibraphone, Tubular bells, Triangle, Glockenspiel, Celeste, Harp)
Strings
Scored/playback with Dorico Pro + NotePerformer
Happy holidays!