Hey all!
Thought I’d share a new track. As some here may know already, I’ve been spending the last few months studying the “Golden Age of Hollywood” style of orchestral composition. I decided that I wanted to write a suite of pieces, at least three, in this style and this is the first one. Of course it’s odd that it’s titled as number 2, it’s just because this is the first one I finished, but the sequence is supposed to be, I. Main Title, II. Love Theme, III. Ending Credits. I was inspired by Lyndon Hardy’s old fantasy novel, “Master of the Five Magics” for these pieces.
So for this, I studied and analyzed pieces by Max Steiner, Erich Wolfgang von Korngold, Miklos Rosza and also Takahiko Sahashi. While Sahashi isn’t actually a Golden Age composer, his style is very much rooted in that style, especially on the soundtrack for the Full Metal Panic anime series.
This actually was a nightmare for me to compose because the I found to get that old “love theme” sound, the harmony needed to go all over the place–it’s very chromatic and contrary. Instead of happy, good feeling sounds, it required darker, more dissonant sounds like diminished and major 7th chords and I also found that the Phrygian scale gives it a nice romantic feeling. Not sure why that is
Structurally, it starts in D major for the intro theme, then to E major for a variation (a mistake on my part–meant to go to A but I made it work somehow!) then back to d major with a progression of G# major - E major - G# major second inversion - D major. Then I modulate to A major for the outro. Mostly in 2/2 meter, although I could have used 4/4 and gotten the same result, I used 2/2 mainly as a cue in the score for the musicians, letting them know the piece should be slower and sweeping in tempo–adagio con dolcezza, 74bpm.
Instrumentation is:
solo flute
solo oboe
solo Bb clarinet
solo bassoon
2 horns in F
timpani, crash cymbal
celeste
piano
strings