After staying up way too late working on orchestration last night, I had a bit of a rough start to the day. And it’s already almost the end of the week! It occurred to me as I went back and finished polishing up the work I had done last night — tweaking here and there bits I knew needed it after listening to the recording a few times. I’m mostly happy with where it is now: there are a few very small tweaks I think I will make, but the piece as it stands is a solid second draft, and one I’d be very interested to hear a small orchestra play.

If you compare this to the recording I put up last night, you’ll find that the differences are fairly subtle (you’ll probably be able to pull them out best by comparing the score as it stands today to how it was yesterday), but they are there, and at least to my ear they make an important difference:

Given the course this week has taken and is taking — a very interrupted day today, in particular — I’ve contented myself with the fact that the next section of the piece will take longer to finish than I have time this week. (Days only have so many hours and weeks only have so many days in them, it turns out.) Happily, the opening fanfare works well enough as a standalone piece, so if life is so busy that I’m unable to finish the rest of it by the time of the launch, I can still publish this first part and be content.

That being so, I’m still going to spend the rest of the afternoon and tomorrow and some of Saturday working on the second part, so you can look forward to seeing and hearing more! And perhaps, Lord willing, I will be able to finish it and even learn enough about the subtleties of virtual instrument articulations to make it sound good before the launch in three weeks!