Adrien de Croy: Symphony No. 1 "Resolute"
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- Опубликовано: 9 июл 2024
- This music is an attempt to portray a spectrum of emotions, from love, joy, and contemplation through to betrayal, shock, anger and finally triumph.
This is for all the people around the world holding steadfast - standing resolute.
Written starting mid-2021, and finished in late 2023.
I hope you like my music. If you do, please do leave me a comment. Comments are what composers live for and why I write music.
Movement 1 (0:00)
Movement 2 (8:26)
Movement 3 (22:20)
Movement 4 (27:01)
Revised symphony. First released here on RUclips last November, this has gone through a number of revisions.
This music was rendered directly from Sibelius 2024.3.1, using NotePerformer 4.4 (BBCSO, SSO, HOOPUS and CSB). Final touch is FabFilter Pro-R2 reverb and Ozone 10.
Sample libraries used:
* Spitfire BBC Symphony Orchestra Pro: Flutes, piccolo, oboe 1, cor anglais, clarinets, Trumpets, Tubular bells, Snare, Suspended Cymbal, Harp, Solo Cello, Celli, Bassi
* Spitfire Symphony Orchestra: Oboe 2, Bassoon 2, Timpani, Glockenspiel, Bass Drum, Tam-tam, violins 1 and violins 2
* Spitfire Solo Strings: Solo Violin
* Hollywood Orchestra: bassoon 1, horns, Trombones, violas
* Cinematic Studio Brass: Bass trombone, tuba 
Видеоклипы
Movement 1 (0:00)
Movement 2 (8:26)
Movement 3 (22:20)
Movement 4 (27:01)
Up there, the universe is going round to the sound of incredible music 🎼
Sehr schön, eine wirklich sehr schöne Sinfonie. Ich wünsche dir einen schönen Tag. :-)
Danke schön! Und dir auch!
Really a great work, Adrien!
Thanks again Stefan for your support! I really appreciate it ❤
A magnificent and beautiful work! I enjoyed very much your symphony!
Thank you! Thanks for your comment, I am glad you enjoyed my symphony.
Great work I love it. I'm not an specialist I listen classical music in the mornings when I work , you catch all by attention. I was trying to define who I am listening to, is the first time that I hear your name or listen your music it feels Great. Thanks.❤
Thank you so much Fabian! I'm really glad to hear it kept your attention and that you liked it ❤
If I could compose for orchestra, I could only dream of writing such wonderful music such as this. You really inspired me... The harmonies are heavenly that you've created ❤❤❤
You’re very kind! I’m sure you could write for orchestra
@@adriendecroy7254 I did orchestration at Uni in the 3rd year in Edinburgh Uni. But it definitely didn't sound anything like that. My friend Anna Clyne is a great orchestral composer ❤️🎶🌟
The tools now make it a lot easier. I think you would be surprised.
@@adriendecroy7254 thanks for the inspiration, have a great weekend 🤗🌻
Overall, fantastic work. I searched this up after you replied to me on reddit and had a listen. Overall, the structure and stylistic language used in this symphony are coherent and the orchestration is engaging. It is nice to encounter other "romantics" out in the wild who do not reject CPP tonality. Congratulations on completing your symphony.
However I do have a few (hopefully constructive) comments.
After the introduction, the 1st movement opens up into a gorgeous, soaring tune that really captures your attention, then moves into a more unsettled passage that has some really interesting textures, which seamlessly segues into a more singsongy, waltzy passage, and finally settles down into a very engaging slow finale that feels sufficiently incomplete so as to beg us to keep listening. It feels very structurally "open", rather than "closed" like a sonata, which is an interesting choice. I don't have a lot to say about this movement; along with the 2nd movement, it has a very high level of emotional intelligibility and craftsmanship.
The 2nd movement is clearly the emotional jewel of this piece and reaches some exhilarating dramatic highs. My only beef with the opening to this movement, which is not much, is that it feels a little bit cheapened by the fact that the 1st movement *also* opens slow and dramatic, as opposed to taking the opportunity to do something uniquely melodramatic and foreboding in the 2nd movement (though the introductions are, on closer inspection, materially different.) The accelerando over harp arpeggios at 9:40 was particularly fascinating, and even though your main tune is emotionally opposite from the foreboding introduction, I think it mostly works, in no small part because the music takes a turn back toward the angsty and dramatic a few minutes later as it builds toward the climax, which itself is very much aligned with the mood set by the introduction and fits well. You engage with some beautiful modal mixture as you settle back down out of the climax, and the ending of the movement is very satisfying.
However, the 3rd movement felt a little underwhelming; it didn't really feel completely "necessary" to me. It's about the length that I might expect a more "song-like" movement to me, which might fit perfectly, but the melodies in the 3rd movement felt a little too glacial for that, and there wasn't a ton of contrast between it and the 2nd movement. It also built up to a big climax, which I can't say it felt entirely "earned" given how short the movement is and the fact that we got some big glacial climaxes in the 2nd movement already. This was the only part of the symphony I didn't feel I really understood at all. Maybe I'm missing something.
The 4th movement was not as emphatic as I was expecting either, and although I could *understand* it, it feels significantly less inspired than the 1st and 2nd movements. I almost got the feeling that the 4th movement had some element of cliche or banality to it, maybe because it reminded me of some kind of film score. After 32:22 it just felt like it went on sort of pounding away with that rhythmic ostinato for a while, and then just... kinda perfunctorily stopped. It started out really engaging, but the huge dramatic tension established by the opening bars of the movement just didn't really parlay into anything I found particularly inspiring. It never gave me that feeling of actual *triumph* that you mention in the description. You set us up with this growling, tense, dissonant and angry passage as a "challenge to be overcome" throughout the narrative arc of the rest of the movement, but I don't feel that any of the material that came afterward actually follows through on this promise. It almost feels, dare I say, emotionally and narratively unrelated. The 2nd movement's climaxes feel far more sincere and fulfilling than anything in the 4th movement.
I have one further bone to pick throughout the symphony in the apparent balancing of the virtual instruments -- some passages that I could clearly tell were intended for the brass to take the lead, and my inner ear tells me would probably work fine in practice, ended up feeling "empty" because they just weren't punching through enough. Say, Chicago Symphony brass would easily conquer those passages and bring your melodies to the fore, but your virtual instruments unfortunately don't. There are actually quite a few places where your melodies -- which are very pleasing -- get aurally swamped by other stuff. It just makes it hard to pick it out of the texture and thus to make it "stick" in your memory, because part of your attention is devoted to simply trying to hear it rather than simply being able to enjoy it. Again a real orchestra would balance it better than your virtual instruments do, though I'm actually not even sure that would solve the problem completely in some spots where you might have the 1st violins attacking a melody by themselves in a tutti texture.
Feel free to acknowledge these comments or not, but overall, I still congratulate you on this effort. Writing a symphony is hard; I would know, and yours is twice as long as mine and significantly more texturally complex. Cheers!
Thanks so much for your comment and for giving me so much of your time and attention!
Every piece of music always has some kind of story around how it was born and grew into whatever shape it finally took, and these stories never end either.
The symphony was written over a fairly long duration, and to start with I never actually set out to write one. The first movement just grew organically and a friend composer said "you should make it into a whole symphony". To be honest at that stage such a thing was very daunting as the majority of my pieces to that point had been much shorter.
So anyway, the 1st movement was written in 2021. It originally was going to go somewhere else at the end (it had a shocking loud angry part there - 2min of it). But I couldn't for the life of me figure out where to take it, so after being stalled for a few months on it, I decided to move onto something else, and in the end I trimmed off this last 2 minutes to leave it at a more obvious end.
The something else was the 2nd movement. I thought I'd like to write something with a horn solo. They can be so beautiful, like the one in Tchaik 5, or Borodin 2. So I wrote a short solo and I was quite pleased with it, I reused the theme and developed it, and then it went off in its own direction into an angsty nervy section. At this time the war in Ukraine had started, and I had dear friends there. So the middle faster part of this movement was influenced by the Russian advance towards Kyiv. I had visions (completely unsubstantiated by reality) about tanks racing across the tundra. I'm not proud of this vision but there it is, I take inspiration from wherever I can get it from. It took me literally months to figure out the transition back to the recapitulation of the main theme with the ascending harp and horns/ww triplets but in the end after spending 2 weeks literally on 1 bar, I was happy with it, and then the ending wrote itself. My idea for the coda of it was basically peace achieved only by the end of struggle that comes with death. Pretty morose, but that explains the church bell tollingin the background and the unforced dissonance. Desolation was the goal here. In the end, I was happy with how this movement turned out, and I had it reviewed several times, and went through it numerous times, so it has had the most attention of all the movements.
In late 2022, an opportunity arose for a performance of it, in Yerevan of all places. Khachaturian has long been one of my most favourite composers, and so the idea of attending a concert of my work in the Khachaturian Hall in Yerevan was irresistable. I went over there for 10 days, and attended the concert with my friend from Kyiv. At this time, I was doing a bit more writing in my hotel room, and I had an idea to start a movement with a reiteration of the final theme from movement 2 at the start of the coda, but in 4/4 instead of 3/4. This I thought would make people realise that the coda of the 2nd movement was a foreshadowing and get them to re-evaluate that. I immediately took the movement in a different direction though. But it never really grew. When I came back to NZ, I moved onto other works and the symphony overall stagnated. I wrote some other works, had even some performances of them, toyed with the idea of making these other things into a movement. Even the idea of a very short interlude between the 2nd movement and something more boisterous to finish with. But at this stage also, the Russians had started night attacks on Kyiv. I got messages about it being 2am and having to go to the basement as the air raid sirens went off. I had an idea of a night, peaceful but interrupted by approaching Shahed drones, air raid sirens, air defense response, followed by a kind of peace as that subsided. So this is the shape of the 3rd movement. Peaceful start, with an unexpected rise to a short climax and then back to peace. I went with this for largely expedience, as I moved onto the 4th movement.
The 4th movement I wanted something different. I had 3 movements which were largely slow and brooding. I wanted something tender and then I wanted something to portray the Ukrainian counter-offensive which was going on by this time in mid 2023. I found an old waltz I had started in early 2022, and it had the kind of feeling I wanted, I imagined a soldier in a trench, knowing they have to attack in the morning, and it's peaceful and they are thinking about the tenderness of their mother as a young child, and a pang as they realizing they need to fight to protect their family who they may never see again. Then I added the attack sequence as I kinda think of it. This was another idea of a charge of some sort, kinda like cavalry although that's anachronistic I know. Then I needed the whole thing to be longer. I didn't want it to drag out in the final section, and I knew I needed something else between the 3rd movement and the tender part of the 4th, so I started writing an angstly angry dissonant string section. If you see the first version of this symphony I put out last year you'll see what I mean. I originally wrote it pp, but then I thought maybe it should be ff. So that's what I did. It became a very angry, angsty tortured exclamation of frustration and defiance marked with pain. That's how I think of it anyway. then I had the whole symphony reviewed and a comment came back that the opening of the 4th movt was weak, and that the movement overall was under-developed. So I added a ton of heavy artillery (brass) to the opening and although it covered some of the dissonance (still there in the strings) I was happy with the result. I also reworked the final ending.
So there it is - the story of the symphony thus far.
Re your comments on the rendering, audibility etc of things. I know what you mean. Dynamic markings in Sibelius are fairly blunt, and in reality when you perform a piece in an orchestra, every single player will adjust the dynamic they play, guided by the written marking, and the conductor, but mostly by their ear in terms of how they perceive they are blending with the rest of the ensemble. It's pretty much impossible to indicate this in the score, and the dynamic markings are too far apart. I think you have to hope that the conductor in rehearsal can see / hear what are the important lines, and make sure they are brought out in the performance. It would be possible to tweak individual note volumes outside of the dynamic markings but this is an enormous amount of work. This would typically be done if the mockup was being done in a DAW, but I was just rendering straight out of Sibelius, using the newest NotePerformer and a bunch of commercial 3rd party sample libraries.
My biggest fear about all this is that the writing means that even in a real performance some things will not be able to be brought out. I have been trying in my writing to be less dense, not use so much of the orchestra all the time. Remembering that the trumpets will cut through anything, and that trombones playing fff will cover a lot of other sections. Things that aren't reflected in the sound you get back from the software.
Finally, I have an offer for a performance, and I will have some opportunity hopefully to attend rehearsals and see whether anything needs changing in the score. It's pretty hard to take parts out at this stage but we will see. I have a few review sessions before then with the conductor and hopefully we will identify the majority of these places when we go through it. Relying only on my ear (since I never studied music theory) then means I'm at the mercy of the rendering.
Anyway, if you've read this far, thank you again, and I wish you well also on your own musical journey.