Königliche März ~ And Then the Sun Came Out

I was going to put this into yesterday’s post since it happened yesterday, but Horizon did not fit the mood. This piece does, somewhat, because it sounds hopeful, which is better than sounding silly. See, my grandma is dying, and my dad has flown back to be with her until she dies, which will be in less than a month. Königliche März means ‘Royal March’ – while it’s not a funeral march, if I were to die, I’d rather die with this music than with morbid, requiem-esque sounds.

“’twas a downcast day
our troops’ morale was suff’ring
then, behold! yonder,
the sun came out, and our path
illuminated”

As usual, skip sections if you want. Each is completely self-contained.

Summary

I’ve always wanted to put Important in big bold letters as a caption. Here’s the download link for the .wav of this composition (pure audio without images – the audio quality of the YouTube video is the same, I think), and the download link for the .pdf (there’s no point in downloading this if you don’t have a full orchestra, and if you have a full orchestra, go play something worthwhile.)

Anyways, this was the second composition I have ever made! Seriously, I composed this one and a half years ago waayy back near when the blog first started. Man, I would’ve made this tl;dr with esoteric notes about individual instruments that don’t make sense but I’ve already done that so I won’t. It’ll just be normal tl;dr.

This composition was meant to give a sense of, I don’t know, hope? Just that really big, ‘warm’ feel that you get at around 4:30 of the video, which was really the main point of the entire composition. And that’s all it is.

As for the title – it’s not actually ‘Royal March’ as in the walking ‘march’, but it’s ‘Royal March’ as in the month ‘March’. The proper word for March in German is ‘Marsch’. It was Google Translate being derpy! Also, I swear, I had not heard of Königgrätzer Marsch before this.

As for why I chose German… no reason. Why’d you ask?

Images

In the post I made one and a half years ago, I talk about how I was going to edit and go through it. Well, when I opened this, all the dynamic marks were already there, and I was too lazy to actually edit it, so… it’s of this quality. Derp, I could’ve uploaded this one and a half years ago, but I didn’t. Sigh, that’s a bit too long of a wait…

All the images in the video were shot by yours truly. I just had to include four images because I had these four decent sun-images, and it would be a waste not to use them. The first one has an interesting story behind it, so we’ll skip that for now. The second picture was taken during a 5:00 sunrise on 光明顶, which is one of the most scenic spots on 黄山 (lit. ‘Yellow Mountain’). I went there on a trip to China a few months ago, but haven’t written a post about the trip to 黄山 itself yet :X

The third image is from Bella Beach, a beach on Davis Bay, which is… a city-town-village-neighbourhood in the Sunshine Coast of British Columbia. I also visited there quite (about two months ago) recently, and… I haven’t written a post about the trip yet. The final image is at Kensington Park, a nearby park in Vancouver. It wasn’t a sunrise shot, but rather a sunset shot as I sat waiting for the Celebration of Light (of 2011, the Canada event) to happen.

Anyways, about the first image. It was taken in Queen Elizabeth Park on Monday, this Monday, during school hours. The story below…

Adventure Time with Mushy and Rulez

I recently got a great idea for a solo piano piece that would require me shooting a video during an early morning in Fall. Although that piece probably won’t be finished (or for that matter, started) for a few months, I decided to go on Monday because I’d have to wait another year for Fall to come again. So, seeing as I had a dentist appointment at 11:00, I took the first two morning classes off with a simple dentists’ note.

At around 8:00, I got on the bus, got off, and walked to Queen Elizabeth Park, one of the larger parks in Vancouver. There, I walked up to the Bloedel Flower Conservatory because there’s a good view of the city from there, only to find that THE PLATFORM LOOKS TO THE NORTH, NOT TO THE EAST. So, I headed down, walked around, took several dozen shots, shot three takes of my video (which involved me walking while holding a video camera for ten minutes each time), walked up again, walked down, walked around, up and down, wal(ry

The sky actually changed when I was there – it was a dull shade of grey when I first got off the bus, and by the time I got on three hours later, the sky was a dazzling blue. And then the sun came out.

Also, protip: looking at the sun directly because you’re taking pictures of it is stupid. So is taking pictures of the sun. All in all, I came out with three shaky videos, one decent picture, and no good ones. Also, I was just walking and walking and walking when suddenly, a bird dropping dropped right next to me. The bird was sleeping in a tree on top of my head, and I just happened to move out of the way in time :|

Turns out that my teacher completely forgot about my ‘dentist appointment’ and phoned my mom, who thought I was going to class anyways. I expected SEVERE PUNISHMENT and was all MOPEY and EMO as I walked home, but my mom was just like ‘oh lol must’ve been a mistake lololol’.

MAN YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT I FELT WHEN SHE SAID THAT

THAT’S THE TYPE OF FEEL I WANT TO MAKE IN MY COMPOSITIONS

I’ve managed to at least make some (~5%) of that in this one, but that’s not enough. That feeling of bliss, perhaps the only way to achieve it would be to play the Phantom Score from Dantalian no Shoka, Utopia, immediately after Twilight. You don’t feel happy unless you’ve felt sad.

I would’ve made this into an O-NEC but nope, it wasn’t funny enough. As for the last O-NEC, the strings people performed today. I don’t know how coincidental this could be, but they played Haydn’s String Quartet No. 63 in B Flat Major, Opus 76, No. 4. What’s its nickname? “Sunrise.”

They also played a quartet by Brahms that I fell asleep during (because I slept too late last night writing that Horizon post), a modern composition by a friend of the performers, Jimi Hendrix’s Purple Haze, and Coldplay’s Viva la Vida.

YouTube

YouTube: “Congratulations! Your account is now enabled for uploads longer than 15 minutes. Click the Upload button below to select a video.”

The thing is, the only way to enable longer-than-15-minute uploads is to send some confirmation code to your mobile phone number. Being the hipster that I am, I do not have a mobile phone, and thus wanted to spite Google by sending the message to a random phone number that probably wasn’t even a phone number.

…I guess that actually was a phone number, then. As if I’ll ever make a video longer than 15 minutes :v

My camera shoots at 4320 x 3240, which is a 4:3 ratio, but Windows Live Movie Maker doesn’t support 1920 x 1440 (4:3), only 1920 x 1080 (16:9) :( Furthermore, YouTube’s videos are now all widescreen, so there are these ugly black bars at the side of them. Oh well.

I suppose I somehow understand Windows Movie Maker – when you have two thirty-second long sections and insert a ten-second transition between them, that ten seconds is taken from /both/ sections. So, you’ll have one twenty-second long section, one ten-second long transition, and then another twenty-second long section, which adds up to fifty seconds, instead of the sixty seconds you would’ve gotten from two thirty-second long sections. Basically, you lose ten seconds of time. It all makes sense now! So, why couldn’t they just have made it so transitions take out time only from the section it’s based on?! Instead of having 20-10-20 (section-transition-section), do 30-10-20 (section-transition-cut section). That way, no time is lost!

Tiro Finale

As I said, there were no changes in notes. I had to reformat the text so that it wasn’t in ugly Times New Roman, but for some reason, it was far too large compared to how large it was supposed to be (import from 2010a error?). Thus, I had to create a new document, add all the parts, and copy the notes in, just to find that it wouldn’t play sound. After fiddling around for a couple of hours, it still wasn’t fixed, so I just took the .wav that I made in June of last year. The .mus still doesn’t play music. It’s probably corrupted. I didn’t upload it either :X

As I said (man I say a lot of things), there’s not going to be any compositions from me for a long time. This is the last composition that I’ve completed that isn’t a solo piano piece – all the other compositions I’ve completed are… well, solo piano pieces, and I haven’t the skill to play them. Furthermore, it’s too hard for me to write a new composition from scratch within two weeks, simply on account of my lack of direction and concentration. Why only two weeks? Because NaNoWriMo comes up in November, and I’ll have to catch up on Half Season Review after that’s over.

Oh well, I hope that was enough compositions for you. NOBODY LISTENS TO THEM ANYWAYS