First tune finished successfully!

I showcased the first of my finished tunes at my Composition lecture last Thursday and I was glad to hear it deemed a success by Mark Lockhart and the other students. I have since rehearsed it a couple of times and am starting to get to know it well. I think I shall still redraft bits of it, but overall I am happy with it as a piece.

I used the main parts of a remembrance service to write this first tune, with the intention of it being either the beginning or end of the programme to set the scene or to round it off. It uses an extract from Robert Laurence Binyon's poem, 'For The Fallen':

"They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old:

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning

We will remember them."

I drew on examples of the classical music of the time; particularly those who survived the war and wrote in the aftermath. For example, Vaughan Williams, Ivor Gurney, Holst. I listened in particular to Vaughan Williams' 'Pastoral Symphony', which makes use of pentatonic melodies and plagal cadences, akin to folk music:

http://open.spotify.com/track/3BUCC4vnn39rALO49BJhzT

For the intro to my piece I used excerpts from 'The Last Post' (to which a very sleepy student asked, "what, as in the royal mail?" which made us all giggle) and reharmonised certain chords.

As you can see I still need to add a Coda to accommodate the words "at the going down of the sun...."