Written for the 2012 Junior Composer's Institute Salon. This song was a completely different experience for me to write. A friend of mine came up with a 'space exploration' motif, which I borrowed to form the basis of this piece. Once I had that quick 4-note sequence under my fingers, I sat down at an electronic keyboard and messed around for a while. I found the 'Star Dust' patch, which is what you hear on the electric keyboard throughout. As it turns out, the keyboard was about to record MIDI and could export straight to a USB drive. I simply sat down and record about 8 minutes of myself just improvising on that motif.

That melodic recording was then followed by another 8 minutes of simply playing chords underneath the melody. After exporting, there were a few painful hours of translating the MIDI in to readable sheet music, then arranging for the ensemble I had chosen: The Keyboard, a Piano and French Horn. And then about 2 minutes were cut off of the end so that it would be more manageable in rehearsal.

During the rehearsals, we experimented with different mutes and such on the horn, never letting up on the sustain pedal on the keyboard, different positioning of the instruments, etc. We discovered an amazingly cool effect of playing the horn straight in to the piano's soundboard while the sustain pedal was down. The resonance effectively echoed the horn's notes and timbre, creating an amazing effect. Might have been more awesome if we hadn't accidentally left a Snare Drum with the Snares turned on during the performance, but it was amazing anyways. At least I think we left a snare on. Oh well.

So, after all of that, I present to you, "S'pht'Kr", a piece named after an alien race from Bungie's Marathon Series.

Instrumentation:
Electric Keyboard ('Stardust' patch)
Piano (3 hands)
French Horn (with Mutes)

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