Badinerie Excerpt MIDI - Update 6

Hello everyone and welcome to update 6 on this 8 updates journey, or if you’re new, welcome!

Flute from Baroque Era

To summarize so far, I was originally planning a transcription/arrangement of the Halo flute choir, but last week, I pivoted to creating an orchestral excerpt as a MIDI file and will be working towards performing over it. Last week, I determined that the flute choir project would not be feasible to do within the set time with no experience, so I had a lot of thinking to do. That is when I came up with this alternative. The focus of last week’s work was to get lots of work on the MIDI done. I managed to get a third of it finished.

New update time! This week’s priorities were about the finishing of the MIDI and practice of the excerpt. Let’s start with the practice portion first. This excerpt is not extremely difficult, but the challenges lie within the interpretation. It requires knowing what you want to do, when you want to do it, but the ornamentation also should sound improvised. After I mentioned being a fan of the scalar pattern down during the main motif, I started using that and added slurs to pairs of notes that were repeated seconds. Not everything in this excerpt needs to be pointed or short.

I primarily focused on the work of the MIDI this week. It needed to be done, so I sat down for a couple hours and knocked it all out. It wasn’t terribly difficult. I split my laptop screen in half, one half with the score and the other with Finale. Probably the hardest part that I cannot figure out is the volume of each instrument. It’s okay that the flute cannot be heard as clearly because I can just take it out when recording, but the strings are so quiet compared to the harpsichord. Take a listen below as we conclude this update!

So to summarize, I’ve been practicing and working on interpretation of the Badinerie, finished the MIDI, and now need to put it all together. This should be the easiest part of the project due to the work that has already been put in. I had to learn this week about being decisive about how I want notes to be played. I didn’t want them to sound too pecky, but I didn’t want everything to be slurred or as long as possible. It’s about going into the final product with a plan, making sure everything is exactly as I plan it.

For the upcoming week, I will be rehearsing with the midi file. Once I feel comfortable with how it’s going, recording a few test runs will follow the rehearsals. On Thursday, I am performing Badinerie for the University of Arizona language fair under the German Department. The practices I’ve had for that have contributed to this project, despite being a different ensemble. It has been a change of pace playing with a real chamber ensemble and not a MIDI file. Here’s a video of a full performance of a chamber ensemble with flute.

On that note, see you all next week for the second to last update!