Music Book - Sometimes I Compose Things

The Sinister Fate of Joseph Redding

T h e S i n i s t e r F a t e o f
J o s e p h R e d d i n g

If you're new here, hello! This isn't the usual kind of music book on Wattpad, because it's one containing solely music I've written and performed myself.

Kind of. Mostly.

Above is the audio for the book trailer of The Sinister Fate of Joseph Redding, which has been available on my profile for a while now. I wanted to start this book off with my favourite piece though, and this has to be it!

(A worthy mention here is a friend of mine, the very talented ashutoshmoru, who put the trailer together for me. Drop by him and say hi!)

Mood
If you've already taken a listen, it doesn't take long to get a feel for the mood of the book it belongs to.

It's a horror/mystery story set in 1880, and just like the book, the piece gradually gets more intense. It's actually the same repeated motif throughout, though the focus shifts between the piano to the strings.

Technique
I should say "pianos", really. I took one look at the sheet music this composition generated, and cried. Pretty used to spanning octaves (I swear I've developed like an extra joint in my hand somewhere because of how I play...) but this wasn't as Finny friendly as I'd hoped.

I usually have string accompaniments playing legato, (long, lovely notes) and I do love a healthy drone (lengthy bass note), so this was the first I've put together where the strings play pizzicato. In this piece the upper end of the string ensemble pluck the strings instead of bow them.

Gives it a sense of urgency, doesn't it?

Except for the last bars of the main body, which is staccato. I can't imagine many people can pluck that fast, and if they can I dunno how they don't shred their fingers...

Likes
And that bell-like piano outro? It gives me shivers. I really liked how the piece crescendoed and then just dropped away. Like most things I create, it was a happy accident.

One where I'd actually managed to delete 8 bars and failed to recover it, but it worked out well in the end.

Another little happy accident was in the "phantom melody" (there was never a melody composed, if you would believe it. A melody appeared out of a succession of arpeggios (a type of musical scale) and the brain picks out a melody that isn't there). I decided to exaggerate this phantom melody to create the main motif of the piece.

Kinda fitting for a story about a phantom, right?

Dislikes
Just for the purpose of the trailer, the intro had to be cut. Originally there was a fade, a pause, and then the piano came in, but we thought the pause would slow the trailer down so chopped it out.

Carrying on with this ghost theme though, buried beneath the echo where the the climax grinds to a halt, there is actually a single beat that vanished. It's hidden well enough in the aftermath of literally 12 tracks dropped off into the void all at once, but the ghost beat is still there.

Or...

Isn't.

Spooky or what?