5 COMPOSERS 1 THEME (ft. Adam Neely, Nahre Sol, Ben Levin & Tantacrul)

hello my name is David Bruce so many of you who follow Andrew Huang's channel will know about his for producers split the same sample videos where he has one sample and he gets different electronic music producers to create a new track from it Andrew mentioned that he'd stolen the idea from a photographer on YouTube who had four photographers to take pictures of the same subject and the idea occurred to me that in the tradition of all the best artists I should steal from him as well but instead of working electronically work in what I think of as my own domain instrumental music so get a few composers to create short pieces all based around the same initial idea once I'd had that thought I straightaway thought of my old friends in an ensemble called chroma I've worked with them since they played on my childbirth opera push back in 2006 and a couple of years ago they also played on my opera the firework makers daughter at the Royal Opera House but we've done loads of other little projects together and one of the regular features of a Croma concert is accordionist Ian Watson Ian plays what's called the button accordion so instead of one side being a piano keyboard both sides are buttons it's a really amazing instrument which I think thoroughly deserves a place in orchestras and ensembles and I'll do a whole separate video on the accordion soon so then around the accordion we built a small ensemble Ilona hall on bass Stuart King on clarinet Zoe motley on cello and Charlotte bonnet on on violin it's the kind of lineup I really like a bit foki a lot of color but with these kind of players you can literally take it in any direction you want and they'll be able to handle it so I asked some of the big YouTube music names if they'd like to be involved I thought it would be good to have a bit of variety in backgrounds so Martin Keary also known as tumped accrual is a classically trained composer Adam Neely many of you will know is a jazz composer and bass player Ben Levin plays in his bands Ben Levin group and bent-knee but is someone I can relate to in terms of the obvious joy he finds in music making of all kinds and finally naari soul is an amazing classically trained pianist and composer so next what to choose for our one idea I thought it made sense to use something that everyone watching would be familiar with so you could follow along with what we'd done whatever your musical background so I thought of some of the most cliched melodies in classical music which we've you don't know their names you'll definitely know their tunes there's Mozart's eine kleine Nachtmusik Beethoven's Fur Elise Tchaikovsky's 1812 overture another Beethoven Beethoven's fifth and finally because it had to be there the lick most of you will probably know all about the lake but if you don't you probably don't want to so I checked all those famous snippets into one line and that became our idea and I told the composers the rules were simple write what you like but it has to be based in some way on something from that line and keep it to just one minute long you might think that's a bit short but the time scales in this kind of written down acoustic music are so different apart from anything else it takes a long time so one minute is already a pretty big commitment and then to rehearse perform and record to the highest level five one-minute pieces well in truth a group like chroma does this kind of thing all the time and does it frightening ly quickly but I settled on a six hour recording session to rehearse and record everything which turned out to be just about right too quick thank yous before we plunge straight in firstly to chroma themselves who are always amazing and such fun to work with and secondly to Martin or Tonto cruel who helped me out with filming and recording on the day and even mixed to finish pieces it was definitely a unique experience for both of us to try to simultaneously rehearse a new piece whilst also trying to film a good shot of the performers but I think we did okay all right so when I initially got the orchestration from David I saw we had accordion and clarinet so immediately I thought okay we have to do something vaguely Balkan sounding we have to use that oxic rhythmic concept something where we were alternating between long and short pulses to create a very insistent groove but a very kind of lopsided groove so the way that I created that lopsided groove is I had a measure of 5/8 long short 3+2 ducka ducka but I made it really quick so we got this kind of Swing another aspect of Balkan music is the sort of florid melody where you have these ornamented melodies that go on for a little while so I took the lick and extrapolated melodic material on top of that to create a six bar phrase which just repeats over and over and kind of a strophic form over the course of this one-minute arrangement but since we only had one minute I wanted to experiment with as many different kinds of orchestration as possible so one moment we have the double bass player playing like in thumb position at least I hope they're gonna play in thumb position like doubling the accordion left hand while the cello player is playing with the bass player normally would with this like driving sort of 5/8 rhythm most of the material is fairly diatonic but it does flirt with different key centers and along with like odd phrase lengths and odd meters this is something that I love doing to kind of I know just make the diatonic seven notes of the scale feel super fresh for me at all times and I think that you know even though there are a couple hashtags spicy jazz chords in here it's still fairly diatonic and I had a lot of fun putting it together [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Laughter] [Music] so I'm excited okay it's time to listen to everyone's recordings I've been super curious about what people did because found it to be a difficult challenging writing thing okay I'm kind of nervous here all right uh here we go [Music] oh yeah other way that pizzicato works really really well really well of this bass and accordion solo it's kind of like a jig and five is accordion swells [Music] [Applause] [Music] and Scott goosebumps such fun oh man oh man the band killed it ah sounds so good well done of them great piece Oh Adam jeez I really really enjoy that ending as well I just love the and we've got a big laugh in the studio and it got a laugh out of me too I just love that kind of casual dismissal of the music you've just written just like identidad today whatever when I first heard the theme that David sent us to use in this project my thought was that it'd be really hard not to make something ironic or a little sarcastic simply because the themes are so recognizable I thought anyway I use them it'd be like I had huh you hear that when you hear that one kind of thing and there's nothing wrong with that that can be a lot of fun it's just I've been drowning in irony lately my whole sense of humor has become basically lying so I wanted to make something sincere and beautiful so what I did was instead of putting the themes in the forefront and making them the melody I slowed them down like crazy and made them a baseline in fact I just took the theme as is pretty much straight up slowed it down and made that the baseline for the whole thing and I built harmony and melody on top of that [Music] all right this one's mine okay I bet you before listening to Ben's it's gonna sound a lot like Ben Ben has a very particular sound [Music] love this accordion melody [Music] heard this melody a few times now and it's really growing on me beautiful [Music] the ornaments really really work for this arrangement and this instrumentation and the accordion do sound so wonderfully blended [Music] beautiful it's it's so emotionally charged uh so beautiful just also how always orchestrating with like the accordion and the clarinet it seems like that's the the way to go just have to blend there that Corian like really makes everything blend so well I'm really really impressed again just I'm a there's a lot of things to like here I mean I love obviously I love the the wave written for the instruments they swell beautifully in fact the swelling is the thing I think I like the most sometimes you write a piece for people to play there's no you know you don't know the people and you don't rehearse and then it turns out pretty bad this was not the case it's very moving when it works what I really love about Ben's pieces is such a good lesson to all of us about taking constraints you know he used this rather silly material that we've got and he just slowed it down to make a bass line and then he built this beautiful piece on top of that and just shows you that if you stick to a constraint it can help you build something you might never have imagined hello this is tantric rule here thanks very much to David for involving me in this project it's come at a pretty good time for me actually because I'm in the middle of writing something else that's turning out to be quite complicated and then Dave sends through this lovely little brief which is hey let's just mess around with the motifs from the 1812 overture and eine kleine Nachtmusik and I just thought to myself this is exactly the kind of nonsense I need to be proceeding with right now these motifs when which I would never have permitted myself to even think of using because they're so cliched I mean they're profoundly cliched to use a slightly odd term and I tried sort of burying the motifs in a kind of clandestine way but I found I had the most fun just using them in a really overt sense anyway I think in combination with especially the 1812 overture kinda sounds a little bit like a sea shanty to me but um I'll let you be the judge [Music] I don't really know it's writing at all so this is gonna be interesting okay so next we're going to listen to Martin's piece hell yeah here we go [Music] hmm [Music] a flutter tongue of a clarinet that's nice that's nice a lot of cool effects this is my favorite bit coming up [Music] problem very cool use of the familiarity of the motif making something really unhinged and crazy but with the super familiar melodies that's cool I've actually never heard tenth accruals music and that made me want to hear more nice alright cool that's awesome man this is a super inspiring I really like the effect of just like the swells with the accordion and the strings together just like how the accordion is blending with everything a super super interesting like why aren't we all writing for accordion all the time it's such a cool instrument in this context that just the blend is awesome I used all of the melodies in some way or another often fragmented and altered in the beginning I start with the fifth symphony theme with the strings and clarinet and in this next section I kind of merge the overture and eine kleine Nachtmusik because they both have prominent forts and then in a very lyrical way the clarinet handles the overture theme then I took the lick with a full ensemble here in odd time time meter it I wrote it as 916 and in the end where everything sort of fizzles out the piano is improvising and I plug in [Applause] from Beethoven's Fur Elise in terms of instrumentation I chose to add some keyboard sounds with piano acoustic piano and then some marimba sounds and electronic piano [Music] I know now rice writing decently well so I'm excited to hear this oh so she oh so now ray played piano on top of this I don't know that you could do that it's gonna play bass I was gonna play bass guitar on top of mine actually no I wasn't [Music] such a delicate beautiful sound I mean that is such a cool texture it's fun that she used the 1812 melody in the same way that I did with a more melancholy kind of tone not the bloody lick again I see we went with the link but I'd metered then also in Farrelly's he'd be listen though drifting off thanks Nora that was really good ah beautiful the Wayne IRA uses pit sacado with like that kind of articulation on the piano just a little bit of a staccato sort of thing going on it feels like rain droplets and it's such a nice texture man I'm gonna be stealing so many of these textures from all of these people I love nice piano playing I'm really glad she included that this one in particular has achieved what feels like such a complete world in like so little time and and not just like one world but two so I have to admit my composing head was in the middle of a big string quartet piece I'm writing at the moment so to get me started I borrowed a little rhythm from an old piece of mine which is what you hear at the very start and then basically I took the brief very seriously and started throwing as many of those melodic fragments all over the place pretty much everything you hear comes from that line quite often two or three different parts of it at the same time I found it quite interesting in terms of perception the themes are so familiar they just stick out of almost any context which can be good for a bit of comedy but at some point they can also take on their own lives and become something new in a way which I find quite interesting I think the two distortions I'm most proud of or the sort of sultry string version of Beethoven's fifth at the very end wha-wha and the way Farrelly's gets into this kind of gruff descending scrub on the double bass baba ba-ba-ba-ba ba-ba-ba-ba but if you listen out you'll start to hear different snippets popping up all over the place [Music] [Applause] [Music] David Bruce the boss Bruce all right David [Music] [Applause] [Music] I love the violin writing in this I really love it violin writing is just bloody brilliant and I'm gonna take em steel by Frankie Farrelly's on the bass [Music] that reminds me of straight-up D'Angelo there so that's my Tchaikovsky also really really like the ending I quite liked we've done that to Sandow and strings and then back again [Music] whoa dang ya can hear the funk can you David Bruce I'm afraid to make ensembles like this groove but thing is these are some great groovy musicians that piece is so catchy like there's such a nice balance of counterpoint stuff than resolving into Unison's that it gives you this very complete groove even when there's no drums it's something I'm taking away from this is like you can get some phat grooves in there you might sound good David you made it good well done that was cool I forgot the fact that you know classical double bass players usually have that low C extension and so wow I was so cool like hearing it at the end oh so cool it's so inspiring that's so inspiring I got so many cool ideas I'm gonna steal from everybody in concluded in clearly different humans have different ideas very creative stuff I never would have thought of and I actually learned so much from this so it I'm pumped I hope people enjoy this to say that I'm sure they will so if I look a bit tired now is because editing the mountain of footage we had for this project has taken me a long time but there's two final points I want to make the first is that if all five of those composers would agree on one thing it would be that these musicians were incredible and did such a great job in a short time man the band killed it they really pulled it off well I'm sounds great they're a bunch of pimps and players and they are my god so thank you so much chroma looking forward to the next time oh and before you go can you just do your lucky cat wave yeah thanks and thanks also to the composers if you don't know their channels already do please check them out they're always producing amazing music and Composition related videos and whatever your background and level as a musician I guarantee you'll learn something from all of them and the second thing I wanted to say is that I'm sure you can guess the amount of time energy and resources that go into this kind of project so if you enjoyed it and you found it interesting educational entertaining do please consider joining my patrons over at patreon as a way of supporting the next video that we do if you're new to the channel welcome and if you're into music and want to adventure into its hidden depths do come and join me by subscribing and maybe playing tuned on that notification Bell and please let me know in the comments if you enjoyed this kind of video should we do it again what should we do next time thank you so much for watching and I'll see you next [Music]

Channel: David Bruce Composer

Views: 845,355

Rating: 4.9757295 out of 5

Keywords: david bruce, 5 composers 1 theme, adam neely, nahre sol, ben levin, tantacrul, chroma ensemble, composers

Id: nWDITMZW1XE

Length: 27min 40sec (1660 seconds)

Published: Fri May 17 2019