Senses - IV. Taste

Thing I used; MuseScore 4
My rating: 9.5/10

dude why is the video glitching I swear there's always something

I've been liking my work lately, that's good. I only hope other people like it too and it's not just composer bias where I only like it because I know all of the ideas behind it.

After a sizeable break, I haven't left my project behind. Here is the fourth movement of Senses. To capture the sense of taste, I cooked up a vague story of a person walking into a relatively fancy restaurant and being served an appetizer, a salty/savory dish, a sour/bitter dish, a spicy dish, and desert. (There were going to be even more foods but I figured out quickly that it wouldn't be manageable.) I even put in a gimmicky "lick" to count the courses. I didn't expect the movement to be this long, but I wanted to adhere to the story. 2nd longest piece of mine, let's go. Here are some labels.

0:00 Restaurant Walk In
0:36 Appetizer
1:14 Salty/Savory
2:52 Sour/bitter
4:43 Spicy
7:20 Desert

I really do feel like I'm stepping things up. The form, the orchestration, the musical developments, the harmonies, the melodies, they're all getting to a good place, although I'll always have flaws. I want to say it sounds cinematic. I was going to rate this a 9.75/10, but I held back in case I had too much recency bias. I thought I wrote pretty quickly, too, but actually that's not really true because I slowed down a lot. I normally struggle with form (knowing what to write next so that it makes sense in context), which led me to create a story, like I do with some of my other pieces, and I think it helped to hold the long piece together. It might have caused me to repeat ideas more frequently as well, which is a good thing. In previous pieces, I repeat things too little, which apparently is indeed a beginner's trap, but I think I did a relatively good job here, given that it's not in sonata form, which tends to lend itself to repetition. I am worried that people won't be able to absorb the concept of the story as easily as I believe, though, and will get bored or confused. It's still a long piece, after all. That's what happened in Paint, I think.

The revision process was smoother than normal, too, especially compared to Hearing. That was a mess. I did do some revising while writing rather than all at the end, but still. There are still some uncertainties here and there, but I feel like I was able to weed out most of them. I often get in trapped because I want to make something sound better but I know it still has to sound good in context, and I usually have gotten used to hearing the old version. That didn't happen as much here, somehow. The solutions came quick, and my brain accepted them.

Apart from the story, the movement is based on the feeling of a dance, which I thought could contrast well with the other movements. The time signature is already good for that, and I tried to base each section on a type of dance as well, though not that successfully. The appetizer section is like a waltz. The salty/savory section is based on a minuet. The sour/bitter section is based on I don't even know I just accented the second beat a bit with moderate tempo. The spicy section was going to be based on a tarantella but it was too hard. The desert section is based on a sarabande. Musical form experts will probably laugh at me, but that's okay. It was mostly for inspiration and contrast.

You will probably notice splats of tempo markings in certain places. I typically control ritardandos like that, and there are quite a few in here (although I didn't actually write them in), but I did decide to control the general flow of the piece in certain places in a way that I don't normally do. The markings at the beginning are the most glaring examples; at some point I thought there wasn't enough time in the rests to make each pause important, so I tried physically breathing, maybe like a conductor would, to see how I would time the entrances if I could wait longer. The problem with doing that is that not everyone will feel the flow the same way, so it's possible that a lot of people will just consider the pauses to be strange.

In the sour/bitter section, I had trouble finding markings that gave the articulations I wanted, which is why the markings probably look weirdly complicated. One could theoretically tell players how to do it, but since I mostly just upload MIDI recordings, I wanted to see if I could get close. It was close enough. But it does look weird. Dynamics had a similar issue. I really had to mess with some crescendos and diminuendos to achieve the right volumes and growth/decay. If someone were to actually play this, I would change them to something more natural and separately instruct the players.

I really hope Touch goes well. This has been a good journey.