Debussy: Reverie

Well, I've been working on this (and kvetching about not having finished it) for so long, that this may be a bit anti-climactic, but, at last, it's done -- or done enough, anyway.  This is the piece I've been working on since February that the completion of which has been variously interrupted by school demands, computer issues large and small, and operator problems.  It feels like a long time coming and a commensurate relief to post it.  Strictly speaking, it's unfinished; there are some mixing issues that I could fix and I still feel a little lost as regards how to best to implement dynamic expression, but, between the facts that this is my first big project and that I am really ready to move on to something new, I decided it was time to call it done.  All that said, I'm actually pretty happy with it overall. 

It's no accident that I chose this piece for my first big synthesizer arrangement.  When I was in my teens, my father brought home a copy of Isao Tomita's Snowflakes are Dancing, and in it Tomita did an arrangement of Reverie.  Up to that point, the only real synthetic music I had heard was Wendy (then Walter) Carlos' Switched on Bach and The Well-Tempered Synthesizer, which we used to listen to all the time.  Tomita's virtuosity on the keyboard and timbral imagination was so radically different from what Carlos had done, at first it seemed to go too far, but the more I listened to it, the more I heard his genius.  Although I don't intend to emulate him, I do aspire to Tomita's level of imagination; I still hear new things in his work every time I listen to it. 

My arrangement here is not intended as a "remake" of Tomita's performance (that would be almost as silly as remaking King Kong).  Instead, as Reverie is simply a piece I have loved for many years and, despite its relative simplicity, I hear many voices woven into it, so it seemed like a good place to start learning the basics of synthetic music production.  Only one of the voices in this arrangement is original; several are mods of stock voices, and one or two are unaltered stock.  I ran across the two voices at the beginning of the piece quite by accident, but they set the tone for the rest of the work.

I hope you enjoy this as much as I have enjoyed making it.