Tim Rohwer: Composer

I recently took another job as an orchestra teacher.  Seeing how much people have liked the harmonic exercise minor version of "Mary Had a Little Lamb" from a few years back, and knowing that my beginning orchestra would have a limited playing range, I decided to take the minor version of "Mary Had a Little Lamb" and orchestrate it for a beginning orchestra and a more advanced orchestra. To do this, I placed the main melody in an "A" part for Violin, Viola, and Cello.  I then added harmony parts, Violin Part B, Viola and Violin Part C, Cello D, and Bass E.  To have this become a more "official" piece, I expanded out the structure of the piece so that it would be an ABA structure for the section. Beyond that, I added two other movements using children's songs as the overall theme for a suite of songs, which I have called "Scary Bedtime Songs."  The first movement is Scary Mary, the 2nd is Zombie John (taking inspiration from Gus...

I've been hoping to stretch my composition skills and at the same time create a useful resource for others.  In order to do this, I've started a project to create a series of orchestral pieces that describing different emotions and moods.  I'm going to start making the MP3 files available on my new website , and these will eventually be put into the Unreal Engine Marketplace for game developers to be able to utilize.  Check out the video above (made using Unreal Engine and Blender) with some of this new music! As I write these new pieces, I'll also describe some of my thought process for how I went about writing the pieces, and creating the feel.  Stay tuned for the next article about "Warm and Calm."

After watching a concert with the Park City High School's Chamber Orchestra, I felt inspired by one of the students who created a string orchestra arrangement of music from the movie "Howl's Moving Castle."  I asked the orchestra director if I could write an original piece for his class, and he consented.  I started working on it over Thanksgiving break and finished it up just a few days ago (minus minor editing).   Here is the SoundCloud link: There have been lots of great things I've learned from this experience.  For me, this is the fastest I've ever put together a piece of this magnitude, and it has been such a refreshing feeling to finish something I've worked on. One of the great things that I decided to do as I worked on this project was to have a deadline.  None was given to me by the orchestra teacher, but I knew that the group would appreciate having it sooner rather than later, so I set the deadline as the end of February. Having the pu...

Hey Everyone! Hoping to get back into the weekly warm-up routine now that some things have settled down a bit.  Tommy's playing more by himself, I'm working a little less and have a bit more free time, and so I hope to get back to doing some more composing soon.  My first attempt at getting back into it was finishing this soundtrack practice.  This was originally intended for a video on YouTube.  I e-mailed the author to see if I could have the soundtrack be used for his video.  I never heard back, but kept working on it because it was still good practice.  I may create my own video now that will fit with the music but we shall see on that.  Here it is: Some more things to come soon: -A new hymn arrangement:  "Come Follow Me" -More warm-up updates -A new approach to composing which will hopefully yield at least one movement of a Symphony -A small method book for violin that should be available for purchase through the Piano Gallery in Id...

As a fun experiment, a decided to take a shot at some minimalism as a weekly warm-up.  Minimalism is where you take a few basic elements and develop art from them.  The idea is simplicity, although sometimes the results can be quite complicated in sound and appearance.  For example, here is a minimalist painting on the right.  It takes a shape and colors to form a painting.  the result is quite beautiful. Composers can do the same thing in music.  An example is Steve Reich's clapping music: The composer takes a rhythm and has people clapping it.  One group then shifts the notes.  This creates an amazing effect that sounds new and fresh even though it is the same rhythm again and again. Another famous minimilist composer is Phillip Glass who wrote the music for "The Truman Show" and "The Illusionist" among others.  Again, he uses some simple ideas to create pretty neat music. I tried my hand at this style of composition and came up...

After coming back this week to work on the fugue that I had originally started last week, I found that somehow it had all been erased except the first measure.  I was a little flustered and frustrated by this, until I realized it could be an excellent opportunity to start again with some fresh ideas and some new insights.  So, here is a newly updated fugue with a completely different subject.  Again, the subject was one that I wanted to be something you would be okay hearing again and again throughout the piece, and the counter-subject something to match it in enjoyable-ness, and yet not to be too "overbearing," to drown out the subject. Thinking as well about last week's attempts, I realized too that a 4-voice fugue for piano would have to be carefully crafted to include all four voices in such a way that no voices were lost, there would be little to no crossing of voices (lower voices going higher then higher voices and vice versa), and this would all need to be c...

I've been thinking about grad school and some of the essential knowledge and skills that I'll need, and one that has come to mind is counterpoint.  Since I began learning about counterpoint, I have been fascinated with this compositional technique.  In High School, I began to write two part inventions for piano, and ended up writing about 26-28 of them.  I don't exactly remember because somehow in throwing out some old school work, I must have managed to throw these out as well.  It's probably just as well since I had a limited understanding at best of harmony, of counterpoint, and of music theory and composition in general.  My guess is that they would have ended up sounding quite gross, to say the least. However, my fascination with polyphony continued, and I eventually wrote a fugue that took as its theme the Mario Brothers theme, changed a little to sound a little more classical.  In the end, I came up with a very classical sounding Fugue on a Theme...

Having lacked time and energy, my plan to weekly spend time writing at least part of something fun as a warm-up to stretch my composing abilities has suffered considerably.  However, things have somewhat settled down and I've been able to do some composing and have a new short snippet to post, and here it is: Light-Hearted My goal with this was two-fold: 1) Write something in a compound meter (something which I haven't used quite as often).  In this case, I used 6/8 2) Write something that is happy, fun, and light-hearted (something I also haven't done as often, at least lately) The result I felt was quite pleasing.  What I tried to do to add to that light-heartedness was to make the tempo very jaunty and almost dance-like.  I also used a lot of chromatic non-harmonic tones to help add to the almost silly feeling.   I originally had the melody in the Viola (partly from personal bias, partly from necessity), but felt that brass could more effectively...

This week I decided I would try my hand at trying to score for a movie.  I went on to YouTube and found a video I liked, turned it on mute, and then started writing.  It's been interesting so far.  I've contacted the owner of the video and hope to have a response soon as to whether I can put the video with the music on this blog, but if not, I'll showcase my attempt sans video. Some interesting dilemmas so far:  trying to find the right orchestration to fit the background and trying to line up the music to correspond with the video.  Also, though at the beginning stages, I'm hoping to make something that could stand on its own, with a discernible melody and form that does not get boring or repetitive as the piece/video goes on.  We'll see soon how I've done!

As promised, here's a little bit about some changes I've made on the lyrical movement of my recent piano sonata.  To start off, here's the most recent update on what it sounds like: Bear in mind, this is still a very rough version of this piano sonata.  I've yet to figure out a few rough spots in the minor section and some overall structural concerns I've had. I've been spending most of my composing time focusing on this sonata, and some recent changes I made have made me wonder about why a composer changes things that sound okay, and how this refining process can take an okay composition and turn it into a better composition, and - hopeful - can even change it into a masterpiece. Being a perfectionist, I find I spend a lot of my time (more at times than I like) writing and re-writing sections that at least earlier I felt worked really well already.  This raises a few questions in my mind about composing in general: -What makes one note better than anothe...

A new arrangement is available for download in the Violin & Viola Arrangement section.  It's an arrangement of "Come, Come, Ye Saints" played for a Stake Night of Music, and every instrument features the melody at some point.  Have a listen:  For the present time, this arrangement will be free to download. Soon to come also will be the same arrangement with a cello part in place of the violin and some updates on previous arrangements.

I've continued to work on the 2nd movement of the piano sonata, and have a short clip from the work done so far on it.  I'm hoping to discuss soon some of the changes I made from what I originally had and why I made those changes, but for now here is a listen to what I've got so far:

After spending some time moving, I've been able to get back to experimenting with the chance music piece I started preparing for a week ago.  The results are quite interesting:  something that sounds kind of neat and quite tonal overall. Here's what it sounds like: Not necessarily great, but I think it turned out quite interesting. Here's my methodology for creating this piece. First of all, I played a game of chess against the computer (and lost:  I'm not great at chess). I recorded all of the moves that were made and using a chess board pitch chart I'd created earlier, I found out what pitches corresponded to what moves. My pitch charts were based on 2 major things:  1) As I was reading about chess, it was mentioned that the center of the board is the most important place.  The pitches I felt would be most important to establish the tonality were placed in the center of the board so that they would more likely be fell on. 2) Whether the section u...

I've been toying with an idea in my head for a long time now, and have started to put it into conception:  How could I write aleatoric music that sounds tonal? When I thought about it, the answer was quite obvious:  if I control the possible elements that are going into the piece, I will control the tonality of the piece.  Not only that, I could 'write' a composition with largely chance elements involved, but sculpt them in such a way to make something that may even sound melodious, and might even have classical forms in it. To this end, I've started putting together some different ideas for a 3-movement piano sonata that will be written as a chance piece.  I will strive to incorporate the appropriate form by controlling elements in each section.  For my first attempt, I am going to use two different chance mediums:  rolling of dice and a chess game. For rhythms, I will use dice to determine which of several sets of measures to use for different sec...

A few nights ago, I decided I would arrange Led Zepplin's Stairway to Heaven for full orchestra as just a fun project to try out some orchestration ideas.  I'm super excited!!! It'll be way fun. :)