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Fanginina, female White Xweetok, UFA. She was a pound pet I zapped with my lab ray for a while, and I think she looks quite pretty right about now. Her name seems to suit the way she looks, like she's a white fang or something. PM me if you'd like her.
Edit: I'm re-zapping her. Hope she'll be even prettier.

It's really awesome that you're working on this! It's such a great project idea, and I hope you're really enjoying seeing your work come together like this!

What I like:

I like how the first theme bounces along, with a lot of great forward momentum. It's very fun to listen to how it charges along in full flow. I also really like that you're doing this project and you're putting your music theory to work! The Classical style (by which I mean the specific period, not necessarily all of Classical music) might seem simple in sound but it is also exposed. It's difficult to keep following all the rules of harmonization, but you've made sure all the parts lead smoothly to their next notes and that they cover all the notes of the chord and don't awkwardly move in parallel 5ths or anything like that.

What I think can make for more awesomeness:

What I really like to hear in an orchestral piece is a contrast in texture. By texture I mean, how many instruments are playing at once, what groups of instruments, their articulation, and the varying density of the score. You're already doing some of this, but I think you can be more daring. Have orchestral silences, they do wonders. And try getting parts to take turns in answering each other. I guess some of those effects would be masked for now, since the synthesiser's notes all sound like the same instrument. But there are still things you can do to vary the texture more. I'd love to take Tchaikovsky's pizzicato ostinato (4th symphony, 3rd mvt) as an example.



Even when Tchaikovsky has to write within the constraints of making the string section pluck for the whole movement, he makes the texture of the strings interesting by leaving gaps in the baseline for daylight to shine through. He also sometimes transfers the melodic role down to the cellos while the violins get out of the way with an unobtrusive accompaniment part. And he sometimes lets a melodic or quasi-melodic figure play without any accompaniment behind it at all.

I think, especially since your piece has a Classical period style to it, you could definitely lighten up the baseline and the accompaniment in spots. Maybe you could let the base not play for a few beats and then rejoin, and/or let the accompaniment have some different articulation in spots, other than legato sostenuto.

I also get the feeling that your symphony doesn't have enough "bridging material" - sections that aren't complete melodies in themselves, but that set up a different mood and shift the key and possibly the tempo of the piece. When I listen all the way through your current symphony, it feels like it continually stays in the same key (even though it technically doesn't) and it seems to keep more or less the same mood. So I feel like I don't get a break from hearing the relentlessly forward-moving melodic figure. You could break this up using fragments of scales, or even just play the same two chords back and forth and then do the same thing double time and tie off with a cadence... right before a lone voice carries the music off somewhere else, perhaps.

On a similar note, I think more experimentation with keys would be awesome. My favourite part of the development section was 3:33, where I felt you had really nailed the different mood of a different key, and I was looking forward to hearing more but was sad that by 3:37 you had already switched to the dominant and then stayed with the dominant to the end. I know that it's kind of a Romantic thing to ask for more keys, but Classical symphonies often make great use of this too. My favourite part of Mozart's development section in the following clip is 3:19 where he takes a fragment of his melody and goes through the circle of fifths with it, changing key at every four-bar phrase. Then he cranks up the ante by taking an even smaller fragment of the tune and changing every two bars. Then he doubles again and takes just three notes and changes keys every bar (4:08), and then in a rush he changes several times a bar. About a whole minute was spent cycling through keys, right before the development collapses into a space-time singularity of rapid key changes just before the theme returns.



I also notice that your melodic voices are very "polite", in that they only begin their own four-bar phrases when the previous voice has finished a four-bar phrase. That's great when you're stating the theme, but it would be more fun to play around with this in the development. For example, at 3:30 in the Mozart clip, the cellos "rudely" butt in and start their own four-bar phrase in the fourth bar of the violins' figure. And again at 4:20, before the woodwinds are finished with their downward-sloping figure, the violins perk back up with the theme. How annoying! Those parts haven't finished yet! But the disconnect builds excitement. Without it, pieces risk sounding like an ice-cream truck on loop, the tune always starting again at the "right" place.

In summary: More textural contrast, more bridging sections and key experimentation in the development, and more space to breathe.

Again it's really awesome that you're doing this project! And it's great to hear how much work you've already done on it! I hope it sounds really amazing by the time you're finished!

That makes me feel a lot better. So after all, there is a way to compete successfully with the people who offer themselves cheaper, by offering better talent and more desirable services. Top quality work doesn't come free.

It's strange to hear that there isn't a strong VFX guild. They deserve far more for their talent and time than what they're being paid. But hopefully these events will strengthen their resolve as they realise just how much the industry need to unionise.

I spent quite a few years crossing and crossing back across the evolution vs creationism debate. I've finally settled on the Old Earth side. It took some time because, like you, I felt something of a culture shock through the process... I remember the first time I went Old Earth it was in early high school, and I thought to myself in frustration, "Here's the plan. I'll ask Jesus when I get to see him in heaven which side is right, and THEN I'll agree with him, whichever it was."

When I later went Old Earth for good I wasn't quite as blunt as that, but the thought was similar, in that I do not believe Jesus requires his followers to subscribe to Young Earth Creationism, and so many, many observations made more sense in an Old Earth model of history. I'm prepared to be wrong on natural history, but since I can't be absolutely certain of a 6-literal-day Creation I might as well choose the theory that makes more sense. It has some knock-on effects, like I now believe that there were animal deaths before the fall. But the venerable Bede (7th-8th century) and Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologica, Part 1, Question 93, Article 1) also believed that animals died before the fall, so it's not altogether unheard of in more than a thousand years of of mainstream Christian theology.

So perhaps this might be comforting to you. Not all historical Christians were literalists, some notable theologians were quite the opposite. St. Augustine was one of the greatest fathers of early Christianity, and he did not think it was wise to adhere to a rigidly literal interpretation of the genesis creation. He wrote about creationist interpretations:

You may choose whichever you prefer; only avoid asserting anything rashly, and something you don’t know as if you did; and remember you are just a human being investigating the works of God to the extent you are permitted to do so (Augustine 2002c, 9)

Augustine actually found it very difficult to accept the 6-day Creation theory, in part because of his Christian theology. He felt that if God was all-powerful, why shouldn't he have made everything all at once, not even in a day but in a second?

Augustine was not satisfied with a rigid literalist interpretation of Genesis. The saint even felt ashamed that some other Christians of his time were talking up how well they knew how God created the world. Not only did this strike him as prideful, but he also felt that it was harmful to the mission since it gave a bad impression of Christianity to the pagans:

Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men.

Augustine lived in the 5th century AD, long before the culture wars of our times, but his words and the words of other Church fathers still have the power to put things in perspective. At least for me.