This is my entry for Impressions Composing Jam: OST #2, hosted by KaleOverlord. The goal was to write music inspired by The Course of Empire, a series of five paintings by Thomas Cole.

This soundtrack is a duet written for piano and guitar. One song for each painting.

Below, I've written a short overview of my concept for this soundtrack, as well as descriptions of each song. Feel free to ignore these if you'd rather come up with your own interpretation of the music! Thanks so much for listening, either way!

Overview

I decided to tackle this theme pretty directly. Instead of musical abstractions of the story of a kingdom, these songs are observations of a physical scenario as time passes. Basically, this soundtrack is descriptive, rather than story-driven.

Plan

Everyone is just starting to get organized. They are playing around with the tools they have, and deciding how they plan to use them.

For this track, we are playing around with the guitar and piano... and not necessarily using them "correctly". All sounds are created by playing the instrument wrong.

For the guitar, I'm just knocking on it in various ways, sometimes muting the strings, and plucking the strings past the nut.

For the piano, I'm holding down the sustain pedal while "feathering" the half-blow pedal. It creates these really fun, chaotic bursts of sound! (And I don't even touch the keys!) I do this for about an hour, and later stitch the best parts together. (This was recorded on our home upright. I switch to a keyboard for the rest of the tracks.)

Setup

Now that everyone has their tools and skills ready, they can start setting up!

The music has more structure to it now. Still mellow, as the natural environment still constitutes most of the scene. The city isn't quite "sprawling" yet.

Flourish

They've finally greeble'd the landscape with lovely buildings! What a beautiful city!

This is the most upbeat part of the soundtrack. Triplet feel, bouncy and fun. The guitar and piano still play around each other; nature hasn't gone anywhere.

Teardown

Oh, I guess they're done now. They're packing it up!

In my soundtrack, I'm not even sure this is necessarily about a war or anything. Maybe this is all strategic demolition to reallocate resources. Who knows. Either way, music still sounds like we're breaking things! Yeehaw, dissonance! Staccato! Loud stuff!

Leftover

Over the years, nature begins thoroughly contributing it's own decorative ideals to what's left of the buildings.

We return to more laid-back patterns, like the ones we heard in track 2. Again, nature is the most readily observable thing in the scene, though there are structures. This time around, we are on the dusk side of things, and we hear some slightly deeper versions of the themes from track 2.