Clarifying the "mysterious" section

Beginning at measure nine of Night Sky these is a section labeled "mysterious."  In this section I am trying to infuse my personal compositional voice into the context of the music.  One style in which I like to compose is reminiscent of Bela Bartok's "night music."  Color and timbre are the two primary elements in this style.  For this section my intent is to juxtapose long tone in the upper voices with short fragments in the other voices.

Another goal in this section is to feature the percussion section a bit more.  I want the percussion to be more that just decoration, accenting the melodies played by the wind instruments.  I feel that all too often in band music percussion becomes an afterthought or just another layer of the melodies.  I want to bring the percussion forward in this section.  This way if the percussion parts are missing then there would be a hole in the music.

As I orchestrated the mysterious section I became concerned with the way it was coming together.  I noticed some problems that I am certain Adam would have pointed out had I not revised this section before sending him a copy of the score.  The first issue was the long tones in the upper woodwinds.  Each note lasted four measures and continued on with other notes for sixteen total measures.  If this piece were for orchestra, then the long tones could have worked in the strings.  However, for a band in this age group, the fatigue factor and lung capacity prohibits such a relentless passage.  My solution was to have the long tones fade out after two measures with rests the following two measures.

The other primary issue I had was the harmonic language.  I tried to add some dissonant elements to the piece.  The long tones were more like note clusters than chords.  This did not work for me.  I ended up changing some of the notes in the long tones to create diatonic chords.  I did this so that the harmonic language does not unnecessarily stray away from the key area.

I am still finding parts in this section that I am still tweaking.  A couple of examples are rhythmic content and metric placement.  Sometimes I feel as if the melodic ideas do not start on the right beat or measure.  This is all apart of the editing process.  I am liking the changes I have made to this section.  All have helped to strengthen the piece.