Listen to Mitchell’s composition performed by the Queensland Youth Orchestra conducted by Paul Dean.
Listen to Mitchell’s original composition submitted with his entry.
Mitchell Mayman (Age 12, Qld)
FANFARE: Fanfare for a promise of spaceflight
Hello, my name is Mitchell. I am a 12-year-old boy from Queensland. My piece for the Artology fanfare competition is Fanfare for a promise of spaceflight.
My background in music started in 2021 when I was 11 years old. I started playing the piano and writing some basic pieces. When I got Musescore, a music transcription software, I gained the ability to write for more than a single instrument and write pieces too complicated for me to play. With the aid of Jason Allen’s Composition classes on Musescore learn, I was able to write significantly better pieces such as “The Chase” and “Life”. At the start of term 1, I began work on a symphonic piece I called, “A Promise of Spaceflight”. After multiple days of work on it, I had finished the 5-minute-long piece. Later on, I modified “A Promise of Spaceflight” to be a fanfare for the competition.
Currently, I am playing a French horn in the Benowa State High School Concert band. I write pieces of music for fun and play them for my friends.
Composition inspiration
My fanfare, “Fanfare for a promise of spaceflight” is based off my older orchestral piece “A promise of spaceflight”. A promise of spaceflight tells the story of the Apollo program: from the fire on Apollo 1a to the complications aboard Apollo 13. My piece tells the story of the people at NASA trying to salvage what they can a maintain the promise of spaceflight.
To write “Fanfare for a promise of spaceflight”, I extracted the baseline and overlays from a part of “A promise of spaceflight”, that you can’t miss, and worked from there. The middle woodwind and trumpet part was inspired by a previous Artology fanfare and the timpani before the ending was inspired by “Fanfare for the Uncommon Women”. The ending was based off from some organ pieces played during American baseball. To create the building tone, I intentionally incorrectly transposed some chords and deconstructed them. The percussion and rhythm in the last 2 bars was inspired by A promise of spaceflight’s ending.