Deathstorm For Wind Ensemble | Michael Barry (2023)

Score and Parts are available for purchase at murphymusicpress.com.
Score only is available at www.michaelbarrycomposer.com
This work has been performed before but I cannot seem to find the recording of it, so this demo is an enhanced Finale playback. Unfortunately, I cannot locate the last 3rd of the demo, so it ends abruptly about 2/3rds of the way through.
Initially, this was a cinematic composition that I ported over to wind ensemble and expanded upon. The work draws primarily from cinematic influences of three of my favorite film scores (Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, Star Trek VI, and Predator). I don't think you will find a film composer who doesn't love the score to Predator. I used to think Star Trek VI was brilliant, but then I discovered how heavily it relies upon the 10th of Shostakovich.
As you can see above, this work is for a particularly large ensemble. Still, I don't think there would be any significant loss if some of the parts are left out (for example, the Eb Contralto Clarinet or Bb Contrabass Clarinet or Piano, etc.... As with all my works, I rely upon the ensemble leader to decide these things, and hopefully, I've successfully composed the work to support this line of thinking.
This was the third work I composed for the genre, and it remains the first work that I didn't fully orchestrate myself; some talented soul at JoAnn Kane Music put the finishing touches on my hand-written 8-line sketch score. Until the last few years, I've always been searching a better method of composition, and writing by hand was an attempt that I quickly abandoned after this work. I've since found that I write best, and most efficiently, just by working directly into the full score of
Sibelius. (2023)