Philosphy

We don't want to sound like elevator music. Listen to the London Punkharmonic's Symphony for Destruction (don't buy it for God's sake) and think to yourself "God they've destroyed these pieces. I can do better than that".

Style

This pretty much holds as it was before. Do not take dissonance or wrong notes out, unless you are doing a stylized
piece and it is appropriate. Try to capture the spirit of the piece. We are not going for elevator music, we are going for
punk. If you are doing a stylized piece (a piece that could be describe using the words “in the style of” such as “in the
baroque style or in the style of Phillip Glass”) then run it past David and John first. We have approved punk version of classical songs, classical songs with new punk lyrics or even old punk lyrics, and madrigals using punk themes. We don't want to go too Peter Schickley, so do get input first

Good Arranging/Bad Arranging

We used to be just thankful anyone gave us a song. Those days are gone. We now expect all the normal things that make up a good arrangement: dynamics, color, articulation instructions, and all things that make a piece easy to read and play. Don't create extract a part longer than 3 pages- they don't fit on a music stand. Try to put page breaks in reasonable places. Don't make confusing measure hops. Don't add extra measures at the beginning of a piece to account for a spoken intro. Get the pickup measures right. Make it easy for us.

Original Material

Yes we want original material, preferably with lyrics. Here's what we want

• Piece should be 3 minutes long or less.
  
• The instrumentation is up to the discretion of the composer. Since the Punk Rock Orchestra is going to perform the piece, only instruments represented by the ensemble should be chosen unless some other arrangement is made. However, the composer is not required to use the whole orchestra.
  
• The piece must, in some way, borrow from punk rock music, be it in rhythm, melody, harmony, theme or some other way so that, once complete, the piece should be obviously categorizable as a piece in the punk or classical style, as opposed to being a piece of some other musical genre.
  
• The piece must not violate copyright law. Leitmotifs from other punk rock songs may be used as long as they do not constitute a breach of copyright law. While the piece can quote other punk rock pieces, the composer should avoid writing something that consists entirely of quotes of other songs.
  
• The piece should refer to forms of classical music or to other classical composers.
• The piece should not refer forms of music not recognized as being part of punk or the punk culture (for example, most references to rap music or jazz would be in appropriate).
  
• The piece should, in some way, be melodic in the same way that punk music relies on melody (in other words the passages of melody can be dissonant, harmonic, or even yelled or spoken without a discernable tone).
  
• The piece need not be in a particular mode or scale, though the scale or mode should be appropriate to punk rock genre.
  
  

Please contact John at: john@gluck.net
Please contact David at (415) 235-4382