This is my entry into Ryan Leach 's January ‘24 Composing Competition. As always thank you to Ryan for putting these on!

The very cool background image and inspiration for this composition is “Cyberpunk Love Story” by Hardy Fowler. I originally wanted to do a hybrid type score with synths and sound design and all that jazz, but after banging my head against it for quite a while nothing really “stuck”. In the end I abandoned ship on the hybrid idea and wrote the entire thing as a very traditional orchestral score (if you don’t look too closely at it anyway, ahem impossible harp pedaling, ahem).

In the image I saw two people exploring a budding romance on the busy streets of a futuristic city, it felt like a very positive image to me so I wanted to steer clear of anything dark-and-broody. Instead I hope to convey a sense of happy yearning, with essentially meandering but peaceful melody lines (mostly violins and horns) to convey the sense of calm-amidst-the-bustle. The city is represented by motion (mostly woodwind trills and trems and overlaid staccato pulses in bassoon + low strings). At least that was the idea! Hope you enjoy it, feedback and comments are very welcome! Happy early Valentine’s day lovebirds.