Between complex and simple??

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What, you didn't like the handbells??? lol

j/k

Thanks, I'm glad you liked it! I need to finish up my work on that series, but I keep getting interrupted by other projects. The weather has been really unkind, so I've only used that synth once in the last two months and even then it was only for a much-needed late-night practice session [ashamed ].

Nope.

Unneccessary= "it doesn't add anything to the musical content".
Technique for techniques sake: "Look at me, I can write a 6-voiced fugue, even though I could express my ideas more simply".

My composition teacher always said "less is more." He studied electronic composition back in the Buchla-synth-and-tape era and kept an Electro-comp in his classroom. He pointed out to me that Bach and Bartok didn't really exceed 4 voices, at least not very often, and his earliest experiments with tape usually fell apart after layering four parts. Even in good orchestral writing you don't really have many more layers than that. Wind instruments are layered over strings in one of a few different ways: as solo instruments, as accompanying instruments, or as doubling instruments, and mostly what you get is some sort of homophony. Even if you get into Schoenberg and Webern's work, the use of klangfarbenmelodie treats the ensemble as one or two voices, largely obscured through heavy use of hockets. The scores appear complicated, but the actual realization is remarkably and beautifully simple. Consider:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKD_tZr-ZpY[/youtube]