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The October Competition: Halloween Contest! Composing from October 5-October 25th. Judging from October 25th-October30th. Winner announced on October 31st and featured on the Radio. :D The Premise: Composers will write a Halloween themed piece in a CLASSICAL form. Sonata-Allegro (in a minor key). Toccata and Fugue was popular for making dramatic sounds that we NOW use as Horror-style scores. It should be for SOLO KEYBOARD INSTRUMENT. Piano. Harpsichord. Organ. All available to you. IF you are feeling adventurous, I will also allow the use of an auxiliary instrument as a solo line. Maybe a bass clarinet, trumpet, whatever you want. But, I feel like that would be harder to do with some classical forms. If you have a question about whether something is a classical form (I mean from the 1700s (Late Baroque) - late 1800s (Romantic)). But many forms were solidified and became obsolete in the 20th century. They have become novelty, but they have also become VERY cool! I was going to have a fugue competition, but I didn't want to force people to learn HOW to write a fugue. While it's not terribly difficult, it requires a week or so of research if you aren't familiar with the style. Scoring Classical Form? x/10 Idiomatic use of Keyboard instrument? x/25 Musical content? (is is based on a theme that could be considered halloweeny? Is the music developed well? Good arc?) x/25 Score!!! And, NEAT score!!! x/15 Paragraph doing a DETAILED analysis of your piece: x/25 You will be presenting a theoretical paper on your piece as well. One page (double spaced) of all the ideas you used and how you treated them. This will help the judges understand how you treated the compositional process and can help you to better your process by suggesting different methods. Judges: Me. 2. 3. Participants: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

Hi all! Challenges is something new I am trying to stimulate activity here and also to stimulate the composers' minds around here. You can now start your OWN topics in this forum. And, members can create Challenges, which are anything from mini-competitions to simple time-based things. To start a challenge, here are the steps: Make a thread titled: "Challenge: ______" insert a subject you want to call your challenge. In the thread itself, describe the challenge and if there will be a deadline to complete it. Post it. Examples of different types of challenges: Compose a piece based off of this melody/motif. Compose a fugue based on this subject. Write something for paper clip and soprano. Set this text to homophonic choir texture. Write a string piece using only natural harmonics. Write a baroque suite, learn the dances, and post a video of you dancing to your suites. Write a piece using ONLY this melodic idea. Write a piece using all chromatic tones in every voice. Take your favorite pop song and arrange it for classical singer and piano. Write a piece in under 60 minutes! See what happens. etc. The idea is to come up with little creative exercises for composers to think outside of the box. Yeah? They can be any length, any instrumentation, there are NO rules to this. if nobody wants to participate because you've made a challenge too difficult, that's YOUR problem and you should revamp your challenge to be more accessible. Ask questions below. :)

Thing is that starting around the time of Mozart the definition of toccata was standardised to refer to a specific kind of virtuoso solo piece (almost always for keyboard), usually characterised by perpetual motion, fast tempi and brilliant effects. Bach's multipartite toccatas were translated into fantasies of which there are a number of examples that seem to be directly inspired—Beethoven's Fantasy Op. 77 for instance, or Schubert's Wanderer-Fantasie (which even ends with a fugue, like all the Bach toccatas save the D minor one). Limiting yourself only to pieces called "toccata" (mind you there are plenty of those) will leave out the direct descendants of Bach's multipartite toccatas, which present a direct line from Mozart's infamous Fantasy KV 397 (385g) to Liszt's Sonata in B Minor.

This looks fun. October + Halloween + Classical? :D my favourites! I might consider this if I have time.

I read this and the first thing i thought of was this

It's glad to know I'm not the only one out here. Something loving horrible must have happened to this site really fast if suddenly people can start mindlessly prattling on about the "infinite" with ridiculously pretentious (not bad, just stomach-churningly, unrepentantly awful) grammar and sad metaphysical references and massively inflating their egos (ooh, look, I am a prodigy) and receive the sort of kneejerk support that seems to be accumulating here. Have we really become so sad and wishy-washy? Has no-one actually ever read Marzique's profile? To Marzique: I'm not sure how good a composer you are. Your ideas are grandiose but marginally interesting. Whatever the case may be, you are a lousy human being with an ego that's frankly unbelievable. You claim to be a composer of "genius" (I hope the fact that English is not your first language does not exonerate you. Certainly you ought to be familiar with the meaning of such grossly hyperbolic terms if you bandy them about with such ease), but I have yet to see any evidence of it. I read a couple of your reviews recently and you seemed to be sobering up (and not stupidly liking your own comments like you used to), but apparently that has not been the case. Sarastro, ffs, what utter bollocks. If I can't see any external coherence I see not reason to believe it is internally coherent (an interesting synonym for "meaningless"). Shockingly, the purpose of language is communicative, not obfuscative.