Leaderboard

These are called prime forms and they denote a compact unit of intervallic relationships a melody or bassline uses, used in Schoenbergian analysis, and is helpful in determining the main motives of a piece, such as a theme and variations piece. My opinion is that a change in the theme should be deliberate and should contribute to the further elements of the piece rather than making a change only to return. The prime form, at least for the first motif should stay the same, though it can be manipulated in inversional or transpositional equivalence. I'm sure other people think that as long as some thing is noticeably similar, it should qualify as a valid variation, but in my opinion there needs to be something more to hold it together.

I don't think your main chord progression stays the same entirely to back up the variations. Your prime form of the variations changes as well... too often I think [0 3 5 7] vs. [0 1 3 4 6] in other variations, for example, measure 33. It's simple writing, and that's not necessarily a bad thing by any means, it just doesn't sound very concert-appropriate, if you know what I mean. It does tend to get a little less engaging as it goes along. I liked your pivot chords and chord progressions very much. They sounded quite fluid and led to other parts of the piece pretty well. Cheers!

Whoa, this is a little all over the place, which I guess makes sense considering the description. It never really got out of hand though, which is niceMaybe a more polyphonous section near the end to benefit? As a whole, it's quite nice. I can't see any major problems with the orchestration, except perhaps that I could see a lot more percussion being used, since there are indeed so many parts to the whole. Voice leading issues sometimes (first big theme) but again, nothing impossible. Cheers!

Hey cool! I found a couple of notational things; Measure 70: you notated violin 1 & 2 with different rhythmic values, but I think you intended them to be the same Measure 72: this is the only place I see you use the dotted eight note/sixteenth note rest to indicate the articulation you're after. It seems like everywhere else you used plain eighth notes with just the articulation markings--was this on purpose? Going along with what Luis said about the introduction, it's well constructed and executed but does seem repetitive. My question is what are you trying to accomplish with the repeats? For example, classical composers would immediately restate an idea with a minor variation (i.e. re-orchestrated, different dynamic level, etc.) to emphasize a point. With your repeats, though, nothing is changed so I feel like I'm covering the same ground twice as a listener. That's cool when I feel like I need another listen to digest an idea further, but here I feel like I'm following it pretty well. Beautiful work, keep it up! Gustav Johnson