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I tried combining Hans Zimmer's style with Sawano Hiroyuki's for this one. The theme surrounds itself around battling an Efreet (or Ifrit), i.e. an evil spirit. This is, for now, still a work in progress I'm stuck on unfortunately. But please let me know what you guys think of it :) EDIT: It's finished!

This is a Christmas carol for SATB chorus, based on William Shakespeare's poem "Song of the Holly"

Ludeart, I listen to your music all the time but I never give my own review on it since your expertise is levels higher than mine. I did enjoy listening to this very much.

Golems is perfect. Really nice sound that honors the title. Dragoons is fine and I like the guitar intro...but the guitar after the intro felt a bit disconnected but the feeling didn't last. Once it turned around, every felt good again. Victory is fine but it's a little tough to tell if it's a victory theme when it starts. But as it goes on it begins to click so I like it. Good job! Not sure why your friend said it was lame and isn't "real" music, not sure why he would say that but I think what you have here is great.

Ah ok then, well nicely done.

Golem is great. Dragoon is fine, but a bit disorienting when the first guitar solo comes up. The last segment is a real change of mood, like the player has some time to breathe. Victory sounds exactly like one expects it to sound, with brass and so forth. One doesn’t recognize the reference immediately, but I don’t think that’s a problem. Your friends should be happy to have such a soundtrack composer in their ranks.

It is very good how you develop and reuse some ideas and motives, like the quick semiquaver figure or the rising quaver - semiquaver figure. The form is surprising for a classical minuet, even given that minuets can be structured in a lot of different ways. Though there are minuets with two trios (e.g. Schubert D335, Haydn Hob. I:51, Mozart KV 563), they typically are structured like a rondo: Minuet - Trio I - Minuet da capo - Trio II - Minuet da capo - (Coda). The MP3 omits several repetitions, which is fine with me, but I would urge you to listen to it with all intended repetitions and then judge if there are too many thematic déjà-vus across the parts of the minuet or not. Perhaps you could make the Trios more contrasting, e.g. by a surprising modulation (to a major key?), thinner texture (perhaps making a literal trio out of it with changes in who constitutes the trio), or getting more mileage out of some of your ideas, that is for instance concentrating on developing m. 22ff. in a trio part more thoroughly. You reuse it, but I think you could make more out of it. I am no violinist, so I have no idea if the changes of arco to pizzicato and back are always workeable. I find the end of the phrase in m. 2-6 mildly irritating. You use the melodic minor scale with the sharpened leading tone, but end the phrase on it. Thus it sounds like a modulation to B Major, not like a half cadence. This can be a feature or a bug, depending on your intentions. I am impressed by your use of imitations to make music livelier, the texture richer and also how you really work with all parts. This is no "violin + cello" duo with filler parts; instead, all of them have interesting passages to play. Thanks for sharing your minuet which surely was a lot of work to write and is very interesting to listen to.