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Here my new Choral work for voice, strings and organ. It has no lyrics yet, but it definitely has to be for some religious purpose. I think it is a very solemn, optimistic and bright piece. Any comments are wellcome (I also appreciate suggestions for the lyrics 🙂).

Okay, here's my take on score improvements. To start with, it's generally wise to indicate whether the score is CONCERT or TRANSPOSED. You can put this in the top left corner of the score. (Yours appears to be transposed.) I notice in measure 1 you have a poco cresc that appears to crescendo to "pp" from "pp." If the dynamic is a sudden departure from what's expected, you should probably notate "pp sub" or "subito pp" or something like that. This lets the players know that the dynamic is different from what they were previously playing. I'd be careful using simile in the era of copy and paste. Handwritten scores and manual typesetting is one thing, but it's less ambiguous to simply write out what you mean rather than use the simile shortcut—and it's very fast and easy to do nowadays. It's nice if the bar numbers are notated below every bar. If I were a conductor, I don't want to have to count 4 bars from measure 15. It'd be much easier if I could just look immediately below and find the bar number. In a similar vein, you don't have to hide unused staves. It's far easier to follow along with a score if the instruments appear in the same line of sight on each page, even if some instruments don't play for several more pages. You might split the horns out into 2 staves the whole time. Measure 36 begins an arco passage immediately preceded by a pizz passage in the celli. I question how feasible that is. No need to write solo (as in m. 42). Just indicate which part is playing using the appropriate number. In some cases, like in m. 52, you indicate which part plays what even when there are only 2 parts in the stave and two notes are being played. You should omit the parts' numbers altogether as it's understood which part plays what. Which brings me to another point. Even on the instrument short names, it's good practice to indicate which parts are assigned to the stave. See below as an example. Don't use dangling hairpins/cresc./decresc. Make sure to put a dynamic at the end of each one, unless you use a descriptor word like molto cresc. or poco cresc. You can get away with that, even though it's still not a bad idea to punctuate it with a dynamic marking. Rapid notes in percussion (timpani rolls, triangle rolls, etc.) are now indicated with tremolos and not with trills. Well, I think that's enough for now. Remember, these are just tips to help make your score more user friendly. As far as I know, there isn't an MLA format (so to speak) for score arranging, so I would evaluate each of these on a common sense basis to see if they truly work for you and what you're going for.

Degrees are essentially worthless; especially in a time where more people than ever before have them. If everyone has a degree, no one cares. The fact is also that if you start taking this stuff seriously when you're a teenager, you'll honestly know more than many college graduates and stuff will simply because you've been learning for way longer than many of them. I passed the entrance exams; theory, performance, all of it for my college despite having been almost totally self-taught up until then. I wound up turning them down because I didn't feel like being 10k in debt and the first year of the program was studying stuff I JUST PROVED I already knew! Then there's the fact that the arts (and post-secondary education in general) are totally corrupt.

Is this your first attempt at a work for piano and orchestra? I wish you would have picked more original melodic material and not tried to fit into any particular form - I'm sure the result would have been a lot more interesting. I feel like sometimes composers forget that their inexperience can be their strength.

Amazing! You got quite a lot of people to participate! I used to try and organize 'chain-composition' sessions on another composition website a while ago and never got so many submissions. I figured out later that I was pretty much content to just write variations on my own (or sometimes other peoples) themes. Has anybody ever held an orchestration-athon here?

More of a joke than a minuet

Hi Dirk! I like how you use small chamber groups of instruments at a time. You save the tutti for the exclamations to your phrases which is very effective.