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It's interesting to study these dances, their rhythms, etc.... I wrote this just to learn. They don't follow the baroque rules about form or harmony. Some people ask me to write the chord names, so I leave them.

Hi. Probably it is all as you say, I can't remember.... I wanted to study this baroque forms and I read from many sources. The information you get is different and didn't find absolute terms. I tried to follow the rhythms and tempi supposed to use, but al last, I always do what I want at the moment of writing. I don't care much about how to call every piece of the suite, perhaps I had to name them as 1, 2, 3, etc... Because in "contemporary thinking" you take the essence or just a tangent feature of a form and from that point, you develop a different type music. If not, take a look at Schönberg's Mussete, from Op. 25.

Very well done, I also like the non-exact-repetition of sections. I'm curious about one thing... As a movie score composer (I think this has future) are you interested in contemporary systems that many famous composers are using? For example Bartók axis, cardinal points, etc...

Wow, is this a celesta? It always works fine in this environment. Nice and good you have a middle section different, even it's a short piece.

Nice! I didn't know you composed dances as well! It's cool to hear a more modern approach to these old dances. Even having composed quite a few of these myself - I am no expert as this is quite a wide field of study. Given that - I do have some points that you are free to ignore if you disagree with of course. I think the Courante as you have it ventures a bit too frequently into a 6/8 hemiola which makes it momentarily sound like it's a Gigue. That part of it just seemed out of character for a Courante. Also your Allemande to me sounded more like a Gavotte in tempo and general approach. As I understand it Allemande's are supposed to be a bit slower and have an anacursis of between 2 or 3 sixteenth-notes (although that's free to interpretation - the important thing to note is that in an Allemande sixteenth notes are expected to pass slowly enough that it would still sound dance-like). I don't know if I've ever heard a Musette as an independent dance like this - I thought it would usually appear as a section of another dance like the trio is a section of a minuet. When I search for Musette I get a Wikipedia article that says that Schoenberg composed a suite in which one of the movements was an independent Musette. I wrote a Musette once as part of my Gigue in Eb and the way I understood it there was that it was a contrasting section of a Gigue that was supposed to imitate the drone of bagpipes. I thought your Sarabande and Gigue were quite appropriate in manner and tempo. Nice job overall! I always enjoy listening to these quirky little specimens.

I personally would go with any of them except for the orchestration option which is really more of an pedantic exercise than a creative one.

All the woodwinds playing together in unison.

Minimalism is all about change by gradual transformation. Picture a minute or an hour hand on a clock. Whereas with most music (symbolised by the second hand) you easily perceive each change and development at almost every moment in time, minimalism is like that minute or hour hand - you really can't see it move if you concentrate on it, yet after a certain amount of time, you might find yourself realising that it moved from one point to the next by imperceptible gradual motion. Transformations in minimalist music can be thought of like this, and pieces in this genre strive for the essence of this whole "gradient" idea. So what you might want to do, is figure out what you'd like the beginning to be like, and what you'd like your end point to be like. Maybe they will be completely different, not just by chord name, but by motivic development, patterns, rhythms, sonorities, range, dynamic, layering of different elements, anything really. Then you take this beginning and end and paint a line from one to the other in music, gradually transforming until you've reached your goal. Whenever you think things might be getting old and boring, add something new, or begin another transformation, make it subtle, the listener will catch on and perceive it as a story that slowly progresses, yearning for a resolution. Some music goes from a start to an end, and back to the start again, creating a sort of journey to "far away lands". Some of it just goes through endless transformations in a free form, it all depends on what you want to do with it. It isn't necessarily that you have to make your material more interesting by adding to it, but that you transform it into something else. Why do you think Philip Glass used the word "Metamorphasis?" Also, when in doubt, go listen to some real minimalism, get inspired. Copy ideas - maybe you'll soon develop your own idea of what exactly minimalism should be. Hope this helps any. :)