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I'm just looking to tap into your opinions to broaden by musical tastes and experience. 1. Who are your top 3 composers of all time? Provide one example of their work you feel embodies their greatness to you, a link is even better. 2. Who is one composer you feel is incredibly underrated? Likewise provide one example of their work and if possible a link. 3. Who is one composer you feel is terribly overrated and why? 4. What original piece of yours do you think is your best work? Provide a link and I will listen to it (no longer than 10 minutes) and comment on it (I guarantee this for the first 5 responses then will try to listen/comment on others as my time permits). Thanks.

A melancholic violin tune! Suggestions and critique are welcome!

The church didn't even allow instruments, just singing, for centuries as well as limited intervals (no tritones) because it was seen as something that peasants who danced were into and dancing is a "pagan" thing. Also, there is reason to believe that counterpoint was also present in folk music of the time as well. We don't really know since they didn't have a system of notation back then, but I am willing to be many of the peasant musicians would have had an understanding closer to what we know today than much of the church did at the time, simply because they'd have had more possibilities and experimentation with instruments. It was mostly-secular music theorists, some who weren't even particularly successful in their work as musicians, who wrote things like the Traité de l'harmonie réduite à ses principes naturels which were revolutionary texts in music that were adopted by literally everyone.

It's a subject that should interest us all on this site, even "starving musicians" because, you never know, they might just come up with something steal-able! I don't trust anything once it's on the web either even if it seems it can't be downloaded. Any music can be downloaded if your computer/phone has a earphone socket. However, I'm in the UK. You don't say in your profile where you live so the following is general about copyright and applies to the UK and associated Performing Rights societies elsewhere. https://www.prsformusic.com/works/how-copyright-works Know for a start that you always own the copyright unless you sell it or give it away (which should be supported by documentation). The question is what protection do you have? So I'm with PRS. I do what the first paragraph suggests - mail a copy of the file (for me, a score of sorts and a recording) to myself special delivery. Then I register the work with the Society for such protection as it offers. The fee is a one-off £100. Unless you're about to get a broadcast or recording offer, it's probably enough to send yourself a copy of your work making sure it bears your name and a timestamp of some kind. This is ultimate legal proof. But on no account open it. Keep it safe. It's meant for opening under the eye of a court if that ever proves necessary. If you're in the UK there's useful stuff on the site including the gubbins on Copyright Law. = = = = I had a look at the site you mentioned but couldn't make much sense of it. It seemed to be telling me more about what its hopes are and what it does for itself than how it protects your music. I couldn't see if a membership fee was needed. Looking at the licence itself : https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ it doesn't seem to offer the sort of protection I'd look for but I've only glanced through the site. I couldn't find where to join or register your work. You may need different arrangements for different works. As I say, it's probably enough to post your music to yourself now; and make sure whenever you load it onto the web that you set the permissions. Best of luck.

I really like the harmony in this piece. Using modal mixture feels very fresh and unique. My favourite part is m9-14. I think it conveys nocturne for me very well. m8 & m38-39 feel too surprising to me. I think they detract from the mood that you carefully built up. I'd feel more comfortable with these if they were developed more in later/earlier sections. I like that m8's idea reappears in m23-24, but they feel too far apart. Overall I like it, hearing this after midnight really got me in the mood 🙂

Well of course. I don't think anyone denies that. Here's a sample from one of my favorite albums of the last 10 years I would not really describe this song as "beautiful" but I do think "epic', "haunting", "dark" and "menacing". However, it is also still good. The chorus melody is pretty catchy and soaring, the screamed parts aren't just unintelligible noise but as well carry a melody. The switching to half time in certain parts was tastefully done, the guitar solos are great and well-played with a slight neo-classical vibe, the build up into them is good, and the production is pretty good as far as metal usually goes and the way the solo leads back into the main riff was well done. It's a pretty smooth arrangement. The phrasing is solid, the structure, and the contrast of sections works nicely. It's absolutely a great aesthetic if you're going for dark and brutal whilst still sounding like actual music. I now would invite you to listen to Mayhem and tell me if you feel it is as good as the previous example as extreme music goes. I would say the mayhem example barely sounds even like music. The production is also completely atrocious. This is where I will say that I feel the two schools of thought are tradition and modern. The former is the idea that music should be able to stand on its own as something great and inspiring. Regardless of genre or mood, there is a specific craft that applies just the same. If one has a solid mastery of that craft, then they can almost always compose something which is enjoyable to listen to for MOST people. If the composer is a real aesthete, with a refined sense of detail and style and really knows how to play with expectations and such; that's what separates the "great" composers from the merely "good" composers. One cannot be great unless they were first good, though. This is the school of thought that I belong to. The second school of thought, the modern one, is about abstract conceptualism. It is the idea that someone would listen to this piece and say that it is "bad' because it "has nothing to say", allegedly. The fact that it has very slick production, is performed well, has a catchy melody and rhythm and beautiful female voice, with winds that mimic birds as a neat touch, easy and fun to dance too, makes good use of medieval instruments, the entire album has a very vibrant and uplifting aesthetic and that it has over 70m plays on this video alone and basically embodies a lot of what humans find enjoyable about music in general — is all irrelevant because it is essentially mere "pop" music. All of these are "subjective" things, all of these things that are actually musical, are unimportant compared to some sort of arbitrary social commentary the critic feels is important and can "allegedly" be conveyed through music. It simply reduces music to literature. You could just write out what the music "says" and how this supposedly makes it good rather than subjecting people to noise. Put some social justice narrative on it for the ultimate highscore. The fact that everyone down to your 90-year-old Grandma loves Enter Sandman and it's one of the few songs where the audience will actually sing the guitar riff back to you doesn't ACTUALLY mean Enter Sandman is a better piece than my piece which consists of nothing but an ambient drone on a didgeridoo for four and a half minutes because I've slapped some sort of message on it. This school would say Enter Sandman is just "sh*tty pop music enjoyed by anti-intellectual rubes and working class rednecks" BUT if Metallica played Enter Sandman with Rob and Kirk, men of color, tuning their instruments completely different from James as a protest to "decolonize" heavy metal — what would sound like absolute garbage to every normal person on Earth would get standing ovations and orgasms around the auditorium full of University professors because "it's such a powerful message! THIS is the definitive version of Enter Sandman!" They would then proceed to brow beat anyone who thought that Enter Sandman sounded better when all of the instruments were in tune. It's this sort of subversive philosophy which drives the likes of Schoenberg, who literally sought to subvert the long-standing tradition of scales because he felt it was essentially discrimination against the other pitches of the chromatic scale...it's actually incredible that he and his school were able to sell this idea as a thing that is actually possible to any number of people. It is this sort of school which is talking about removing SHEET MUSIC from post-secondary music studies ffs. https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/oxford-might-scrap-sheet-music-amid-pressure-address-white-hegemony-report So yeah. I don't think a third school exists. You're either making music because you want to make great music or because you want to destroy western traditions and artistic standards or else what are you even doing?