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I had a creativity outburst at the beginning of the pandemic, and wrote many pieces. In this it's a fanfare following a late-Romantic, slightly cinematic aesthetic, reminiscent of Korngold and Richard Strauss. When I posted this piece in another place, a player of the Sophia's Vereeniging symphonic band of the Netherlands asked me if they could play the piece, and I said that of course. There've been some rehearsals, but they had to be postponed after yet another spike in Coronavirus cases. The score can be seen here: https://albertdelaf.com/op13_en/

Good evening everyone, I had the good fortune of having my piano tuned for the first time in well over a year a couple of days ago. I'd almost forgotten how nice it could sound and feel! Anyways, given the wild hot/cold weather we've been having here it'll probably only last a week before keys start sticking and the action starts creaking again, so I thought I'd better take advantage of this little window of piano bliss. Here's a link to a collection of five piano character pieces. Written in late 2019, it's my most recent work, and actually the only thing I've written in the past four years or so. As one would expect from the title, these are melody-oriented and not formally complex. Hope you enjoy!

Oh! And this is such a small thing on the score, but it makes a world of difference musically: where are the dynamics? I think they could do a lot to bring out the form and phrase structure of what you've already written!

Hi! I agree that it works well in terms of harmony, form, etc. Bonus points for achieving such interesting harmonies with almost no divisi and relatively singable voice-leading (just a couple awkward leaps in there that might be asking for trouble, but mostly good). The harmony seemed to lose a little focus at the end (maybe that was deliberate?) but apart from that, the harmony flowed well and created a nice form. The main thing that bothered me was how the words flow (or don't flow) with the music. If you sing through every part (which, simple as it is, is the best advice I ever got about writing for choir--you don't even have to be a good singer!), are there spots where the melody doesn't really match the emphasis and inflections of the words? There are a few moments where the word stress seemed unnatural to me ("let THE earth" in the tenors; "na-TU-ral-ly", "pla-NET", etc.) I tend to agree with aMusicComposer about the bass low Es. Since you'll generally have the baritones as well as basses on that part, it's a good rule of thumb to add an upper divisi part whenever you go below a G or so. While (in theory) it's true that a good choir tunes to the basses, they'd only be able to fudge the tuning a small fraction of a semitone without throwing the whole progression off, and sometimes (like at the beginning, where the sopranos are already holding an E when the basses come in) that's not even an option. Lastly, if you do manage to get this in front of singers, I hope you follow Pateceramics's advice on text notation in your original post of this piece. It will make the words, and the way they line up with the notes, much easier and faster for them to read, and they won't waste time trying to figure out what you meant by "a-nd", "spro-ut", etc. 🙂