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Hi, that's a Elegy in memory of my grandmother. She died 29th October. Elegy String Quartet in Dm.mp3

I like the fact tho this thread raises so many fundamental questions about being a composer!

Maybe it's just me but this sounds very much in the line of japanese jrpg piano version soundtracks, like final fantasy's piano albums or saga frontier. I mean obviously this is a lot more involved, but I can't shake the feeling. Also, the fugue is neat and it reminds me of Shostakovich's fugues a lot. Really good job with the recording, it's very nice and I think it's why so many people are reacting so positively. It's Too bad there's no score to look at.

Why are you depending on one person's perspective to make yours valid/invalid though? You are just as much a person as Papercomposer. Its ok to be you, music is the most beautiful of all projections!

A beautiful work, thoroughly accomplished. Composed from the heart and to me attuned very well to its title. It would be difficult to highlight variations I particularly liked: the Rachmaninoff and Española. That brilliant fugue also had tints of Rachmaninoff and the Nocturne brought the last minutes of dusk in some warm place. I listened to the entire work straight through. Wonderful. May I ask what piano you're playing? A Bluthner?

I think one of the key things to look at is context. Someone can enjoy an extremely modern concert and have no foundation for enjoying that music. Why? Because it's high and mighty. It's a 'thing.' It's like having caviar. However if you played that music to someone out the blue, they may want to strangle you. A hollowed out coffee can may make great music for a film, depending on where you put it. Being the artist is about controlling the context. No matter the genre You have to understand where your listener is coming from, this might be deeper than you think. In other words someone may or may not listen to it just for pure life experience others education, others want to smoke weed to it, or it maybe just serves as a record for your own life experience.

I've come to realize that it's a linguistics matter more than anything else. It's like this: depending on the musical style/language you use, you can make use of devices that people have a common understanding of, so that you can pursue more complicated "meanings." This is obviously harder since you need to learn a musical vocabulary and be able to use it effectively. So, it's not about beautiful or not, none of that matters, to me it's basically either you write in a language people can read and interpret complexity, or you go into a variety of shades of compromise. In reality it's always a kind of compromise, but you can still play it extremely safe if you feel like it and just use very established idioms and be totally OK in that regard. Otherwise, if you write something that goes totally off the rails, it's fine, but it's a lot more direct as to what people can draw from it, often just simple emotional reactions save for the people who are also well versed in interpreting meaning out of otherwise random noise. And then it obviously isn't random noise anymore if you frame it within a structure, but that's pretty inconsequential all things considered. It goes without saying that this is all from the perspective of the would-be listener. I think it's OK to make that a focus too, but it's also OK to just do things for yourself and yourself alone. Sometimes seemingly "random noise" is just the thing you need to get out of an otherwise too-structured headspace that is bringing you nowhere. Just like you would switch painting styles to focus on different things, or sculpt different forms. It's not a black or white thing, but a sliding scale of priorities and values and you need to decide where you stand on it for each individual piece (or moment, even) when you write.