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Hey, I wanted to share this with all you. I tried to narrate a science fiction story through very unconventional music. I'm not sure if this is absolutely awful or okay, but I know very well it took me a ton of work. (You have a small analysis in the description of the video) I appreciate any feedback. I'm still new with electronic music, I did the whole piece using Audacity and only that.

But if you constantly try to reinvent the wheel while you are starting out as a composer, how do you actually learn to use the basic tools in the composer's toolkit? Everything in life is a process of slow evolution, with each new discovery standing on the shoulders of the ones that came before. You have to sound like a Debussy for a while, (and what an accomplishment that would be), before you can be the heir to Debussy's writing, with something new and individual to say. I really like this. It's a solid foundation to build on. I think adding some grace notes to the left hand might add something interesting. This piece has a really strong "system" to it: everything feels like it belongs to the piece. Which means finding a way to add a surprise or two, that still fits into the sound world, could add some richness if that was something you were interested in playing with. Nice one!

Ooh! I love this! Sorry to be so late to the commenting party, but I seem to have missed this one when you first posted it. The transition at measure 9 is particularly fun, and I like the variety that the syncopated texture in the left hand adds at measure 14. If it was my piece, I would have added some more of that character to the second half of the piece, maybe with even more exaggerated long and short rhythms, but the whole thing is great and sounds like it would be a lot of fun to play!

Seeing this come back up in discussion gave me a nudge to listen, so I did. This is a very entertaining piece. You’ve clearly got the late Romantic style nailed, and the orchestration is on point. If it were performed live, you (and the soloist) would get an ovation. It’s just what audiences would expect a violin concerto to be. But you said you wanted critical comments, so here you go: The piece sounds (except for a couple of spots) like it was written 110 to 140 years ago. I’m all for embracing music of prior eras, being influenced by many styles, building on what’s come before, etc.; but I have to wonder, why put all that effort into creating a full-scale major work that lives a century and a half in the past? As an artist, don’t you want to speak to your own time, and from your own life? It’s a little like if I said I was going to write stories just like Mark Twain did about life on the Mississippi in the 1800s. People would say, “Why? Twain already did that, and he was actually there.” We’ve got late-Romantic violin concertos written by people who lived in that era. What’s the value of an imitation, except as a curiosity or a commodity? Given that you’re choosing to take a 19th century European viewpoint, using a blues-like element in the 2nd movement raises a lot of questions. At that time, the roots of blues would have been found in the U.S. among Black communities mostly in extreme poverty. Your music isn’t that, instead it’s a highly gentrified kind of blues that might have been popular among upper-crust American audiences in the 1950s, but in the 2020s is socially tone-deaf. And using it, as you do, as a diversion (“Setting off into the countryside”) that is then tossed away feels like, “Oh, it was so pleasant to visit that plantation; but of course we’re far more sophisticated than that.” It’s an antiquated attitude that’s out of place now. The “quintic” bits in the last movement make me sad. Even though I love this kind of harmonic language, and your episodes are nice taken by themselves, they just don’t work in the context of your 19th century world. I know you commented above that you intended it to be “jarring”, but I don’t buy that. It’s like a John Constable landscape with an Andy Warhol soup can in the middle of it. The whole is less than the sum of its parts. You’ve clearly got the skills to write music of the present — whatever you define that to be — rather than longing for “good old days” that never were. I’d really encourage you to do that. Oh… one more thing. The title page of your score. I hope it’s intended as tongue-in-cheek because otherwise it’s really, really pretentious.