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Hello all, hope you're all well. I haven't posted anything for quite some time but I kept working on my 2nd Piano Concerto and I'm happy to say that it's finally ready! It's dedicated to Ruben, the most wonderful cat who died this week from cancer but who gave us 10 great years, I love you Ruben. The Concerto is in 3 movements, I hope you'll find time to listen to them all, it's just over 21 minutes in all. I don't really like to impose my views or thoughts about I feel about it or what it might represent, I prefer to leave that up the individual but needless to say I'm very pleased with it. I hope you like it, and please feel free to leave a comment, I'd love to know what you think. The links are to my sound cloud page, hope they work ok. Love to you all Mark. https://soundcloud.com/user-729021187/piano-concerto-no2-in-bb-minor-1st-movt?utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing https://soundcloud.com/user-729021187/piano-concerto-no2-in-bb-minor-2nd-movt?utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing https://soundcloud.com/user-729021187/piano-concerto-no2-in-bb-minor-3rd-movt?utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing Hello again, Just a quick addition. I know some of you like to see the score so I have uploaded them here. My process is quite messy, there are lots of mistakes, improperly divided notes and badly tied notes, wrongly spelled enharmonics etc., etc., plus there are various artifacts that are necessary for NotePerfomer to play it correctly. I just hope that anyone wishing to see the score can follow my intentions rather than what is sometimes actually written. If I thought there was ever any chance that someone might actually want to perform it, then I would take the time to produce a performance score, but I hope you will forgive my not taking the time to do it right now. Thanks again and I hope you enjoy it. Mark https://www.dropbox.com/s/vm7nud7lcyys8ym/Piano Concerto No.2 in Bb minor 1st Movt adjusted score. - Full Score.pdf?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/r6o298nfgb2cl3p/Piano Concerto No.2 in Bb minor 2nd Movt. adjusted score - Full Score.pdf?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/ahoabrlurrhlpfg/Piano Concerto No.2 in Bb minor 3rd Movt. adjusted score - Full Score.pdf?dl=0 I made a mistake when exporting the scores and they came out nearly unreadable. I have since made much clearer copies should anyone wish to see them and the links above are now to the wholey more ledgable copies.

In light of a recent thread, how about we keep beating that dead horse some more. Maybe instead of rotten horse meat we'll get candy this time (gotta stay positive.)

Four fugues and 3 preludes (or whatever these can be called.) The counterpoint and style is mostly quite free, I took a lot of liberties with harmonies and voice leading if I thought it was interesting, so there's inevitably going to be parallel motion, but I think I'd rather take that than make it bland. It's been quite a long time since I've written this kind of music so it was really refreshing to go back to "my roots" and have fun with it. As for technical matters, the subjects for the fugues, save for the first one, are strange on purpose. Specially C minor and the second double fugue subject in the D minor fugue. I mean, they're workable, but I'm constantly harmonizing "against" the subjects, so this leads to some pretty fun moments like a subject that's supposed to be in G minor tonic being harmonized in Ebmajor, stuff like that. It was pretty challenging to get all of this done and stay somewhat inside the style of instrumental counterpoint that I like. The double fugue in D was hard to write and it went on for longer than I had anticipated, even after cutting all the fat. If there's something I realized when writing these things is that I have very little tolerance for sequencing that is there for the purpose of padding out the runtime of the piece. So I try to never sequence anything more than 3 times, and I will vary the amount between 3 and 2 depending on context. It's one of the trappings on the style and I understand better now a lot of composers that worked in this style post-baroque times, specially within the context of a sonata's development episode vs the way sequencing is used in a fugue. Combining both things is very difficult from both a conceptual and technical point of view. In fact, I grouped these fugues together (I wrote them in sequence within the span of 2 weeks or so) and in the end I feel this is also sort of, kind of, like a sonata. Even if there's no "sonata form" in these, but then, I get the feeling that the DNA of the thing is more leaning in that direction than something like Bach. I purposely avoided reusing countersubjects when I could help it, too, as to give myself more freedom to write whatever was more appropriate within the context of that moment, but that also has the unintended side effect that the whole thing feels a lot more complex than it really is (certainly felt that way when I was writing it.) I get the feeling that a lot of the typical baroque counterpoint conventions and traditions end up being shortcuts to pad out time, so I kind of didn't want to use them. If anything was too "automatic" I would cut it and rewrite, and I did this the entire time when writing. I have no idea if that's something audible, but well there you go. As for the score, it's not completed yet. All the music is there, but I need registration markings and a bunch of other things that I'm not going to write until meet up with the person who will be performing these, so we can work out the details together at an actual organ. It's easier that way. Edit: Guhhh, fixed IV's key signature to something sane. oops. 01-fugue in e.mp3 02-fugue in h.mp3 03-fugue in c.mp3 04-fugue in d.mp3

[Second attempt at posting this, apologies if it appears twice.] Basically I agree with SSC, so I won't repeat what's already been said. If (and I know this is a big "if"), you are willing to consider major revisions, I'd have two suggestions for where to focus: 1. Look for more places to open up the texture. You've got a particular view of the piano as a percussive instrument, and of the soloist as an intensely busy individual. Contrasting this intensity against the orchestra, rather than replicating it, is potentially a way of getting a deeper message across. 2. Reconsider the endings of the movements. They don't give a satisfying sense of summation, completion, or arrival. (This is a problem with form, as SSC pointed out.)

"It sounds great" Is this not like arguably the whole point of music?

@AngelCityOutlaw I don't know why you hate on Mahler so. I mean I know he's got many movements of symphonies and such that are overblown and bombastic, but when I think of Mahler I admire mostly some of my favorite scherzos and the Symphony No. 5 Adagietto which is just the purest expression of love in music that one could find. And the Adagio from his Symphony No. 10 is just so mysterious and lucid. It's mostly all very accessible music it seems except for those aforementioned pompous and bombastic movements that I always skip, although I'm sure you could find your given equivalent of those in the music of Richard Strauss.

No. 1: Nice short theme, I can almost smell the ridiculously oversized wig on the performer's head. The stretta in MM. 64 ff. is also nicely prepared. I really like how you insert free-flowing toccata sections. No. 2: What a strange introduction, reminds me of Mozart's "Dissonanzenquartett". The slower tempo has an air of Bach's pastorale for organ. No. 3: Starts rather conventional as well, but quickly takes a turn to something different. Great cadence into the Ebmaj7 in M. 18 and the picardy third on the tonic minor in M. 20 gets the sweet plagal minor cadence sound from the fa-mi and lo-so. MM. 25 ff. on the other hand have an infectious rhythm. The Cm sixte-ajoutèe and the fdim7 leading into a surprising Amaj7 are a nice touch(Haydn did something similiar once in a quartet). No. 4: Right of the bat, this sounds like the funky lovechild of Buxtehude and Stevie Wonder(in a good way). Those sweet jazzy chords and progressions: dimmaj7(M. 30), Maj7(M. 4)...MM. 9-12 are just pure voice leading, held together by the C# over a 9b2(as the third), 7#4(as the augmented fourth), m7b5(as the fourth) and a lush lydian augmented chord. M. 29 really tricked me into thinking you would give us a minor plagal cadence. By comparison, the fugue is rather tame. Nice how you let the introductory sections reappear in MM. 106 ff. and MM. 153 ff. respectively. Seldom can I brace myself for such a large-scale work, but I actually listened to your entire opus and read along. This is such a smooth marriage of fugue and toccata, truly a marvellous work, combined with anachronistically different pre-/interludes. Have you met with the organist yet?

These traditionalist types like ACO are always full of hate and rage these days, beneath a classy outlook. Their hating is, for them, of course always only the fault of the (post)modernist and the modern world. It's funny because this use of hate and ressentiment was once the thing the left used to build their power, it wasn't a conservative thing at all. I guess the thymos can be cultivated but these traditionalist types aren't much of an example of how to do it well.

Okay, it's obvious that despite your Sam Hyde meme you sent me, you don't really have much experience with what's going on out there. You'd have to be on the spectrum to suggest that the plethora of good music that was written back then is a taste which must be "acquired" rather than just listen to the piece and have people be like "this is a good piece". It's like suggesting that Renaissance paintings or architecture are an "acquired" taste to appreciate rather than just looking at it with your eyeballs. It's retarded. Nobody, and I mean nobody, requires any special exposure or training to realize Fur Elise or Divertimento in D is good. Even if it's not what they normally listen to. https://nypost.com/2021/03/30/oxford-wants-to-ban-sheet-music-over-complicity-in-white-supremacy/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/that-sound-youre-hearing-is-classical-musics-long-overdue-reckoning-with-racism/2020/07/15/1b883e76-c49c-11ea-b037-f9711f89ee46_story.html https://worldcrunch.com/culture-society/no-more-mozart-classical-music-v-cancel-culture-1 Oxford is straight up changing their curriculum to focus less on White, European composers and dropping guys like Mozart in favor of some microtonal drivel from the middle east or whatever else to combat "racism in music". They want to get rid of SHEET MUSIC ffs. and this isn't a new thing either. 10+ years ago when I went to school, the big thing in music was whether or not the definition of "Chord" should be changed because it's mean that other cultures didn't figure out triadic harmony. Even Adam Neely is on this bandwagon. Oh, and look who is right on the thumbnail! I guarantee you he had help getting to this video. These thoughts were put in his head. SSC freely admits they didn't study melody-writing when he went to college. The growing majority of people who come out of music education today wind up writing inane, abstract conceptualism like he did because this is praised by the professors. Maybe not always literal serialism, but abstract conceptualism all the same. It's the exact same, and actually worse, in the visual arts. Look at how fast JJayBerthume's music went to hell after he graduated. He was a better composer when he was 16 and self-taught! Quinn had a thread on this very forum a couple weeks ago saying he "hates film music" and used the latest Zimmer shtpiece score for "Dune" as an example of why. Hans Zimmer, his billions of clones, have such a stranglehold on the industry and educational resources for composing film music today, that his meandering, droning garbage is what people associate with "film music" now. You think it's limited to film music though? That this kind of thing hasn't been slowing infecting all aspects of the arts since before you were born? If it's possible to create this negative perception of film music via this tactic today, maybe said tactics have been utilized before? We may never know why the masses today are under the impression that classical music is something lame, boring or even evil and it's not worth their time. It's not like there's an obvious culture war demonizing it and elevating mediocre imposters in its place or anything. I mean, they only take disciplinary action against professors who don't go along with the idea that Western Music is evil https://www.foxnews.com/politics/texas-professor-sues-univ-after-being-punished-saying-music-theory-isnt-racist If the masses can recognize that the bottom is better, they can do the same with music. https://blog.bimsmith.com/Survey-Shows-Americans-Prefer-Classical-Architecture-for-Federal-Buildings No "acquired taste" necessary. People don't need to acquire a taste to things which are actually good.

apparently it's called a Kenny Barron voicing

Wow! I didn't want it to end. This was a truly lovely work. NRKulus made a good point about thirds in the low parts, but it was still fantastic.