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Dear all, It has been a while I post new works here as I am working on my Symphony. That was fun but I am distracted by another competition. This work, Ordered Colours for Piano Quartet is written for a 5-min call-for-score competition. I am not sure why I am that bold to base the work on a twelve-tone series ("Ordered" as in the title), but I later turn it to more tonal materials. I really wish to get selected by the judges and get it recorded (as a shortlist reward). Good luck lol What do you think about this piece? Is there a "voice" of mine? Thank you. HoYin

Basically, me and my composer friend have been arguing about this, so I wanted your guys' opinion. My argument is that basically that composition is coming up with an original idea, and arranging is making a play upon an idea. Therefore, arranging cannot be composing. However, he's saying that since it's presenting music in an original way, it is composition since it is original in the sense that they're showing something old in a new light, like a new arrangement of an old song, like Caravan or Pachelbel's Canon. I just wanna see what you guys think.

You make a good point about the blur between the two. Were Deryck Cooke and William Carrigan composing or arranging when they respectively 'completed' Mahler's 10th and the last movement of Bruckner's 9th Symphonies. It looks like an inextricable mix of both. The basic material was there but had to be filled out, extended, with a good musicological knowledge of both composers and the sensitive addition of new music to make the works 'make sense'; to make them sound as if they came from the original composers.

The talk was under 5 mins so I listened to it throughout - but I still couldn't work out what that pair were trying to say. Google's dictionary defines texture as "the feel, appearance, or consistency of a surface or substance," which applies to any constructed art as much as to any other "surface". I couldn't see how their string of analogies related particularly to music. I tend to take a technical view of texture in music as being the relative thickness of a sound (or sequence of) in terms of harmonic density, spread of the 'tessitura' for want of a better word - span, maybe; timbre and dynamic. But it also includes melodic and rhythmic elements - in other words the sum total of sounds at a particular point. This is just my view but I don't think that texture in music (edit: of itself) has anything to do with emotion or sensuality which is the province of the evolving harmonic progression (including melodic or motivic component). Fine, sensuality is well served by music but texture alone has little to do with it. Equivalent textures could produce the whole range of emotion / sensual reaction. And of course, how we perceive the sounds is so very individual. There are those who are excited to excess by the Rite of Spring or Sensemaya, while others find them unpalatable and provoke annoyance, even anger. It's so personal a thing.

Interesting pedal point from M. 62 on. The rhythm in M. 2 seems to work when it is supplemented by a steady stream of sixteenth notes because otherwise it strongly suggests the preparation of a cadence, at least to my ears . In M. 14 and M. 46, I (aurally) stumble over it, but in M. 73 it serves as a perfect way to end the fugue, I think. This nitpicking aside, I could not spot any glaring errors. Really solid counterpoint and nice theme, as far as my (definitely rusty) fugue skills allow me to judge. A pleasant and skillful work for sure.