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Following suit after my latest video's warm reception by my dear audience, I have decided to continue composing vocal works and rendering them through means of the choral rendering website Cantāmus. Interestingly enough (mostly given the fact that I am not that devout myself), religious texts appear to be among my best options when it comes to this kind of contrapunctal vocal works in Latin (though this need not necessarily always be the case, for more secular lyrics might as well be included on one of these compositions of mine later in the future). Enjoy! YouTube video link:

Overall, your biggest problem is that you seem to be almost writing a piano+harp double concerto. The focus and complexity are so disproportionately weighted towards these two instruments that it's a serious problem for your score. I highly recommend for beginning orchestrators to basically just pretend the piano and harp don't exist, to avoid accidentally overusing them.

Hi Pabio @Fugax Contrapunctus, It's nice to see you compose vocal works and use the counterpoint technique to it. I love this piece more than your instrumental pieces even though this one is not a fugue. Personally I love the a Capella version more than the one with organ. Thx for sharing! Henry

Really great rendition you've presented here! I usually love variations pieces as I consider the variation technique to be at the core of my composing technique in general - even for pieces which I don't intend to be in a theme and variations form. In fact - I'm working on a set of variations right now! These variations are dreary, dark and dramatic! You create a really effective mood here that is very appropriate to the meaning of the Dies Irae. I think what halts the momentum of the piece for me is your reiteration of the theme with the tubular bells in between each variation. Maybe instead of repeating the theme each time, you could just include the tolling of the bell (if you've attached a meaning to it as you say). I know that whenever I write variations I have such a huge number of ideas that I am almost overwhelmed sometimes by them, so I cope with that by trying to be really concise with my presentation of the variations. But you seem to take the opposite approach here, extending the piece for a really long duration that could have easily been clipped a bit. I think you use the restatement of the theme as a way of transitioning between the variations but it's really redundant since the listener has heard the theme so many times by then, in many different forms. I don't think the listener needs to be reminded of what the theme is each time and that's just kind of an unnecessary feature of the piece in my opinion. That's my critique. But besides that I really liked the piece! My favorite part I think is the waltz since it's the most light-hearted and jolly variations and quite well written. Also - kind of an unexpected feature of a variations piece meant to be about death! I do wonder what this particular variation meant for you. Nit-picky thing about the score - if you meant for there to be no key signature for the piece in general you should also remove the key signatures for the transposing instruments. Those are my thoughts. Thanks for sharing!

Hi and welcome to the forums! That's a decent chunk of material. Before diving in it, let me ask: Why 17? And now, to the score: • Not a harpist, but this seems pretty uncomfortable to read (or at least one could say it has room for improvement in the engraving field) and the last bar has redundant silences. Apart from that, see how the arpeggio indication overlaps the silence in the first bar of the image. Actually, the same goes for the piano staff. In the very first bars my guess is that you wanted to make the bass continue thorough the first four bars. You might already know this but in case you did not, you can engrave this by using the Sost. Pedal which does exactly what you want to (maybe not in playback depending on the software you're using). I would also recommend the use of 8va. bassa in certain parts of the score such as the ones just below the harp part I took a screenshot of. • I suppose the first theme ends at M66; It didn't really convince me because: The question-answer structure you try to make at the beginning sounds too disunited to me. There's no question —to my ears— neither answer, and specially the end of each answer (the mordent) is very unsatisfying. There's barely intervention from other instruments. The register in both the harp and the piano is kept low in the whole passage, but this might not be necessarily bad if the phrases were more convincing. Not the case in my opinion. • The sound in the playback doesn't help the second theme AT ALL, but that's independent of the score. For what I'm listening to up to now, this seems more like a piano concerto than a symphony. • There's much chaos, lots of voices, each one wants more prominence than the others thorough this second (or already the third) theme. That often goes against the piece and not in its benefit. • I believe the material you bring near minute 6 is really good. It needs polishing though, as well as the whole score actually. • Again, not an harpist, but this is wrong and absolutely not idiomatic to my knowledge: C clef? Why? You put it twice in the staff without clef changes in between, too. For how the harp is built (how pedals work), writing D and D# in the same chord is just not the way to do so. My recommendation: as I assume this is a work you would want to be as better engraved as possible, change those D# for Eb (the same for every other conflicting note); consider that the harpist needs to switch pedal positions for doing anything outside the natural alterations of the tonality, which is not really an issue unless you want them to do so during the execution of a single chord. For more info, I would recommend you to read Samuel Adler's "The study of orchestration", specifically the harp part of course. • Sorry if I'm mistaken, but I am past the tenth page and I have not seen a single dynamic marking, which is almost compulsory in works of this density and length unless you intentionally want everything to sound with the very same volume. Summing that with the fact there are often lots of voices trying to get more prominence than other, this ends up as —in all honesty— a mess. • I must insist: consider that we are talking about quite a big work, more than 20 minutes only the first movement and there's not variations in the volume of each voice overall. I haven't reached the tenth minute and I'm getting overwhelmed, exhausted and even a bit stressed already. I see neither a clear direction, nor significant chunks of good material as whenever they appear they rapidly get burdened by tons of notes of different voices that erase their momentum one another. Perhaps the only moments of contrast are the parts when there's barely any other instrument than the piano or the harp. • The comeback to the first theme is a good choice in my opinion, regardless of the problems that lie into it. I would have ended the piece in M609, but instead you chose to continue and add another theme with poly-rhythms. All in all, the very, very last bars sounded interesting though replacing the left hand on the piano for a drum would have been a wiser choice. In summary: Very chaotic and unreasonably dense movement, with lots of voices trying to get prominence at the same time and no dynamics from what I've read. Very questionable scoring: strange clef choices; non-idiomatic engraving for the harp; very messy piano engraving with —likely— redundant notes that get its voice dirtier and —also likely— nearly impossible passages; questionable scoring of the horns too, as in my opinion, more than one staff (just like you did with violins) would improve readability for the performers; notes, silences, clefs, etc. overlapping one another; badly split voices; too much unjustified "out of the staff" notes that may make its study more difficult (extended use of 8va. bassa and alta would be encouraged). Despite its comeback to the very first theme nearly at the end of the piece, there's no recognizable structure other than one theme after another (I think, as some parts get too messy for me to know on a first and/or second listen) and linked together with more or less fortune. Probably, having a clear structure is not compulsory in a symphony nor in many other genres, much less abiding to a strict set of rules, but most of them have at least significant traces of one, and this is for a solid reason. Perhaps you do not agree with me in anything I have commented and criticized here (though, there are some points that are not subject to opinions such as the harp engraving), and I totally respect it, but this is my honest opinion and I think this is what usually people desires to get. Before proceeding any further with your piece, please consider revisiting this movement extensively. Kind regards, Daniel–Ømicrón.