Leaderboard

Well, the nights are getting longer, the frosts are appearing on the ground, @PeterthePapercomPoser and @Thatguy v2.0 are locked in battle... It can only mean one thing - it's long overdue time for the annual Young Composers Christmas Music Event! The Brief Same as last year - write anything you like inspired by a winter celebration of your choice! Or, if you don't celebrate anything, maybe a piece to capture gazing over miles of snow (or grass if you live in the Southern Hemisphere) ... If you want to participate, pop a comment below! You could have a look at last year's competition for inspiration if you like: It would be great to see lots of you taking part! No prizes, no winners, just a way to get the creative juices flowing during the Season. Submissions will open on the 1st December. There will be a separate submissions thread, so look out for that! There's no time limit but you'll probably want to have your piece done by Christmas, or at least the end of December. Excited to see what you come up with!

@PeterthePapercomPoser Wait... let me get this straight... PeterthePitifulPoser thinks he can write a better Christmas tune than me? Seriously?!? Dude... I'm Thatguy v2.0, doesn't he even know that? lololololol oh man... oh boy... whew... that was funny So let it be known that this year I will be writing Christmas music AS A WEAPON AGAINST PETER. Luckily for him, he made the wise choice (as he is a noble yet humble man), and already agreed to this 1800's U.S. Western-style competition. A duel of compositional wits, if you will. The deadline will be Christmas day, and the winner will be decided by a community poll. All may cast their votes, and if no one votes... @Henry Ng Tsz Kiu will be forced to decide upon the winner. Don't do this to Henry people... he's such a good man. I would hate to have him decide between friends. The winner will receive bragging rights until Mike stops paying for the yearly cost to run the site. Oh, and Peter: YOU'RE GOING DOWN ❤️ 🎄 ⛄

My earliest attempts at composition were probably me banging on the piano at home when I was very, very young. A bit later when I learned to read music, I would write stuff by just drawing staves on lined paper - but of course it was all complete rubbish. I kept at it, and continued to be terrible at it for a very long time. I remember with horrible embarrassment telling the music teacher at my elementary school that I was writing music, and then playing a little bit of it at her request; she just very politely smiled and nodded. Then when I was in 8th grade, I got Rhapsody, a rudimentary piece of music notation and MIDI software, for Christmas, and it was only at that point, when I could hear a playback of what I'd written at the press of a button, that I actually started to improve.

Hi guys! All of us here are composers, whatever level we are in. However everything has its beginning (and hopefully not end). We all have our first experience of composing, and start to compose more by having that first experience as the basis and build ourself up, whether by skills, knowledge, experience or taste. I would like to ask, why and when do you first begin composing? What is your inspiration of it? How do you compose when you may not have adequate tool and theory to back you up? I wanna share my own experience. I started learning piano when I was 10 years old, a relatively late age. Then after months or a year or so, I suddenly had the impulse to imitate Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, since it was the first classical piece I had ever listened to, alongside his no.13 and noi.15 Piano Sonata. I remembered I knew nothing on composing and therefore just wrote some mess out, which might resonate with some of Beethoven's passage LoL, in a naive way. I didn't even have staff paper at that time, let alone PC and computer program to write the music out. I just wrote with the letter names on top and the note value under it like this: A G# Fx G# Crotchet Crotchet Semibreve Minim (in note, not words) I have already forgotten that piece, but that experience is unforgettable. There's no reason for me to begin composing, since no one has ever taught me so, but I still do that and luckily I am still composing. Really wish you guys can share your first moments of composing to us! Henry

Greetings. This will probably be my last piece I will share for the year. I composed a little suite of sorts of adventure film music inspired by the works of John Williams and Jerry Goldsmith primarily. Adventure movies happen to be my favorite kind. It's over 4 minutes, so none of you better tell me it's too short this time lol. But seriously, let me know what you think of it.

To be honest I don't think I exaggerated with the title of the video. Composing it has been a turning point for me, very few times I have felt a composer-piece connection like I had when finishing this. I left some kind of metaphorical tale in the description of the video. Let me know any doubts you might have. Also I used some kind of augmented 6th to reach a Neapolitan chord right before the last climax. I hope you enjoy it!

How embarrassing .... What was I thinking or not thinking; of course it's a Trio!!! As fall as the season goes .... my mentor says it reminds him of Autumn.

I've always had an interest in composition, but it wasn't until later in high school, and college that I began exploring my interest in composition. I started with simple piano improvisations, then went on to arrange original hymns and hymn arrangements, and now I'm studying composition. I am currently working on a piece for flute and harp.

Well well well... Care to add your masterpieces to this year's Christmas Music Event?

Let me provide the anti-climax: if I am forced to decide upon the winner I will make a draw LoL.................. I would rather be an audience eating popcorn aside LoL..........

Yes of course, I will check out your youtube channel.

🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄 I'm in! You can't beat me! VincetheVeryVindictivebutnotValiant will not win! I'm writing a 10+ minute Variations piece on a famous Christmas carol for Piano and Orchestra in Eb major and nothing can stand in my way! I have a Romance, Minuet, March, Rondo, and the works included and it'll blow your Christmas socks and ugly Christmas sweater right off! Muahahahahahahaha! 🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄

This is incredibly gorgeous, and the more I listen to the music you post, the bigger fan of your music I become. You're getting better and better my friend, I love hearing the progress

Thanks, Henry Damn it

I think my first composition was not inspired by any particular composer or genre but by my having a computer and midi program which gave me the capability to hear anything I put in which to me just opened up the whole world of composing. My first piece was an impossible piano piece that could not be played because it had so many consecutive repeating notes (it wouldn't even be playable if one arranged it for four hands or two pianos LoL). As I learned music through learning Clarinet and Piano with my best friend in Jr. High and High School, eventually my Slavic/Polish roots came out in my music as I composed a Polonaise type piece without even really trying to write in nationalistic/folk music forms. But I like to think that a huge part of my attraction to music was because of my experiences of playing video games and listening to the kick ass music in classic Super Nintendo games from the 1990's. With my midi software I was able to search the internet to find midi's of VGM tracks that I opened up in my sequencer and tried to analyze/understand and then (of course) imitate that. I think a big part of my musical philosophy (which is basically that I believe that all music is playful) comes from those experiences of listening to really awesome video game music while having lots of fun playing games like Zelda: A Link to the Past, the original Star Fox, Sim City, Final Fantasy VI, and Chrono Trigger (all for the SNES). I also tried to imitate those musics through writing short incidental/programmatic imaginary VGM tracks with a limited instrumentation. All those old works are lost now but some of the melodies are still in my memory. Another kind of music I tried to imitate when I was first starting out is Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 4 - Pizzicato Ostinato. For some reason the string orchestra all using pizzicato all at once was a very attractive sound to me and I tried to write my own Pizzicato Ostinato piece which was one of my most chromatic and harmonically complex first compositions. It included harp and I was told by a Violinist friend in University that it was in fact playable (to my surprise LoL). But these days I feel like I've grown out of trying to imitate other composers. Maybe I might still imitate certain genres I am not particularly familiar with if there's a purpose for that (like if I need to write that kind of music for my own future video game I'm planning to make).