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1. By the time a composition of mine reaches about a minute in length, I feel like I've covered all of the fresh material I can in that piece and that adding anything more would result in excessive repetition. As a result, most of my pieces are way too short for their own good. 2. I can't figure out how to consistently write counterpoint that sounds both smooth and clear. I can combine well-written melodies while following all of the rules set down by the likes of Fux and similar authors and still end up with a result that sounds poor to my ear. Part of the problem is that I'm just too picky about the resulting sound as seen from the fact that I find a significant amount of Bach's music, the work of a genius, to be excessively lacking in smoothness and clarity as well. 3. I have very little knowledge of how to mix the music I compose. I've focused on learning how to control what appears in the sheet music to the exclusion of considering the subtleties of sound levels, audio spectra, and the like. When I want a decent mix, I usually just use a program I downloaded that automates the mixing process in an imperfect but usually satisfactory fashion.

Yea, when I now look back, this is one of those earliest piece with the worst repetition issues, bordering on annoyance even to myself, even if back then, I felt it was only a little too much as I wanted to use that many repeats just to build up - instead of ( as I am considering more of now ) making shorter build ups or using more themes/other alternatives for build ups. I mean I still have quite some repeats in my later/latest pieces though I'm also glad that they are much fewer.

Now that I have cantamus, i went ahead and mocked it up.

I like original use of harmony in this piece! Starting on a diminished chord sounds especially cool to me in this context. Also, great use of octatonic scale and effective contrast through half-step planing (which you also use to create more and more tension to the line at meas. 83 - 100). Although you still use too much repetition, I think it's excusable here because of your portrayal of the character it is meant to have and his dance. And I love the part where the piece slows down to a crawl with lots of pauses towards the end as if the devil has finally exhausted himself! You don't resolve the piece at all just ending it on the same diminished chord on which it started LoL - thanks for sharing! Peter

I know you've already heard plenty of people tell you that your music is too repetitive, and this piece also suffers from that imo. I think it repeats/sequences its ideas so much that it verges on annoying the audience. I'm not sure you know how different your music is from probably most music you love to listen to from that perspective. Like I just mean - if the composers who composed some of your favorite pieces/songs repeated things as much as you do, I don't think they'd be beloved favorites. Composition requires a good sense of proportion and when too much is enough and if this sense is not sufficiently developed, they don't know when they're beating a dead horse in a sense. This sense lets the composer know when a theme/motif/idea has been exposited enough and that it's now time to move on to something else or end the piece. Also, many places in this piece are very robotic to the point of being impossible (meas. 157 - 160 and 204 - 216 especially), and I hope this isn't your sole reason for calling this piece an "Etude". Thanks for sharing though, and keep composing! Peter