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AUDIO : https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bqxe3epHQIU1eZn5WMtwrQ3nvq3wkY2s/view?usp=drive_link Hey everyone, just wanted to show what my next project will be after I'm done with my symphony. Criticism welcome so long as it's constructive!

Hey @PeterthePapercomPoser, I've been working so much on my symphony. Revising the first movement and working on the 4th movement - the 4th movement is nearly 20 minutes long now and I promise it will not disappoint. It's just that I'm almost done with a 40-minute symphony and want the ending to be magnificent, so I've been helping others with their compositions while studying scores in the mean time. Thanks for your feed back! I always appreciate your comments. Thank you and yes, this is the beginning of the first "true" theme. I'm not entirely sure where to go with it, but I know I want to contrast the introduction's maniacal nature. It was intended to be a sneak peak, but I will always accept advice and criticism so long as you have as much interest in my work as I do. I figured I should let you guys know I haven't forgot about you all and that I'm still alive and working lol I want to evoke the characteristic evil of an anti-hero in this piece which means I'm going guns blazing through the introduction because I also want the piece to sound cool. Also, The attention span of people as a whole is pretty small, so I'm going for music that is more marketable and relatable for things like Instagram reels and YouTube shorts. The objective of the piece is to rarely lose the attention of someone who doesn't know a thing about music appreciation, theory, or musicianship. I can 100% guarantee that there will be clear themes after this introduction. Thanks again for your time and response!

Yess!! So much better, thank you for the reupload. In fact, please do us a favor and replace your mp3 in your original post with this new recording. My comments will be the same, fun to listen to, and love your key changes. This is very "chant-like" and some people may not like this type of harmony. I don't mind it at all though, especially if this is the mood you are looking to portray.

Thank you so much for taking the time to listen! Yes, I did write the text. It's often easier to write what you want than to find a text that discusses a particular topic and that is in the public domain. It often feels like the world is ending lately, between climate change and unstable political situations and Covid, but having someone there with you, even if there is nothing they can actually do to fix anything, makes life a little easier. Over all, I was looking for stillness and simplicity with this piece. I know what you mean that a little chromaticism would have added something, but I didn't want too much lushness, if that makes sense? More, a sense of the plain and the quiet. At the end of the world, things are pretty stark. We're down to the essentials and just quietly sitting. Thank you for sharing your thoughts! I appreciate it!

Hello @latebeethoven_addict! 1st movement - this actually manages to be a good sonata form structurally. The problem I perceive with it is that the transitions and modulations sound very forced (on account I guess of this being an old work of yours). Another problem is that the ideas/themes have no unity and don't seem to be related to each other at all. Very often you default to writing various arpeggios and scalar passages that have no point or substance (because they're not guided by a melodic sense or thematic significance). Writing scales and arpeggios for their own sake is just about the most boring and pedantic thing a composer can do. The fugato passages are also very poor on account of being short and based on unrelated musical subjects. They also break down quickly as if you weren't able to sustain the fugal process for very long, so you just resort to adding voices which aren't related to any of the subjects or themes. 2nd movement - many of the same remarks from the 1st movement apply here. There's lots of forced modulations and transitions. The music doesn't breathe - there's scarcely any resting time for the listener to relax and feel like a phrase has finished before another one begins. Also again there's lots of arpeggios and scalar passages just to fill up space. It doesn't sound very dance-like or like a minuet and the rendering is very mechanical with no tempo changes to add any kind of humanization or ebb and flow to the piece. There's no space between one movement and the next so unless you're following along with the score it's very hard to tell that one movement has ended and another has begun. Usually we advise members to save their movements as separate files so that the listeners can freely choose which movement to listen to making it easy to start listening to the piece where they last left off if the piece is as long as this one is. It's not very reasonable to expect members to listen to a piece that's this long in one sitting. 3rd movement - this one also suffers from many of the same problems as the previous two movements. But it introduces consecutive repeated chords that change chromatically in ways that don't make any musical sense. Another thing I haven't yet mentioned is that you often introduce very random sounding tuplets into your scalar passages. To me, they don't make any musical sense. If you were in some kind of Chopinistic rubato type of section where the tempo was controlled by a steady pulse in the left hand with a tuplet being played over it so that the ear can conceive of it as a type of rhythmic ornament then that would be fine. But there doesn't seem to be a reason for your tuplets - they're another one of those things that you seem to do for their own sake or to try to introduce some musical interest. Imo that's not a good way to do that. If I had to choose I'd say my favorite movement would be the 3rd. Thanks for sharing! I'm assuming you've progressed and compose a bit differently today on account of this being an old piece, but I hope that you will still find something useful in this review.

Hi @pateceramics! I like the text of this song! Did you come up with the lyrics yourself? It makes me think of the distant astronomical future (the 'heat death' of the universe) where the red dwarfs (the longest living stars) will be the only surviving light and heat sources in the universe before everything goes dark. I do wonder sometimes if any humans or living beings will be around to witness that. I like how the beginning of the song slowly exposes the F major tonality gradually by adding more factors of the chord. There's also some nice word painting at the end where all the voices die out one by one while they sing "as the starts are turned out, one by one". It's also good that you include a key change for some harmonic contrast although for me, it's not enough, as the song stays in a predominantly diatonic and major context throughout the whole thing. I yearn for some chromaticism to help bring color to your harmonies and melodies! But overall, I enjoyed this song - thanks for sharing!