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Thanks for the information! 🙂 Unfortunately, I don't remember where I parked with my Delorean...

The Dreamscapes Competition was already ended and the result was announced on September 2023 here: Make sure to check out the upcoming challenges and future events! Henry

@PeterthePapercomPoser and @Thatguy v2.0 Thanks I appreciate the genuine feedback! You both hit the spot. I am writing short piano sketches as practice, and am treating them as a "piano diary" 🙂 If I stumble across a melody I really like, then I make more efforts to complete it. It's easy for me to start a new melody, but for some reason it's so difficult to build upon and finish. I don't know why, I always get stuck after a few measures.. My goal is to practice improvising weekly to get better at composing, then hopefully make sheet music and full videos 🙂

Sounds like you're varying up the melody some more? I think you do a fine job of that already, you have a lot of variation within it. I meant more with the rhythm, or tempo, or harmony, or range, or dynamics, etc. etc. For instance, your bass line is E then D, right? So it's in E minor, then you have the 7th (D), then you go back and repeat. What if you tried going through the other notes of the scale for a while? Even just swaying back and forth on C and B for a bit would sound cool, and it's a cadence ending on the B for your E minor loop again. AND, if the B chord is major, you get to go with the chord for your sax melodies to fit it, giving your melody variation from a different angle. What if you dropped that static bass note out for a bit? Less is more. Have just the drums and that killer bass keep the momentum, maybe the sax leads are toned down. Idk, I'm just spewing off ideas from the top of my head. You'll hear static harmony in rap music, but they have lyrics to focus on. With instrumental music, sometimes you have to take extra measures to maintain interest in looped music. Just my opinion though, I'm just some dude on the internet.

We had an official Young Composers competition with prize money and 5 judges including myself just about a year ago. Competitors (Oneironauts they were called) were tasked with writing a composition based on a dream or dream poem of their choice for one monophonic instrument and one polyphonic instrument (in your case, Violin and Piano). Check out the submissions!

I would just keep calling these piano sketches or piano shorts, but at least number them! They're perfect for youtube shorts, if that's the goal.

Hello @kaiyunmusic and welcome to the forum! I really like the 2nd piece you posted! But on the whole, these are really extremely short! Did you cut your recording down to only the short section you feel you can be proud of? Since you're including background audio of rain and natural background noise in this, maybe you could title your tracks the way Lo-Fi Chill-Hop artists title their music? I know a little bit about that because I had a prospective video-game company that wanted to hire me to write Lo-Fi anime-styled music for their game (they ended up not hiring me). But I wrote two tracks as demos for them and I am proud of the music I wrote - I titled them "Heartfelt" (this one is for piano and strings and I played it at a local talent show and won) and "Relaxing in my dorm". I think in the case of music like this, the only important thing about it is that the title matches the mood of the piece. It could be like the kind of title a diary entry might have if you were writing a journal or something. That's my take on it. Thanks for sharing!

Hi @Quinn St. Mark, I like the main theme here actually! I think it is really a fast version of the piece “The Fountain” by Bohm which I played when learning piano: Naming it Kite for me fits with the piece! Henry

This topic would make a fascinating thesis for someone. Make a list of under appreciated works, make the case for why they are great, and try to determine why each didn't make as big a splash as other pieces by the same composer... Requires an instrument that's a little harder to find? Premiered at the same time as some other really great pieces, so it got a little lost in the crowd? Composer was going through a difficult patch popularity-wise at the time it premiered because of local politics, a snit with someone influential in their local music community, some known bad behavior? Local tastemakers were promoting a particular type of sound at that moment in musical history, and this was not that? Composer too busy with personal or family obligations to give it a good premiere and it just sat in a drawer for a long time, while their other works gained popularity and became the big pieces in their canon? What are the conditions that make something really gain momentum, and why weren't they met in this case?

I'm happy to share the thought as you sir.