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An atmospheric piece--- I really think it could be well served by a second linear voice as counterpoint/countermelody to the violins after the initial minute or so. (viola? Cello?) This wouldn't break the mood established but add an interesting element---

Hello Yes, I think that everything can be subjective, but my opinion is as follows. I don't think there is any difference in the shades in terms of emotions or moods that they can provoke per se. I do think that the "height", the range in which a piece moves can have some influence (and this you change with the key). I think that the choice of one key or another depends on the composer's preference and, many times, on the instrument he uses. Let's assume a piece in D flat major. Take the score and transpose it to C sharp major. Do you think the listener is going to tell the difference if a performer uses one or the other score? It's going to sound exactly the same, in the tempered system. What does change the mood of the system is the mode (Dorian, Aeolian, Phrygian, etc. ....). I think that a nostalgic music can be in any major or minor key, just as in a music with energy.

Oooh I have a lot. Let me start with a very beautiful one by Michael Giacchino and orchestrator Tim Simonec I especially like the writing of the strings during the pizzicato section, and of course the flute's melody. Ratatouille has excellent music. It's interesting to see how Michael Giacchino had way more creative ideas in his early days

I think that the feeling that a specific evoques is completely personal and depends on the “tonality” of your speech and inner voice, and how that tonic chord relates harmonically to the tonic of what you are listening to. Though I think that is a really weak theory My favourite key is possibly Eb minor, I don’t know why, but it is the “tonality” of my thinking (most of the time when I think of an stable chord and I get the notes in my head, I go and play them on the piano and they are Eb, Gb and Bb. Technically, this key should be the saddest (six flats), and its relative major should then be the saddest major key according to that theory. However, you will find very little Gb major, to be substituted by F# major (Chopin barcarolle, Scriabin’s fourth and fifth) this is following the logic that the relative major of the saddest should be happiest. I agree with this, so if I at some point write works in the 24 major and minor keys, I would write in Eb minor and F sharp major. This would have interesting consequences, such as considering C major a flat key (0 flats) and A minor a sharp key (0 sharps).This because there have to be twelve flat tonalities and twelve sharp ones. As a development in the F# vs Gb, I would recommend comparing the melancholic Rachmaninoff prelude in Gb to the ecstatic barcarolle in F sharp major by Chopin. That comparison makes me think that perhaps composers are influenced by the name and “qualities” of a key while composing Another interesting example is Db, which almost sounds sad (I don’t know why) This gives room to debate and study, but after all, everything is personal in the world of tonality, and it is pseudoscience. I hope this answers your question

This is great advice. My thoughts as well. I don't mind the C tonal center throughout for a shorter piece, but that's more subjective I think. Don't worry though, your piece isn't bad by any means. To me, your music is creative and shows you have an awareness to take advantage of your whole ensemble. Peter is right though; all that parallel motion will lead to really thin sounds, unless your parallel chords are all already chunky (7ths and above I'd say). For your next string etude, what if the focus was on counterpoint and a more full harmony? Contrary motion and all that? Nice work, and thanks for sharing!

I love that suspenseful intro.

Hello again @Marc Deflin! I am glad to see you're back at composing! What I observed about this piece is that it's orchestrated very sparsely, uses lots of parallel octaves, with mostly sparse textures throughout. This means that your writing for the string quartet isn't very idiomatic (although it's adequate and playable and fine if you insist that that is the way you want to write). You never take advantage of the ensemble's potential for fuller, more richly voiced harmonies. With 4 string instruments, potential tutti chords in the ensemble can have up to 8 tones in them if the instruments double stop a chord. You also cling to the key of C minor too much imo. You do use natural minor, harmonic minor and melodic minor liberally throughout the piece, but sometimes you have wrong sounding cross relations between notes, most often between Ab and A natural (like for example, in meas. 4, beat 3 where the Cello has Ab and the Violin has A natural). There are ways of pulling off cross relations like this to make sure that they don't sound bad. The way not to do that is to do what you're doing here which is; moving through parallel motion, descending from D down to an A. The parallel octaves on D establish a texture and put both instruments in the same voice treating them as a unity. You then immediately contradict that with the Ab/A natural split which makes it sound like the voices wanted to continue playing in unison but failed because one of them made a mistake. That's at least my explanation for why that didn't work. At measures 26 and 28 your rendering is very poor and some articulations would have, I think, brought out more your intention of separated, repeated notes. There's also the issue that this piece contains too many ideas that need to be developed further. It's hard for me as the listener to find connections between your themes. There's definitely themes here and you even do some sequential repetition to show that you know that you're working with a given theme, but the piece lacks a sense of a cohesive narrative. Those are my thoughts on your work. Thanks for sharing!