Leaderboard

Hi everyone, I’m new here! I’ve seen a few other pieces of music shared here, and it seems like the perfect place for me to join in. I’m a French student, and I’ve spent 12 years studying piano at a conservatory. Recently, I’ve started composing, and I feel confident enough about what I’ve created to share it with you. Right now, I don’t have anyone around for active listening, so I have no idea how to assess the quality of my compositions. I’d really appreciate honest feedback (whether it’s theoretical or just based on your feelings) to understand where I stand and how I can improve. I hope you will feel as much emotion listening to it as I did composing it 😀 Thank you in advance for your time and your insights! The orchestral songs are Paper Symphony part 1&2 only (the others are in others style)

Hello everyone, this is my first time orchestrating a piano piece of mine and I wanted to go for an epic Straussian orchestration. Feel free to spot any mistakes or give me any advice, I'm still quite new to the world of orchestral music. 🙂 It took around 6 hours to orchestrate and I used basic knowledge, the Musescore playback and my intuition. The original piece was done at a very important time of my life and it symbolizes looking at he horizont of the dark past and remembering one last time before moving on. But feel free to let me know what it made you feel or imagine. 😁

In fact that's the common practice of Classical Concerto for the ensemble to bring in the themes first before the soloist comes in. Only Beethoven changed the practice in his Piano Concerto no.4.

Hello dear friends young composers. Little music scribbled at the beginning of the year always on my dear and dear Jules Laforgue, too soon died of phtisia at the age of 25 it seems to me. Always his biting irony. Again, he takes as a witness the moon that never responds, remains cold, like a Rose of the basilica of silence that is the night. In French, the hidden games of meaning are absolutely fascinating, and the metric of the poem itself gives me a feeling of incantation or at least of scansion. I would even say that we touch on certain expressionist images when Laforgue evokes the head of Jean-Baptiste absent from the dish that is the moon! This poet has not been set to music to my knowledge. So I have dared for several years my little experiments by trying to serve him sincerely. I added an English translation in subtitles, but I'm not sure it can be totally respectful of the black magic of this text. Good listening and do not hesitate to criticize!

Good morning, Henry, First of all, thank you very much for your insightful comment. This text by Jules Laforgue is indeed fascinating. While it may appear abstruse at first glance, it invites the reader to join the poetic “dance” in order to uncover its deeper meanings. To begin with, like much of Laforgue’s work, this text is relatively unknown here in France. As a reminder, Jules Laforgue died in 1886 of pulmonary phthisis, a disease that defined the end of the 19th century and persisted into the next. Frequently referenced in art, it reached its literary zenith in works such as Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. In this poem, although Laforgue uses certain thematic elements drawn from medical vocabulary, he is not addressing the tuberculosis that would claim his life less than a year later. Instead, he revisits a theme he had explored before: an invocation to the moon, treating it as a silent witness. I previously set another of his poems, Complaint of the Moon in the Provinces, to music, which also centered on this motif. Here, the moon, once confided in for sorrows and heartbreaks in the earlier lament, becomes something much more unsettling: still silent, but now mocking, like stained glass in a church at night—soulless, dead, or languid in the chloroform haze of the clouds. It remains indifferent, even as the poet suffocates—perhaps from illness, love, or solitude. The absurdity of the poet’s situation is stark. His bad romances (béquinades—a now-obsolete French word) provoke derisive laughter, highlighting how his “platonic” (idealized) loves are reduced to nothing more than the trivial musings of an ordinary man. His imagined grandeur is deflated, exposing the ridiculousness of his human condition. This obsession builds into a chant-like rhythm, escalating into a true nightmare. The enigmatic phrase, “I want to gently caress your sad paten, widowed dish of the chef of Saint John the Baptist”, takes center stage. This is where the poem becomes almost proto-expressionist. Mystical imagery permeates the poem, but here it becomes unnerving. The paten refers to the dish that holds the Eucharistic host. In this vision, the moon is transformed into a dish—a plate in the sky—that once received the severed head of Saint John the Baptist. Now, it is an empty vessel, once an instrument of horror, reduced to a pale, lifeless object. At first, I hesitated to set this part of the poem to music due to its strangeness. Similarly, the inclusion of Salve Regina seemed too overtly religious. Yet, it is precisely this disorientation that defines the poem. The saint being invoked is none other than the moon—the “white lady” of folklore, queen of the night, whom he wishes to pierce with his phalènes. This, as you noted, is where the carnal implications are most evident. The phalènes, or moths, symbolize his poetic verses, which he uses to pierce the sanctified face of the moon. Yet, the phonetic similarity to phallus cannot be ignored. This could suggest a symbolic act of violation—taboo and transgressive. In the closing lines, “I want to find a Lied that touches you to make you emigrate to my mouth”, the poet seeks words powerful enough to draw the moon, his beloved, saint, or muse, to him. He desires a Lied—a song, popular or stylized—to achieve this connection. Laforgue, who lived in Germany as a reader for a countess, was undoubtedly familiar with Schubert’s Lieder. For me, the theme resonates with Der Lindenbaum from Winterreise, the epitome of Romanticism. That Lied inspired the musical motif I used here, after de climax. Both poems share a similar springboard: an invocation to nature (the lime tree in one, the moon in the other) as a confidant and source of solace. Laforgue’s melancholy mirrors Schubert’s: the consolation sought is ultimately unattainable. By the poem’s end, the observation is bitter. No rhymes remain, no words suffice—everything has been tried, all in vain. Yet, it is neither tragic nor pathetic, for tragedy is too sublime. Instead, it is simply futile, almost absurd. In my musical setting, I chose to reflect this futility by paring down the music after the preceding deluge of sound. Finally, a word on the poem’s rhythm, which I sought to capture musically. It is a decasyllable—a ten-syllable meter with a feminine rhyme at the end of each line. This form is rare, as more regular, symmetrical meters are usually preferred for their balance, particularly with clear caesurae. Here, however, the rhythm feels obsessive, deliberately strange. Notably, Laforgue’s earlier moon poem (Complaint of the Moon in the Provinces) used strict seven-syllable lines—a metric that hints at unreason. For this setting, I used a 6/4 (or 12/8) time signature to accommodate the ten-syllable lines while emphasizing the rhythmic punctuation of each verse with two beats. The entire piece is driven by an ostinato of eight eighth notes and two quarter notes. This is what I can add to your reading of the poem. Congratulations again on your astute insights and perceptive listening!

Hey gang, I just go through the amount of editing I'm willing to commit to this one, today... It's not complete, so don't mind the gaps, or, the statements where I haven't added in dynamics to a part yet. 😅 Just wanting to get some feedback on it's current progress, and anything I might could make changes to, moving forward. Thanks in advance!! Promise with you.pdf Promise.mp3

Hello people! I decided to make another microtonal invention for Harpsichord. I used the same method as in the previous one (using syntonic commas to lower and heighten certain choice tones to try and imitate a justly tuned Harpsichord from the Baroque era). There's Harpsichords built in 31 EDO that could probably approximate my intention with this piece. Thanks for listening and I would appreciate any comments, critiques or suggestions that you may have!

Hey Peter, It sounds like a Baroque invention with wrong notes thx to the just intonation, until b.22 when you reach G major and stay in the key! It's quite unusual for me to stay in the subtonic major in a Baroque invention for a major key work! I like the imitations, particular the quasi stretto at the end. Thx for sharing! Henry

Hey Kyle @UncleRed99, It sounds very nice to me. A nice theme and a nice texture. I especially love passages featuing piano and cello. The music reminds me of some lovely Richard Clayderman pieces! The up an octave sign in the bass clef piano at the beginning looks strange for me and you should just notate your left hand an octave higher! The modulation to G minor sounds abrupt to me but it's a work in progress so I guess you will fill in the gap otherwise! Excited to your final product! Henry

Hi @Crackers, Welcome to the forum! For me the part 1 sounds like new music to me. It sounds soothing and I love the marimba/xylophone. The modulation to C minor sounds nice to me, though I think the bass could be less heavy there since it can cover the xylophone sound. You can also add some more notable melodies here, instead of broken chords! For pt.2, whtat's the pluck instrument? It sounds like Guzheng to me and the timbre is wierdly well for me. It sounds quite depressing to me and I quite like it. The picardy 3rd ending is quite surprising to me. Make sure to listen to and comment other members' works as well! Thx for joining us! P.S. Let's invite our Paper Composer a.k.a. @PeterthePapercomPoser for this Paper Symphony! Henry