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I see! Feel free, yeah. Trying to maintain a certain balance between number of posts & number of replies is a wise choice. In my experience, uploading too much and replying too little leads to being ignored because others fairly see you as someone that only wants a bit of attention and that doesn't really care about anything else. It's a valid stance, but it leads to rejection. That said, I encourage you to keep posting & interacting here. I'll make sure to check your No. 8 whenever I find a bit of free time! Regarding this: do you use a software to make these pieces that doesn't provide a solid PDF output overall? Regards!

Sometimes it's not about your skills, it's more about whether the judges' taste is similar with yours and your work's skill level can still be very high even if they think it's not good enough to advance to the next round. I think of winning any prizes more like a chance event, just like having job interviews haha. Keep going and you will for sure pursue what you want! Henry

Hi! Actually I just completed my piano toccata piece inspired from living near the motor city (Detroit, MI) in my childhood... I decided to make this toccata piece since I thought the mechanistic characteristics of the genre match well with general images of the motor city... In this piece I tried to express free style of lots of jazz and popular music heard when I was growing up near Detroit, while keeping this piece modern classical music... Hope you enjoy this piece, and please feel free to leave any comments and suggestions :) Motorcity Toccata.mp3 Motorcity Toccata.pdf

Iv been kicked in the teeth , and rejected several times in life but when you drive your car into a Dead-End....................The Sat-Nav "RE-ROUTES" And its the same with the Human Brain..................... https://www.classicfm.com/discover-music/second-time-lucky/

Could also think of that as a 13th chord without the seventh... so, maybe something jazzy as well? Ravel-ish? Makes me think of a music teacher I had, wrote all kinds of big band type stuff.

Hallo @luderart as you frequently present compositions in this style—short, aphoristic pieces for solo instruments—your compositional approach differs from that of most other members of the forum, who often attempt to write full-scale symphonic works for a large orchestra. Yet in an orchestra, an instrument is merely a gear in a large clockwork mechanism and is subject to the conductor’s interpretive intent. On the other hand, dedicated solo pieces for monodic instruments seem to be rare, so that I could imagine that they are appreciated by players of the clarinet, bassoon etc. However, when I listen to them and look at the score, I sense a kind of loneliness (which is not a criticism, but merely a statement of fact): The solo instrument „utters“ its sentence, yet no conversation emerges, as there is no accompanying or contrasting voice. And even the score pages look a bit „lonely“, since there is remaining whitespace due to the need of only one staff for notation ... Here is another, similar approach to a piece for a solo instrument, the bassoon. The composer, in that case, decided to put the „sentences“ in a more programmatic context, depicting „a garden“ over the course of a year. https://youtu.be/ok_R4cstdGs Now, some short thoughts to the individual sententiae: No. 1 It serves as an overture, trying to gain the attention of the listener. The meter change from 6/4 to 5/4 in bar two is somewhat surprising, and, together with the two trills, reminds me of the bells ringing in the lobby of a concert hall, urging the audience to take their seats before the playful quintuplet melody begins. No. 2 A short, playful piece - reminding me at children playing around. No. 3 To me, the third sentence has a melancholic and contemplative character, which is only seemingly lightened by the eighth-note runs. The final question remains unanswered. No.4 The fourth one has a quality that even exceeds the character of a „sentence only“. Because it consists of three clearly perceptible motifs, which are used in sequences, it has enough thematic material, so that it could be developed further or used as a sketch for a much larger piece, too. No. 5 Again, a sententia which is a short piece of its own, now in A-B-A form, yielding a small exposition, a development and a recapitulation. (Fun fact for me is bar 11. in 1/4 meter with the sole purpose to place a rest ...) No. 6 Number six for me expresses the idea behind the „sententiae“ as its best: Although it has a simple texture with only staccato semiquavers, the rests at the end of the phrases serve as the period at the end of a sentence, thus structuring the short utterance. No. 7 With number seven – which also bears thematic material which could be developed further -, we come back to a more melancholic mood, somewhat a recapitulation of sententia number 3.

UPDATE: I unfortunately did not make it to the finalist round with this work: ☹️