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Showing content with the highest reputation on 02/21/2026 in Posts

  1. It's a huge improvement from the previous piece. The countersubject you've written is very melodious, and you've exploited its scalar nature and its rhythm very well for the rest of the piece. The harmony in your counterpoint is very apparent and well-constructed too: the first bar outlines descending thirds, and the second bar is a dominant chord. The issues regarding accented 8ves are also no longer there. You can refine your countersubject slightly though. All of the semiquavers in bar 4 should be raised by 1 pitch. This will both highlight the underlying dominant harmony, and also lead to the E in the following bar more smoothly. With this change, your solution will be perfectly acceptable, but a slightly more musically "interesting" solution will be to turn the beginning of bars 3 and 4 into 4-3 suspensions. Then I'd raise the following points about the rest of your piece: As mentioned before, your piece needs strong cadences to serve as musical punctuations. You need a V - i (or I) in the tonic key at the end. You also preferably need another in a different key somewhere else. The tonal scheme of your work is perfectly sensible: tonic - dominant - relative - tonic, and so a second V - i at the end of either the dominant or relative section is desirable. A third or fourth strong cadence may also be added at your discretion. Your subject + countersubject together is invertible (in the sense of exchanging bass with soprano and so on) and so you should invert it! Every opportunity you've had (bars 7, 13, 19) you've presented us with a modified version of the subject and countersubject instead. You are allowed to do these pitch modifications (and I indeed like them), but given you have presented the theme consistently throughout the work as soprano -> bass pairs, you should also present these modified themes as pairs. Utilising these modified pitches as new motifs in your episodes would also be desirable. Whilst you will find episodes like these (i.e. repetition of one passage, with slight modifications) in the oeuvre, far more commonly you will see different episodes being constructed completely differently. They have different lengths, and are based on different harmonic progressions. Melodically they generally still play from the pool of the motivic material in the theme, but the exact details vary from episode to episode. The reason why is not because repetition is bad - repetition is good if done sensibly! But the journey you take to get from the tonic to the dominant must clearly be different from the journey from the dominant to the relative, so a different approach is needed each time. Writing different episodes will also allow you to place the much-needed cadences at will. When you can employ this repetition technique however, is when your starting and ending keys are separated by the same interval. In your case, this means you can reuse your episode between the dominant - relative (v to III) as an episode between the relative - tonic (III - i). If the subdominant was part of your tonal scheme as well then it means you can reuse a tonic - dominant (i - v) episode as a subdominant - tonic (iv - i) episode.
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  2. Another Persichetti prompted piano piece. This time the prompt was "24. Extend the following chromatically ornamented piano passage." The form ended up being ABACBA. Thanks for listening and I hope you enjoy and let me know what you think!
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