Monarcheon

Solution: write a BPM or range. This eliminates the wording confusion. If you want an emotion, use a different word.

You're in college, right? Imagine, instead of forcing yourself to be so scalar and inclusive in your approach, you take an isolated subset of the mode, set (026). This is substantially fewer notes and provides you with an opportunity to lighten your texture while staying true to the general sound of the mode. You can then do all of the typical fun inversions and transpositions of that set in that section to vary up the notes that are being used, maybe even using different whole tone collections at the same time.

???? The piece is generally well-constructed, but to me it feels maybe a bit busy? There's obviously imitation and everything but it very much feels like a piece that was written to fulfill certain criteria. In other words, the middle section's texture is a little too consistent for me. Varying it up I think would help a lot and allow for more distant relationships of the mode to be explored. Just my opinion.

1a. Webern, "Five movements for string quartet, op. 5, no. 4": https://youtu.be/ELAKF8ZxDmg?t=378 I really like his ability to be super sparse, only using what he needs to get the job done. It's a quality that I think is super important. Sometimes it comes off as sparse or dead-sounding, but I'd argue his use of processes is the meaning in and of itself, even if it's not an affective one. 1b. Kapustin, "Fugue in A minor, from Op. 82": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaNT6P5x-tI I still love Gershwin, but the level of control between classical and jazz Kapustin has is wonderful to me, and I think this is one of the fugues that really demonstrates that. He's capable of straddling the line between the two or going in either direction — it's wonderful. 1c. Schnittke, "Requiem, Agnus Dei": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-ybWVagNm4 Although this piece doesn't show it necessarily, Schnittke is probably one of the most viscerally poignant composers I know of and knows how to control timbre to the maximum to achieve this. His famous Concerto Grosso is a fantastic mix of all of those elements as well. 2. Revueltas, "La noche de los mayas: IV": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtCVqO4WlsM Seems to take a lot of disparate processes and find a way to blend them without too much trouble. A lot of his other pieces are often about creating cohesion from very separate ideas and I think it's incredibly admirable. 3. Brahms, "Symphony No. 4: I. Allegro non troppo": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_P2AzhECVJ8 I've always felt his MO was a little bit too... arbitrary? It's fine music, there's just a feeling like it's trying to put too much new stuff into a formula that doesn't need it. I particularly don't like this movement. 4. I'm not doing much writing anymore, but I'll throw this here as something I've written recently... just an exercise in melodic transformation and counterpoint, but I think it's nice despite how easy of a piece it is. Thanks for this!

m. 7's Gr+6 and dominant harmony hybrid is a little off to me because of the minor ninth.

The middle section is very interesting. I'd suggest reading into the theories of Mirka and Metric Displacement that you seem to tap into.

What, are you CVS? It's so early 😂😂 In all seriousness, I'm excited to do this again! Not sure if I'll stay atonal this time 🙂

Imagine a submission just that quotes the melody once and that's it. Anyone can do that – that's easy; you're just writing your own piece at that point with no other limitations.

The melodic fragment, ideally, would one that would be suitable to high tonal and ambiguously tonal composition. This would be to not limit the creative directions that one can take with it. There would also have to be some guidelines to how much it's adhered to or referenced.

One of my favorite sax examples is Britten's "Sinfonia Da Requiem". There's also the obvious Prokofiev Romeo and Juliet and the Vaughn Williams Symphony (I don't remember which one).

Do you consider the other minor modes (harmonic, melodic) chromaticism?

If you want to dip your toes into his less tonal stuff, I might suggest the cello concerto. It's extremely dramatic and self contained despite not ascribing to a standard tonality. What do you mean by this? Music with no chromaticism?

A note on the playing... make sure you're following your own music rhythmically. Lots of held notes get shortchanged or overcharged. Musically, it has many outbursts, but I don't feel like your middle section has a lot to play off of besides the chromatic enclosure to the major third of the following chord. It almost sounds like a binary form was primary with an addition.

A few things here, but I would especially be wary of your use of open intervals in counterpoint; depending on what patterns you set up, even things running in a different species (i.e., one hand in eighths another in 16th's), it can sound very parallel and harmonically unsubstantiated without proper care to chord construction on a horizontal+vertical level, not just vertical.

Reminds me somewhat of Lutoslawski's cello concerto, in the D's. Perhaps a bit too much push and pull that never seems to make full use of the instrument's range when it gets rhythmically climactic, but your head's in the right place.