Thank you very much for your feedback. That's interesting that you felt it was too atonal at times, and I'm curious to learn which sections you felt were weird for their own sake--that's certainly never my goal, but I certainly want to work toward eliminating that impression from my music (and actually I've been criticized before for being too functional/Brahmsian in my harmonic language; I suppose it's possible that I'm unconsciously overcompensating for that in this work).
I agree that the piece feels too sectional; one of my goals in the piece (which I don't think was realized) was actually to make the piece approximate a stream-of-consciousness/internal-discourse narrative form, which tends to shift from idea to idea quickly and often but maintaining unity and continuity; I tried to unify the thematic material with micro-motives that would be common to contrasting adjacent theme groups; specific micro-motives throughout the piece were falling half-steps, pairs of falling thirds, 5-note circular neighbor figures (e.g., F-E-D-F-E), and snap-rhythms. I was striving for a piece that would have lots lot of surface contrast but unity through dense layering of these small-scale themes, but I sacrificed a lot in the way of developing phrase-length material for longer than a few phrases, which I agree makes the piece lose a lot of the formal cohesiveness necessary to hold a 25 minute piece together effectively.
