PeterthePapercomPoser

Hi @Luis Hernández! Another wonderful example of yours using the tintinnabuli technique! I like how you use the M-voice always in 3rds. You start with the M-voice in the right hand and the T-voice in the left but soon enough, as the piece develops you intertwine and exchange the position of the voices. Looks like, towards the end you also double the T-voice with 6ths. And the piece is written in free meter akin to Messiaen. Thanks for sharing and Happy Holidays!

I just fell in love with this track after 8-bit music theory covered it. Zelda - Majora's Mask - Astral Observatory:

Hey @Gabriel Carlisle! What your music seems to remind me of on a seemingly consistent basis (maybe because you do this consistently) is how good music can be even if it's mostly just based on line cliches and pedal points. Perhaps your Romantic influence is showing since Tchaikovsky loved line cliches and pedal points and they're the secret behind the complex chromaticism in his music. This is a very dramatic and exciting introduction! I love the main theme and the way you've harmonized it really works in my opinion. I hope you keep going! Thanks for sharing.

Hi @UncleRed99! I don't know if you have finished this by now or not. The thing that stands out to me when listening to this is that you pretty much stick to 3 + 3 + 3 + 2 groupings of 8th notes in this piece. I think, at least for me, when composing in these kinds of weird meters, what I always find exciting is the capability to play around with the note groupings to keep the music fresh and surprising rhythmically. Right now, it sounds kind of hypnotic in its repetition of the rhythmic patterns. On the other hand it can also get stale after a while too. Those are my observations. Thanks for sharing!

Hello again @MantisToboggan! Quite angular melodically, this is very unnerving with those diminished scales and b2's. Despite that, I still perceive the key center to be F# which keeps the piece accessible despite it's dissonant features. The orchestration is also not very thick which further simplifies the texture (you might or might not want to explore thicker textures sometimes to change things up). Another way to explore different textures is to delve more into extreme ranges of the ensemble. I don't really hear any Contrabasses in this. They could add a lot of body and depth to the ensemble. Violins can also easily go much higher. Everything in the ensemble is kind of in the mid-range and closely spaced. Your music could be so much more differentiated and exciting and interesting If you explore more of the capabilities of the instruments! There are however some nice moments for the solo Oboe and solo Clarinet which was nice. The way you have the Flute doubling with the Violins in sort of a low tessitura is a bit unrealistic orchestrationally speaking. The flute won't be heard at all as in that range the flute isn't very loud. Thanks for sharing!

Hey @NicholasG! So, I reviewed this piece the first time you posted it in the forum in July. There are still lots of cool features to the piece that I like. Reflecting on your chosen ensemble I am actually a bit surprised that you chose to write this mostly in A minor when G minor would have been an easier key for most of the instruments in the concert band to play in. You end on a really unprepared C major tonality. In my opinion it sounds really forced like a kind of fake triumph to bombastically end the piece on. It sounds like just a throw-away gesture and doesn't give me a sense of conclusion or of satisfactorily summing up the piece. Also, the piece up to that point has pretty much stayed in A minor almost the whole time which further throws the listener for a loop when you suddenly diverge from that key at the end. That's just my opinion though. Thanks for sharing and good luck with getting this performed!

Thanks for your comments Mike! Yes there's parallel 4ths between the Bass and Soprano for a measure there and it was intentional. Thanks again!

Here's my entry to the event! Merry Christmas to all! Ho ho ho!

This is something I decided to work on for a very limited amount of time over the past two days for the Christmas Event this year! It's a variations piece on the famous Polish Christmas Carol "Gloria in excelsis Deo". Those eponymous words are actually in Latin, but the rest of the carol is in Polish, and I made sure to go in and include all the proper accent marks and special characters which is actually a little tricky to enter into Musescore. This is one of those rare pieces that I wish I had Cantamus for, since it would increase the realism of the piece to have the actual words sung, especially when the Tenors and Basses are in canonic imitation with the Sopranos and Altos. I would really appreciate any comments, critiques, feedback or even just observations that you may have. Thanks for listening and Merry Christmas!

I've begun reharmonizing and doing a choral setting of a famous Polish Christmas Carol (although it's only famous in Poland of course). Count me in!

Yes, at the asymptote, functions are usually discontinuous and undefined. So as the function approaches a certain asymptote at a certain x value, the function might approach infinity or negative infinity in the y value, giving it a very jagged edge at that point. I just meant to describe the shape of your melodic lines.

Hi @bkho! Really great, accessible and lucid first movement, with many welcome harmonic surprises and a memorable melody. Even in places where there isn't much harmonization, the piece doesn't sound empty or like it has to be filled with more harmonic tones all the time. Second movement - slow movements are sometimes not my favorite. In this one, I felt like some of the 16th note chromatic fioraturas didn't really make sense. The retransition back to the main theme also used block chords a bit like a crutch that I felt wasn't very effective in smoothly bringing the listener back. I liked the third movement the best. This is probably the most Beethovenian one as well. The transitions were really smooth in this one. It also reminded me of one of the rondo's of one of his piano concertos. The melody was once again very lyrical and well developed. Great job overall and thanks for sharing!

Hi @MJFOBOE The melodic lines in this are quite asymptotic and jagged! It has a certain Phrygian modal character to it. I think there are things you could do to improve the score, as well as to make it easier to perform. You have many 3/2 hemiolas throughout the piece, but you don't change the notation to make it obvious to performers that they could just count it as 3/2 and it would be much easier to perform rhythmically. Also, you could have used an ottava line to make it easier for the pianist to read measure 7 & 32. Another thing is that you could remove the empty measures of piano during the viola solos. You did that already in meas. 9 - 11 but not in 35 - 44 which is a much more extended solo passage. Thanks for sharing!

Hey @ComposaBoi! I'm glad you divided your movements into separate files as it facilitates my attempt to review such a gargantuan work. I'll start with movement 2 as it seems to be the most jaunty and scherzo-like. I do have to say that I feel like the orchestration is really missing a piccolo in my opinion. There were some spots where the statements of the theme could have been expanded to a higher range with the inclusion of piccolo instead of just alternating between strings and the winds you already have. I think measures 58 - 61 really could have benefited from the inclusion of piccolo. I think some of the chromatic passages like at 54 - 55 give that particular part of the movement the character of a circus march. Chromaticism like that can be tricky - when used right it can make dark movements more mysterious, or it can make bright music more comical (is that what you were going for?). The retransition from the Adagio back to the Vivace I thought was a bit abrupt. Perhaps, if it were my piece, I would have brought back the F# major ostinato in the strings at the Adagio tempo and then slowly increase the tempo until I got back to Vivace. But overall, I really enjoyed the Adagio part of the movement. Especially when the strings started playing pizzicato it really gave it a Mahlerian dark character. Which is why I thought the retransition back to the jaunty, bright and happy Vivace was so out of place after that. Thanks for sharing! I hope to review some more of the movements later on.