PeterthePapercomPoser

Thanks Vince! Yeah, in the case of this casting, where we ended up (by pure chance and luck) having 10 unique solfege degrees thrown with the solfege dice, it almost became a serial tone row. If we had gotten two more solfege degrees (Do and Fa) it would have been a complete 12-tone row. Thanks for your review! You're welcome and thank you for buying me the harmonica and Muzoracle! You've enriched my and other's lives for sure! This has been the most drawn out casting I have done thus far and I hope you gain from it!

I have written another piece for my friend Kat's Casting! This time Kat asked the Muzoracle if she will graduate from a 4-year university. (Muzoracle is a storytelling/divination tool similar to the Tarot card deck, but with cards with musical concepts and 12-sided Musician's dice and Solfege dice.) My interpretation of the cards and dice are displayed below. Since the first card drawn was a Conductor of Percussion card, I chose to use Piano, an instrument that Kat likes. The second card drawn was a Major 7th of Woodwinds, so I chose Clarinet, an instrument that Kat used to play. And finally the third card drawn was an Octave of Voices card, so I chose a solo Soprano singer. If you'd like to find out more about Muzoracle and how castings are interpreted go here: https://muzoracle.net/ This short musical interpretation of Kat's Casting is about a minute and a half long. Since the black 12-sided Musician's Die landed on F, the piece is in the key of F major. I created the following melodic/harmonic underdrawing guided by the cards and dice. The first solfege die landed on Ti and the card indicated a percussion instrument - in this case, Piano. So I had the Piano start solo on an E (in the left hand). Then I had the Clarinet and Soprano enter on an anacrusis into a melody that uses E, Db, C, and B. Since the interval of a Minor 2nd is prominent in the casting, I decided to transpose the whole melodic/harmonic underdrawing down a Minor 2nd giving me access to tones needed to create a V7 of F. I then used that dominant to bring the piece into F major and repeat the melodies and harmonies at the pitch level of F before repeating the piece and ending on an F7 #11 chord. I also liberally used accelerandi and ritardandi, guided by the accelerando/ritardando card in the 1st position. If you've gotten this far, thanks for reading! And I hope you enjoy listening to this short chamber work I wrote to represent Kat's Casting. Comments, critiques, suggestions, or observations are of course, always welcome. Thanks for listening!

Hey Vince! Nice prelude! Does this mean you're just going to keep writing more of these periodically? It would be cool! I think the tonic 6/4 chord in the last bar makes me expect a V before resolving to the final chord. It's such a well worn norm in classical music to hear the I 6/4 either followed by a dominant or a cadenza. Considering that a V/V and bII6 are both pre-dominant function chords, I don't think it would be unusual to transition from one to the other, especially since the V/V can function as a tritone substitution of the bII. But there are no bII's in those bars. In bar 2, the implied chords are V/V, IV, ii7b5, with an anticipation of the return to the tonic in bar 3. Then in bar 5, there is a resolution to vi. The only place where a bII appears anywhere in this piece (as Vince mentioned) is in bar 9 beat 3 but it's in root position with the 3rd omitted. But thanks for sharing Vince!

Hello again @Tunndy! Nice ideas! I think the following parts with 16th notes: should be notated as either being in 6/16 (or you could double all the note values and use 6/8). I've marked the strong beats as red down arrows and the weak beats as black up arrows. That's at least how I hear the rhythmic stresses in your piece. Thanks for sharing!

Hey @Tunndy! Although I don't think that this orchestration is entirely in good taste (with some parts still sounding quite mechanical and robotic such as especially the triplet 16th note runs) I think it's a huge improvement over your other orchestrations of famous piano pieces! You didn't include the piano in the orchestration as a crutch, and you use the instruments mostly idiomatically, making good solo instrument choices and giving the different instruments a chance to imitate each other creating changes in timbre that were original and most definitely not intended in the original. I like how you let the solo flute lead with the main melody, using the strings at first only to outline the harmony. Later you include some variations on the main melody to extend it. Then you include harp arpeggios in a way that sounds appropriate to a harp rather than a piano. You also create lots of variation and contrasts between restatements of the melody that in the original were the same. I like your use of dynamics and thickening up of the texture and creation of dramatic moments with the timpani. All in all, I think this was a very successful orchestration! (despite some things I would have excluded) Great job and thanks for sharing!

I think this question comes from the wrong place philosophically. When one asks the question "How do I compose faster?" one is really treating themselves like a machine, the assumption being that the more trial and error, the more one learns. Take this anecdote: While this anecdote addresses the concept of craft, it doesn't really get at inspiration. I believe that the question any artist or composer should really be asking themselves is "How do I enjoy music more?" or "How do I enjoy writing/creating more?". Without addressing this question one is quickly going to crash into a wall called "burnout". The pattern behind one's creative output is likely to become something akin to this: 1) Overexertion 2) Exhaustion 3) Creative stagnation 4) Increased self-doubt 5) Repetition. Asking the question "How can I enjoy music more?" will lead the composer towards music that they want to emulate, setting up a pattern of: 1) Discovery 2) Epiphany 3) New utility 4) Integration (or Refinement) 5) Sharing 6) Repetition (I won't lie, I partially used Google Gemini to help me come up with more healthy creative habit steps)

In the beginning and throughout the piece you set a consistent mood, which for me makes it sound like VGM. But then the way you use rhythms and ornaments from 0:46 on makes it sound more Baroque to me.

Perhaps my most intriguing Muzoracle casting to date - Fred asked the Muzoracle "How will I attain political power?". (Muzoracle is a storytelling/divination tool similar to the Tarot card deck, but with cards with musical concepts and 12-sided Musician's dice and Solfege dice.) My interpretation of the cards and dice are displayed below. Since two strings cards were dealt in the 1st and 3rd position, I used Violin and Cello. In the 2nd position I dealt a Tritone of Percussion so I used a Clavichord. In the 4th and 5th positions I dealt a Major 2nd and a Triad of Voices, so I used choir. If you'd like to find out more about Muzoracle and how castings are interpreted go here: https://muzoracle.net/ This short musical interpretation of Fred's Casting is about a minute and a half long. The piece is in C major since the black musician's die landed on C. I then made the following melodic/harmonic underdrawing that I used in the composition of the music. To fill out the piece harmonically I included Roman numeral interpretations of each of the dyads/positions in the casting. Since the piece starts with strings I used Violin, Cello and Harpsichord in the first three positions. The voices then come in on the 4th and 5th position. The Triad card is normally supposed to be interpreted as a major triad, but since this was a descending casting and the position where the triad card was dealt was descending I decided to interpret it in a negative harmony way, inverting the intervals of the triad downwards, thus producing an E minor triad based on B (Ti). Then, to conclude the piece I reversed the order of the chords in retrograde fashion to land back on the first chord at the conclusion, but reinterpreting it harmonically as a C major 6 chord. I also reinterpreted the triad as a major triad ascending from B (Ti). If you've gotten this far, thanks for reading! And I hope you enjoy listening to this short chamber work I wrote to represent Fred's Casting. Comments, critiques, suggestions, or observations are of course, always welcome. Thanks for listening!

Hi again @olivercomposer! I think with the way you're using the ornaments and little trills here and there, to me it sounds more Baroque now! LoL

Hey @olivercomposer! Nice piano piece! I don't think it's very Chopinesque or Lisztian - but it certainly sounds like Oliver Kovacs! I think your chord progressions are very unique to you and to your by now well defined cinematic style of composing! If you wanted to make it more Chopinesque you could have included more rubato and long drawn-out roulades or fioraturas. Liszt's piano technique is also quite a bit more difficult. But I really enjoyed this piece of music! Thanks for sharing!

Hey @MK_Piano! Great ideas so far! I think what I find confusing about the beginning of your main theme (after the short 4 measure introduction), is that at first it seems like you start the piece on an accompanimental one measure vamp in the strings. So the phrase actually seems to start on measure 6 in the Bassoons. That serves as the antecedent phrase of a musical period. It lasts for 4 measures from bar 6 - 10. That's just fine and dandy, but then the consequent phrase doesn't come in until measure 11 in the Bassoons once again. So it seems like you might be including that one measure vamp again as part of the phrase, in which case it becomes an acephalic five measure phrase. I know Haydn and even sometimes Mozart were known for writing five measure phrases. I am not sure if it is working here. If you are happy with it - definitely keep it! But to me it would sound better if you concatenated the phrasing so that the consequent phrase would start at bar 10. This confusion about the phrase lengths continues into the 2nd iteration of the phrase at measure 18. The phrase starts right on beat one, so this time its not acephalic. But then it continues for five measures from measures 18 - 23 with a slight 3/4 hemiola that's then concatenated to terminate on beat one of measure 23. To me this definitely starts to sound awkward and confusing in the phrasing. When I first listened to the piece without looking at the score, it sounded like you changed meter to 3/4 and then abruptly back to 4/4. I felt lost as a listener, not knowing where the phrase was going rhythmically. So although kinda awesome, the piece does have many structural flaws that confuse (at least this) listener. When the piano comes in on the theme later on in the piece (solo), you do concatenate the phrases to 4 measure phrases and I think that does kinda work better. But I think as far as the big form and macro-tonal plan is concerned, the piece seems to repeat too much. I think if you had included the contrasting 2nd theme in the exposition before doing a 2nd exposition with the piano that would have made more sense. But I have personally never written a piano concerto in sonata form before - I've just written two theme and variations pieces for piano and orchestra. So all my experience is in concertante type piano concerto writing. Thanks for sharing and I hope some of what I had to say was helpful/useful!

In all the years past, the Christmas Event was just an event - not a competition. It was a completely free event with no limitations on ensemble nor duration and no judges, or scoring. The intent was just to channel the spirit of Christmas (or the holidays or winter) in the music in any way the participants saw fit. And there were only two types of badges - participant badges for everyone who submits music and community organizer for whoever bolstered the event through an announcement post and submissions thread. There was never any popular voting or anything like that either. Sure, that's a great idea! Let me know what you think of the Category Definitions in the Competition Reviewing Template that I just added! Thanks for your input!

Thanks for your vote and for voicing your opinions @MK_Piano! We have had this idea at the end of the last formal competition - "Dreamscapes" - which had monetary prizes and an official set of judges. As can be seen at the end of the "Dreamscapes" Satisfaction Survey linked below 5 out of 10 voters in the survey liked the idea of having tiered divisions for entrants of different skill levels. I think one of the problems with this idea is that we can never know if we'll even have enough participants joining the competition to justify having even just two different tiers. And would this also imply that the prize money will be split evenly between the different winners from the different tiers? Or would the more advanced tier get the lion's share of the prize money? But either way, I think from looking at the results (so far) of this 2025 Halloween Satisfaction Survey, the emergent fashion seems to be that people prefer to keep the competitions as casual as possible or just for fun and without monetary prizes. The formatting was optional. All the reviewers were free to use the reviewing template or dump it and make their own. Or just write comments and forget any kinds of categories or numerical scales. In the past when we had official competitions with monetary prizes, the official judges talked to each other about the entries (the composers of which were kept anonymous by me) on a set of competition dedicated discord channels on the Young Composers Spot discord server. We were a team and presented a concerted effort to review all the entries as consistently as possible. And as mentioned above in my response to @Wieland Handke's post, the only thing that needs to be consistent from one judge to another is the differences between the different entries. So that even if each judge rates the entries in a different range of the numerical scale, as long as the differences between the different scores are consistent across the whole set of entries, the scores all get averaged between the judges and produce a fair result. Thanks for your response and sharing your thoughts!

You're welcome! I enjoyed it! First, thank you for voicing your opinion! When we've done competitions with monetary awards and official judges in the past this was an issue that people have brought up. However, ultimately, when the different scores from the different judges were averaged together, as long as the judges tried to accurately reflect the differences between the various musical entries in their scores then once the scores were all averaged together, even if say, some of the judges scored the pieces in a different range of the scale than others, the scoring still worked to accurately reflect the differences in quality between the different entries. In the past when we had competitions with monetary awards, the entrants were kept anonymous by sending their entries by personal message to me. I would then add their entry to the submissions thread. I think in a free contest, this requirement might be too strict. And I personally don't like the idea of keeping the names of the judges anonymous because it discourages discussion and interaction between the judges and the members. Thanks for voicing your opinion!

I think it's harder because for me it's very important to evoke the casting in the music as closely as possible. So I can't always just write the music I want - I have to follow the underdrawing of the casting. Thanks for your review!