PeterthePapercomPoser

Hi again @Fugax Contrapunctus! Isn't it wonderful that human voices don't have particular set-in-stone range limitations? I'm working on a Christmas piece right now that requires the Basses to go down to a Bb below the staff so I'm probably going to have to transpose the whole piece up a step so the lowest note is a much more manageable C. You have the Altos in this going down to an F# below the staff which I think is manageable despite the commonly regarded lowest note for them being a G. I love the treatment of the fugue subject and the tempo changes here! Is this technically a double or triple fugue? Or perhaps a series of fugues, with a stretto treatment towards the end? Thanks for sharing! Will you be participating the in the Christmas Music Event?

Hello @TheGreatEscaper and welcome to the forum! I love this Mazurka-like prelude you've written! It has so much individuality and character! It reminds me at different points of both Chopin and Prokofiev. The chromaticism is very dark and ominous. The fact that you play your own works is great as well (and apparently you've already played @ComposaBoi's sonata as well! Great job and it's great to see this kind of interaction! You're an asset to the forum!) Formally the piece is a perfect little miniature. The melody sounds like something out of another world when it comes in on the 7th and 11th of the tonality - it's very subversive and surprising harmonically and anything but ordinary. And the accompaniment is like its own melody too that sets the stage for a very ghastly piece that would've been appropriate as a Halloween-themed piece. Thank you for joining us and for sharing this prelude and I look forward to listening to the others! P.S.: Thank you for posting just one piece into the forum to let the reviewers get just a taste of perhaps one of your better pieces instead of suddenly bombarding the forum with a bunch of music indiscriminately! You don't know how many composers do this and it really annoys the people who commonly review others' works here because we don't know which piece to listen to and it turns the forum into a dumping ground for works.

Hello again @Vasilis Michael! What can I say? This is a masterful sonata that I can enjoy from beginning to end as if it's a masterwork from the classical era! Honestly, the only part I ended up skipping through is the double exposition in the 1st movement! You are steeped in classical pianism and it shows! There isn't a single awkward moment nor bad transition in the whole piece! The tonality is so free flowing and adventurous! It's amazing that you managed to start and end each of the movements in the same key - the freedom of the chromaticism is something I'd expect of free-tonal pieces that modulate when they want to without any obligation to stay in any particular key. The abundance of themes is also very Mozartean. And they are very delightful and musically interesting - I wouldn't exclude nor add to any of the movements in any way. I think they are perfect just the way they are. I don't usually like slow movements but the peace and calmness and the space in your 2nd movement was captivating and adept - it kept my attention throughout and has a warm place in my heart. The minuet and trio was also very expert - I loved the E7 b9's! All your phrase extensions are also perfectly calculated and none are too long nor too short. But my favorite movement is for sure the 4th and final - I loved the cross relations! And I think your chromaticism really reached new heights in the final movement. It also has a somewhat Mazurka-like character to it that I really like. Overall - I cannot say enough good things about this piece! And the fact that you provided a very polished final score engraving for when you compiled the whole sonata in the final YT video is great! What program did you use? Thanks for sharing and by all means keep going! Do you ever plan on writing a piano concerto?

I couldn't help but fall in love with this track from Silksong - Cogwork Dancers after 8-bit music theory covered it:

This is present because I tried to include the harmonic characteristics of both Carol's at once which didn't always result in nice consonances. Thank you for your review!

Here is my first submission!

I have now done this aforementioned mash-up! Thanks for the idea @Bill G! Here it is:

I've taken the Christmas Carol's "Angels we have heard on high" and "Gdy się Chrystus rodzi" (a Polish Christmas Carol which translates as "When Christ is being born"). I wrote two variations on this Polish Carol last year and you can find them here to become more familiar (if you want): There was some confusion in that thread about which Carol I was actually working on (LoL) owing to the fact that both of these Carol's prominently feature the Latin lyrics "Gloria in excelsis Deo". But that was basically the inspiration for putting them together in this mash-up. I painstakingly entered multiple stanzas of the Polish, English and Latin lyrics into the pdf score with all the correct accent marks and whatnot so let me know if it's clear! Thanks for listening and comments, suggestions, critiques or just observations are always welcome! Merry Christmas and I hope you enjoy listening! ☃️

Well, both the Rhythm and Tuning cards pertained to her finding an outside pattern to accord with - so perhaps, in the end she found it?

I am back with yet another Muzoracle casting! This time Celery asked me when she will find true love. The whole casting ended up pertaining to her past so perhaps she may have already found it! (Muzoracle is a storytelling/fortune telling/divination tool similar to the Tarot card deck, but with cards with musical concepts and 12-sided Musician's dice and Solfege dice. Perhaps it may be thought of as a special musical Oracle card deck.) My interpretation of the cards and dice are displayed below. Since castings in the key of F are associated with the Heart Chakra, they accord with the emotional suit of Strings, so I decided to include a Violin and Cello, since Celery also used to play Violin as a kid. Then, in the 2nd position we drew a Perfect 5th of Voices card, so I included prominent open 5th's in the piece and a Soprano singing Celery's question "When will I find true love?" as lyrics. 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 Celery's Casting is about ~1:15 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 Le, and the second on Ti with a Perfect 5th card in that position allowing me to use the tones Db, E and B natural. In order to smoothly connect to the tonic chord of F major I included the first two positions transposed down a half-step allowing me access to C, Bb, and Eb. The Tuning card gave me the idea of changing the tuning of the piece microtonally. So I decided to bring the tonic chord down a quarter-step momentarily. But all the tones were brought down by a quarter-step, so the intervals used were still your basic 12TET intervals. In order to extend the piece I also transposed the whole pattern up a half step to F# before concluding on a regular F major chord. Also, since I extended the number of positions in the casting to a total of 5 I decided to use 5/8 for the meter of the piece. If you've gotten this far, thanks for reading! And I hope you enjoy listening to this short vocal chamber work I wrote to represent Celery's Casting. Comments, critiques, suggestions, or observations are of course, always welcome. Thanks for listening!

I've noticed that for Christmas music (yes - it's that time of year and I've already written a piece for the season!) I always tend to write in the key of Eb major for some reason. It also happens to be the key of my favorite Beethoven Symphony - No. 3. Perhaps it's because of that symphony that people ordinarily think of that key as "heroic" but I think of it more as a warm key. I also prefer flat keys, even if it causes way more flats in the key signature than is practical. For example - I prefer Ab minor or Eb minor to G# or D# minor. I'll just use the Ab major and Eb major key signatures and write extra accidentals for the notes I need to make it minor. Interesting topic!

Now I don't see any excerpt, just empty space where the notes used to be ... ???