PeterthePapercomPoser

Hello again. I have composed yet another microtonal piece - this time a prelude for lumatone (or a piano). My intent for the piece was to explore subminor and supermajor chords, as well as the subminor 7th which is a more pleasing sonority in a minor or dominant 7th chord which isn't as dissonant and yearning for resolution (the dominant 7th chord with a subminor 7th is a common sonority that gives Barbershop quartets their characteristic sound). I think a performance on a lumatone can probably best approximate my intentions with this piece in 31 edo or 53 edo or something. Thanks for listening and I'd appreciate any comments, suggestions, critiques or observations you may have!

Hello people! I decided to make another microtonal invention for Harpsichord. I used the same method as in the previous one (using syntonic commas to lower and heighten certain choice tones to try and imitate a justly tuned Harpsichord from the Baroque era). There's Harpsichords built in 31 EDO that could probably approximate my intention with this piece. Thanks for listening and I would appreciate any comments, critiques or suggestions that you may have!

Hello again @ComposaBoi! 3rd movement - I think the strongest parts of this movement are the introduction and the coda which as far as I can tell are made of the same material but orchestrated differently. Your main melody contains lots of cool chromatic neighbor tones that introduce a sense of tension and resolution. I think the way you elongated the introductory melody to serve as the main theme is kind of pedestrian though. Which is a shame as you spend more time on it and we only ever get to hear the "good version" of the melody in the introduction and coda. For my taste, and it might just be me, the main theme is a bit boring starting in measure 14. But I do like the really dramatic string writing in measure 53. The big build up to the F7 add 13 chord in measure 66 and 97 is great. After measure 97 you lead nicely back to the main theme which I previously found boring. But now it sounds more profound and affecting. I guess "repetition legitimizes" as they say. Thanks for sharing!

In the Microtonal Invention, I only modified the 3rds of major and minor triads, although you could also modify the 3rds of the counterpoint. But if you go by the counterpoint then, as the piece progresses through different passages the tendency would be for the piece to get more and more out of tune in relation to 12 tet. I wanted to keep the piece basically in 12 tet and only modify choice tones to keep the best features of 12 tet which is good sounding perfect 8ves, 5ths and 4ths. Also, since major and minor 2nds are also compromised in 12 tet so that they can fit equally into the perfect 8ve, if you modified each interval in counterpoint to be more like just tuning, you'd get more and more out of tune especially if the scalar motion traversed larger intervals than the 8ve. Check out this video that @Henry Ng Tsz Kiu shared with me: Thank you! Yeah I was stoked to hear microtones in @Mooravioli's recent orchestral piece so I of course I decided I had to try it out!

It is not that complex really. Have you heard of just tuning? The concept is to bring the tuning system into better alignment with the harmonic series. In the harmonic series the major 3rds and minor 3rds are much more pure and sound more satisfying than in 12-tet (12 tone equal temperament). But 12-tet preserves perfect 8ves, 5ths and 4ths which is really important to keep the whole tuning system consistent with itself across all octaves. But that comes at the price of compromised major and minor 3rds. If you google "justly tuned 3rd" it will tell you that major 3rds in 12-tet are 15 cents sharper than their justly tuned (much nicer sounding) counterparts and minor 3rds are 15 cents flatter. So I just basically wrote a 12-tet piece and whenever I arrived at a major or minor triad my objective was to sharpen the minor 3rd of a minor triad by 15 cents and flatten the major 3rd of any major triad by 15 cents. I sought to do this by using 1/6ths of a tone which amount to 16.666 cents (which I considered a good approximation) but it turned out that Musescore Studio doesn't have 1/6th tones yet. So I did the next best thing which was using syntonic commas (around 20 cents). That's all I really sought to do in the Microtonal Invention to give it a more authentic feel of a justly tuned Baroque Harpsichord. (Although there's also 1/4ths of a tone which I used in my Microtonal String Quartet).

Hello @guitarman871 and welcome to the forum! The music sounds amazingly well produced and rendered! Your score on the other hand .. did you export this from cubase or something? The beginning with the tremolo glissando is really a great way to begin the piece. You use lots of extended techniques in this such as snap pizzicato and the aforementioned tremolo glissando in the beginning. The only weakness of the piece is that it stays in the key of C minor for almost the whole duration. You seem to try and remedy this by modulating to Db towards the end, but your modulation of just bringing the piece a half step up to bring some sudden freshness into the music is just a momentary fix, often used in Pop music. It doesn't solve the problem of your music being harmonically pedestrian throughout most of its duration. Simple harmonies can be very accessible and certainly, making your harmony more complex by itself won't necessarily make your music "better". On the contrary over-complicating things too much can make music pedantic and pretentious. But I would encourage you to explore how more different kinds of complex harmony can drastically expand the emotional palette of your music. You could try using some tritone substitutions, augmented 6th chords, diminished chords instead of dominants, as well as chromatic mediants just to start. Good luck in your future composition endeavors and I'm stoked to hear more of your music! P.S.: I also am a beginner guitar player LoL

I listened again, and it seems like if you just removed the very last bar and made a ritardando instead of accelerando in bar 38 it might make it sound more conclusive. Especially since you finally end on an E major chord instead of the E minor that has been the tonic up to that point - it will sound like a Picardy third.

Hey @JorgeDavid! I think this rendition sounds great! For a quick first try it's really good! The melody is catchy and bluesy with all those b3 blue notes. I think if you used microtones it would sound even more bluesy since, often, blues singers, when they sing blue notes are deliberately out of tune and bending the notes down a bit lower than they would usually be in 12TET. I am assuming you used diminished chords as passing chords in your passing 5-part Saxophone harmonies? Thanks for sharing this really accessible and promising piece! Makes me want to hear more and with a full big band!

Hi @bkho I like this short piece! I think to continue an uninterrupted musical narrative throughout the whole piece you could have the piece, instead of repeating back to the very beginning, repeat to bar 3. Likewise, you could repeat from bar 20 to bar 13 instead of to bar 11 like you have. I think it would really help keep the pacing and melodic narrative going. The melody that starts at bar 52 made me expect a fugato passage, but you took it in another direction. Thanks for sharing!

Hi @Some Guy That writes Music! I like the dynamic contrasts and use of pizzicato for the whole ensemble in some parts! I think you could use even more extended techniques such as artificial harmonics and double, triple and quadruple stops (which are especially idiomatic for strings played pizzicato)! Btw, in bars 25 - 27, the notes played in the 1st Violins can all be played at once in pizzicato and don't have to be arpeggiated that way, unless of course you really want it to be arpeggiated. Once again, I felt like the majority of the piece stayed in A harmonic or melodic minor and it would have been great to hear some modulations and explorations of other tonal centers or more unusual sonorities! Thanks for sharing.

Hi @panta rei! I love the harmonic adventurousness of this sonata! There is many related themes and they're brought back in so many different keys that I lost count LoL. I think the piece still has a Schubertian flavor despite your efforts to use more "jazz-like" harmonies. I don't like the term "jazz-like", since extended and altered harmonies pre-dated jazz in romantic and neo-romantic music. It's amazing that you still manage to return to D minor after exploring so many other not-so-closely related keys in the meantime. But, despite the harmonic acrobatics, I still felt that at heart, the piece was melodically simple and conservative which is to your credit! Thanks for sharing.

Hi @Krisp! I love the mostly lydian flavor! It gives it a certain sense of awe and wonder. And your fathers photographs are a perfect foreground to the music. Thanks for sharing!

Hi @Jqh73o! Overall, the piece has some nice chromatic lines and an intriguing melody. I felt like the ending was a bit out of place. It almost made the piece sound like it was unfinished and like you meant to continue to a section in the 6/4 meter (which I'm not really sure the purpose of that metric change right near the end of the piece when it's equivalent to 12/8 anyway). The rendition is a bit grating on the ears. Musescore Studio's Musesounds has solo strings samples that are much better sounding and would give a better impression imo! Also, in chamber music both the solo string instruments would normally be placed above the piano in the score order (although, apparently there's some fervent debate about this very topic on Reddit: Thanks for sharing!

Hi @kaiyunmusic! Glad to see that you're finishing more of your pieces! Your music comes across as really really sweet. I think the pieces @Henry Ng Tsz Kiu referred to above by Joe Hisaishi are also great and something to delve into more if you want to get more into that kind of style. Also, if you haven't heard of the composer Takashi Yoshimatsu check out his "Waltz of the Rainbow Colored Roses" which I'll also link to here. We actually had a competition on this forum where everyone wrote variations on the main melody from this piece (even I wrote a variation for it!). Thanks for sharing!

What dash? There's numbers next to the sharps and flats which designate how many syntonic commas the note is to be lowered or hightened. Thanks for your review!