Giacomo925

Thank you! This is superuseful! It's the climax of the development in the revised first movement, so I would like to keep up both the volume and the dissonances, and the piano is already "busy". But I'll look into it and see if I can organize the passage differently and without double stops. "It does not sound as connected" as in I shouldn't put slurs on the double stops because they can't really be played legato?

Thank you PCC! I try and avoid double stops because I don't know if they are doable... but sometimes I fall into temptation! Is it obnoxious to ask whether you can check this passage from the first mov? Is there any rule of thumb I could use - besides "no double stops!" 🙂 - to make sure I don't demand too much of the cellist?

I listened to the whole thing in a beautiful spring day taking a walk through the city and ending up listening to the newest part sitting on a bench in a park. The setting was lovely and it allowed me to fully appreciate the powerful music. I don't have an articulate review, but only a few impressions. I hope I'll have time to deepen analysis and listening. I did not remember how pulsating with life and intensity the first movement is. There is a moment when the pulsating, breathing vibration crystallizes in the imitative section. Strangely, it is like a oasis of silence and holding of breath, before the pulse comes back, running over everything else. It is joy, but also somewhat sinister, as if it is *too much* joy. At the beginning of the second movement, joy leaves room to tension, breaking, almost cruelty. And then the grosse Fuge begins. Pentatonic melodies disappear, pulsating joy disappears, even the breaking sighs of the initial part of the movement disappear, all swallowed by counterpunctal order. The cosmic clash seems to be between the pulsating, dancing hymn to life (Beethoven 7th...) and the regimented emotions of the fugue: the emotions are there but we look at them as if through the glass of a cabinet. But the glass cracks when pentatonal passages start appearing in the fugue again. In fact, to me this whole composition seems to be a wonderful attempt to join east and west, pentatonic and counterpoint, sonata and trenody, the past and the present, now easing unearthed contradictions, now acknowledging and espousing them. The pulse comes back at the end, closing a circle that invites many listens because has many facets, reflections, sparkles, and dark corners despite the luminous ascending ending. Thank you Henry!

To be honest, @Henry Ng Tsz Kiu, I have listened to the second movement of the piano sonata like a week or so ago, but only once and it requires more listens and attention for me to say something remotely meaningful about it. I found it wonderful but I'd like to try and say something more articulate and I can't yet 🙂 Can't wait for the sextet to be published and saved on my phone! These days the weather is nice and I walk to work and I'm looking forward to listening to the whole thing (might need to leave home early and take some detours to make it fit, but it'll be so worth it!).

Schumann and Brahms were mentioned, but to me this piece brings to mind Schubert. The melody of the theme is simple and elegant and sings like springtime in your ears, the harmony joins so nicely that - I hear this in Schubert a lot - it's not immediately clear if the melody guides the vertical writing or vice versa. That said, I'm not a fan of the sudden chords in b. 24 and 63-4 (esp 63-4). And maybe at b. 46-7 I would have liked to hear the cute descending inciso with the repeated note from b 42-3 and 44-5, but what do I know! But I love love love the c# minor section especially 50-57 with the sixths in b. 54 just very beautiful. Thank you Henry!

OK, I did that and it sounds better already 🙂 Thanks! We're all waiting for the big drop!! Meanwhile... is the "little" piano piece the Intermezzo I just listed to on youtube? (Can't find it here, I need to sharpen my forum tech competencies!) I think Schubert would be proud of you! I can see him smiling! I love the elegant and expressive simplicity of the melody, and how it seamlessly supports rather distant harmonic gyrations. And thanks for these kind words too! I had no idea that a polyrhythm (you mean the triplets at the violin with the 16th arpeggios at the piano?) A friend of mine is insisting to try and find students to play this. I would love that but I think it'd require lots of fine tuning of individual parts for playability? I never write at the piano and every time I try to play the piano part I'm horrified by how unnatural it is to my hands! Let alone strings, which I don't even play. GPT says a cellist can play pizz. 8th notes comfortably at 120-150 bpm. So that passage at b. 75 should be playable, but I guess it also depends on *which* notes are being played lol. I decided to go in d minor, with is a bummer because previous to this trio I already wrote a d minor quartet. What can you do! Meanwhile, here's the third movement, revised in light of @PeterthePapercomPoser and @Henry Ng Tsz Kiu suggestions, among others. I don't think the main concerns were fully addressed but I hope it sounds better now...

The melody is so good, and so is the ensemble. Do you think you woud like to develop this into a longer piece?

I like this a lot. It's very creative, daring, always interesting and with a few moments that are just.. beautiful. I agree with others that sometimes the writing is not I think ideal for what you are expressing. My 2c, from hobbyist to hobbyist, mainly would be: play more with sonorities, the four instruments don't all have to play the entire time, and silencing some would enhance some passages, and make the piece even more interesting. It's amazing what you manage to do not moving much if at all from b minor.

OK, here's the second movement, F major 2/4 Allegretto with a 4/4 G major mid section Scorrevole...The general form is ABA' - CD - ABA' and a short coda based on A. I wanted a contrast with the dramatic tone of the first movement, a bit lyrical with the initial arpeggios and the violin triplets and the cello theme in the mid section.

Oh wow, @Henry Ng Tsz Kiu! I think you might be busy polishing the sextet hence the no suggestions. I'm sure there's lot to improve. For instance I don't love the connection between b. 34 and 35 but I can't figure out how to do it nicely! But in any case means a lot to hear your praise! Thank you thank you thank you! As per your question, this is embarrassing... So much time has passed since I wrote the first movement that somehow in my head it became f minor (f minor was the main key in development I guess), and so I wrote the last movement in f minor. Then I published this post yesterday and I look at the title and it says... c minor! So now I'm not sure what to do. I can't transpose c into f or f into c, everything would be too high or too low. So I was thinking to minimize damage: first movement transposed from c to d minor. Second movement is and stays in F major. Third is and stays in g minor. Fourth transposed to f to d minor. not ideal, but I can't think of anything better other than rewrite the first or the last movements!

Hello! I understand that everyone has been waiting for months, wondering every day what happened to the trio and hoping to get updates. Well, your wait is over! Just kidding, of course 🙂 I went through an otherwise busy and largely uninspired period and have not written a note for a while. Then, recently, a couple of ideas came, I was very doubtful, but kept working on them and now, for better or worse... the trio is finished. Or at least, a first draft that I hope to make better thanks to your invaluable comments. This is what happened: First Movement - stayed the same Second Movement - wrote an Allegretto Third Movement - incorporated as best as I could the suggestions I received from @Henry Ng Tsz Kiu and other kind commenters. @PeterthePapercomPoser opened my eyes on how monotonous and boring the whole thing was. It probably still is, but I tried to make it less uniform/dissolved in rhythm and melody. Fourth Movement - Allegro vivace in 12/8. Here's the 4th movement. It's a Rondo ABACADA and any suggestion to make it better would be so welcome!

wait what? one can *give* reputation points? I was not aware! how?

I chose "not enough time" and "other", and I meant to say sonething about "other" in this post. Something about how I mostly enjoy listening to music posted here, but I'm never clear as to what to say in a review. I don't want to be negative for stuff I do not like. I would like to be useful suggesting solutions that I think would sound better even in pieces I like. I would like to highlight what is really good so that people could see better why a piece of music is succesful. But in the end I listen to a piece and being constructive and positive is just... difficult. Not time-consuming, but just really difficult to articulate. I don't have the technical ability to be helpful offering advice. But I also don't really know how to explain why I like or dislike a posted piece. Then it dawned on me why that is. So I hit the back button and chose "not good at analyzing music" 🙂

Two anectodes, one historic, one personal. Historic. There is a famous letter of Mozart to his father, where he tells him about how a piano concerto (?) was received and how he felt about it. And as I remember it, Mozart says that he was quite happy with the concerto because "normal" people liked it, and expert musicians found intresting/intriguing/innovative things in it and hence liked it. Personal. An undisclosed number of years ago 🙂, I hosted for a few days in my apt a friend of a friend who now is a famous conductor and back then was a student seeking admittance at a prestigious school in the US. We talked a lot about music, we played Schubert f-minor Fantasia together, he showed me some rudiments of conducting, it was three exhilarating days (for me at least 🙂). And towards the end, he was playing Elektra on my piano, showing me the daring harmonies used by Strauss etc, and then at some point he like stopped with a sigh and said---I'm kinda envious of you, who can just listen and enjoy instead of working all the details of a score. What I'm trying to say is that "understanding" is a big word. Take the "risanato" slow movement from the a minor late beethoven quartet. What does it take to understand it? Do you need to understand/know that it is a hymn? do you have to catch its mystic character? Do you have to understand the gratitude for healing that permeates it? do you need to understand the ancient use of modality? do you need to grasp the subtle bits of the harmonic composition? the interplay between the four instruments? etc etc. It's a big term and it's hard to define it, to justify leaving something out of it. As it happens, some people will have the technical ability to "understand" more elements than others do. Some people will have a more basic enjoyment. Sometimes the former might encroach into the latter as my conductor friend implied. I find it very interesting what was said in this thread: different audiences at different times will "understand" (or: will have the tools to understand) music differently than us. Maybe chamber music in the classical period was understood more than the generic audience of a classic concert does today. I doubt many in a concert hall today do know/understand the forma sonata, or the intricacies of counterpoint, while in the 1700s you could generally expect a higher level of sophistication from most audiences. So a lot of what we mean by "understanding" will depend by the "vocabulary" so to speak that one possesses. One learns about Galant schemata, and recognizes them and learns how to use them, and it's a bit like learning new words in a language, allowing you to understand or better undertsand what's said, and say things yourself, too. Classical music is I think one of the most amazingly intricate forms of art that we humans have been able to generate. But music (some of it at least) has also this amazing property, that one could now nothing about theory, and still, like I was at age eight many years ago, be moved and engrossed and hooked by listening to a counterpoint of the art of the fugue. It's elusive, i think, to try and figure out what was there to capture your heart so fully. Maybe you learn how to play, you learn harmony, you learn counterpoint, you learn how to write a fugue, and yet you're peeling layer after layer of an onion, and in the end there's nothing left and what really captivated you remains ineffable. So you can understand the technique, you can marvel at the abilities of Bach, you can get a glimpse of why a certain solution was chosen and not another, but what links your heart to that piece, that so many times (most times? always?) remains not understood, and it's a big part of the beauty of music.

It is the same, and it's great! It is so rare to listen to music thought through so well, and with a deep emotional content that goes well beyond the technical abilities or the mastery of expressive music writing. Sometimes life gets in the way, and, for better or worse, life is bigger than composing. But I trust you'll find the time and the peace of mind again, and I hope soon!