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I really like this cantata. You do a lot of things really well: the bass line is nice and melodious, you have very catchy ritornello themes, the macro structure of all of your arias & sinfonias make musical sense, there's a great deal of variety between the movements in terms of the core musical ideas, and you have a great sense of rhythm - all of the pieces have an excellent driving energy. It's clear that you have the Baroque spirit in you! The biggest thing I personally find lacking throughout is more adventurous melody and harmony writing. I find myself wanting more use of chords in first & second inversions, suspensions, seventh chords, appoggiaturas, more frequent modulations and use of chromatic chords etc. - all the usual musical devices that spice up your work and give it lots of colour (Disclaimer: having listened to Bach all my life, I am not familiar with the Italian Baroque, so perhaps this is my complaint with the idiom as a whole rather than your music specifically). Two other definite issues: the "recitative(s)" here ought to be called "arioso(s)". Assuming this is a solo cantata, I also think the tessitura & range of your alto should be more consistent throughout the cantata. Compare what he/she has to sing in the first aria vs the last, as an example. All of the music I compose is in the Baroque style too, so perhaps you may be interested in this?

Hi @Henry Ng Tsz Kiu! Thanks for listening too! There's debates amongst scholars on exactly where the WTC II No. 3 subject ends: after 4 notes, 6 notes, or whether it lasts one-and-a-half-bars. I don't particularly care about this debate - it's a fairly pedantic debate about labelling things. But what's very clear to me is that the main material used throughout the fugue is the first four notes alone. If you view the subject as one-and-a-half bar long then it reappears only three times for the rest of the piece, in the exact same stretto configuration as in the beginning! All of the "stretto" in the piece occurs after the first four notes too, thereby placing a great deal of emphasis to the first four notes alone. The fugue is also uncharacteristic in other ways. For example, it dissolves into a toccata-like texture with an undefined number of parts towards the end. Does this make the piece not qualify as a fugue? I suppose you can call what I've written an invention with a strict fugal exposition. But then isn't this basically what a fugue is? 😄 Thanks for spotting the consecutive 8ve as well! I've fixed the score now.

Hey @PeterthePapercomPoser! Thank you for listening and I'm glad you enjoyed the piece. This is most certainly a fugue! There are a great deal of middle entries (see mm. 16-18, 22-26), though not in the conventional sense of restating a subject in a given key - rather, the subject is really just a motif which the entire piece is weaved out of. Harmony is established by these subject entries via beginning the subject on different degrees of the scale (ala Omnes generationes from BWV 243). The five episodes are also rigorously written: mm. 5-6, 20-21, and 36-37 are stereotypical 7-6 suspension chains in different inversions, and mm. 31-34 is a replica of mm. 9-12 in a different key, which is itself a conventional falling thirds sequence constructed from the whole subject. There's even an important final entry in mm. 38! If you're not familiar with Bach's WTC II then I'd recommend having a look at BWV 872b (Fugue No. 3). It is a fugue with a subject just as short as mine.

My submission for the challenge is here: https://www.youngcomposers.com/t46132/fugue-in-a-major/ I've attached the Music Jotter version below. fugue.mid

This is a binary fugue in three voices. Each of the five "subject complexs" explores a common harmonic formula: 1. Perfect cadence, I-V-I (mm. 1-2) 2. Falling thirds (mm. 3-4) 3. Imperfect cadence, I-IV-V (mm. 7-8) 4. Ascending seconds (mm. 16-19) 5. Circle of fifths (mm. 22-26)

I'll submit a fugue in the coming few days too.

This is exactly what is permitted in 5-voice counterpoint! Have a look at the Kyrie I and the Cum Sancto Spiritu from BWV 232. You'll see that the voices mostly stay uncrossed, but voice crossing happens very frequently between all parts, and especially between the two soprano parts. You find this in SATB works too, just less frequently. To be honest, my interpretation of voice crossing is that it's more of a guideline: "make voices mostly stay in their lanes". Two problems with this. The first is that it's incredibly difficult and tiring to sing something this high for this long - I know you don't care about it but I have to mention this regardless. Second is that your timbre palette is severely limited by having a range of a diminished fifth. It sounds very very odd to my ears - like hearing a violin playing above the ledger line for 2 minutes straight. I'd like to draw your attention now to your tenor line. This on the other hand, to my ears, is incredibly interesting, fully coherent, and sounds like it was crafted with skill and care. Contrast this with your soprano line. Do you maybe now see what I mean?

Have a look at your soprano line. Does it sound like a coherent melody? What do you notice about its range?

I would say Bach's vocal music in general. Whenever I hear someone say they like Bach, it almost always actually mean they like his instrumental works. Which is a real shame: you can add up his entire instrumental oeuvre, and it would not outlast even his Leipzig cantatas.

This will be movement 4 of my cantata (WIP). Text taken from Prometheus. A sample English translation is: I honour thee, and why? Hast thou e'er lightened the sorrows Of the heavy laden? Hast thou e'er dried up the tears Of the anguish-stricken? Was I not fashioned to be a man By omnipotent Time, And by eternal Fate, Masters of me and thee?

Hi @PeterthePapercomPoser and @Hcab5861! I've modelled the overall texture and soundscape off of the bass aria of BWV 159 (which is imo the most beautiful aria Bach has ever written). The omission of a harpsichord continuo and the strings "harmonic halo" are both completely intentional - I want the mood of the music to be gentle, warm, embracing. In addition, I'm a little bit torn on Da Capo form. I think it works well in duets but by default I tend to avoid it. From a singer point of view I don't get excited about singing the first part of the piece exactly twice, and from a compositional point of view, your ritornello theme better be REALLY good to warrant a minimum of four exact repetitions (but more typically six to eight repetitions including fragments), at least for those themes that are tonally closed. I much prefer the scheme of ABA' in these cases (e.g. see the alto aria in BWV 197), where A ends in the dominant and A' ends in the tonic.

Lovely piece. For me, the opening 16-bar theme is almost too good and too delicate to be used repeatedly in this fashion. I wonder if it's possible to transpose the next 16 bars to the dominant (or similar ideas), rewriting the ending so it has a cadence in the tonic key, and expanding the middle section? It'd give your piece a nice rounded binary form, and make the return of the opening later on feel "extra special". I don't actually think the strings needs to have any melodic activity here - I support your idea of keeping the melody to the winds/brass here. However, the accompanying figures can definitely be changed over time from the quavers you have written. Let your imagination go wild!

You know, I like this piece a lot. You break out of your usual style of writing here, creating a balanced contrapuntal texture that is not dense, with plenty of nice sequences and imitation that brings contrast (the hockets like in mm. 19 to 21 are great). I also don't agree with some of the things @Guillem82 mentioned: I don't see or hear any harmonic mistakes/unresolved dissonances, and I don't mind the doubled notes on the violin. Sure, it's uncharacteristic but in this case it works fine, just like the distant modulations. Moving on to things I don't like...I would surmise it as: There is no apparent organisation or plan of your musical motifs. Let me elaborate. Regarding the first point, I remember saying to you before to analyse what Bach does in the WTC with his fugue subjects in order to get an idea of how to develop them (the formal term is fortspinnung). I really would like to make this recommendation again. It is not just fugues, or even Baroque music that this skill applies to - a control and constant development of a limited number of musical ideas is a trait of virtually all classical music. Especially in contrapuntal music, a failure to do this ends up making much of your music "noodling", where you have correctly constructed melodies, harmonies and parts that work with each other, but virtually zero connection between one bar and another. As an example, when I wrote the fugal section of the Overture of my Keyboard Suite, I recognised that the driving rhythm will be 6 semiquavers-per-bar. To achieve motivic unity, I limited myself to three possible settings of notes to this rhythm: an ascending scale, a turn figure (both of these can be found in the subject), and a rising fourth from the 2nd to 3rd notes followed by a descending scale (found in the countersubjects). You can check for yourself that except at structural cadences, every group of 6 semiquavers in the 242-bar long piece belongs to one of these three settings or their inversions. This is a somewhat extreme example; the Air for example is far more loosely bound by motifs, but I stand by my point. When you look back on your fugue, ask yourself: what is it that ties the whole work together? To me, it's certainly not the subject! The lack of subject entrances aside, the head (very nicely composed) has a characteristic descending, dotted, pattern which completely disappears after the first few bars! The tail (also very nicely composed) comprise of a descending scale and a rising seventh chord in quavers. Both of these elements return very rarely for the rest of the piece. So, if your core musical idea isn't actually the subject, what is it?

I think before anything else, you need to work on the ritornello theme a little - it is for the moment way too short. The descending fourth - ascending second harmonic sequence you have written so far however is fine. Afterwards, think carefully about what you want to do for the stuff between the ritornello theme statements. There isn't really a particularly interesting melodic line at the moment.

Hi all! Here's another fragmentary tripartite aria - it's about halfway complete. What do you think about it? What about the word setting?