林家興

There are actually some very pleasant harmonies in this; the way you've voiced the dissonances, with mostly a more open type of spacing, gives them less of that harsh/gritty feel and more of a floating/suspended quality. Although you say it's atonal, sections of it (especially near the start) occasionally seem to wander about a tonal centre, although it is by no means fixed. And kudos for the live performance!

Thank you Jorge! I think I'm still trying to find my compositional style (which is a lifelong pursuit), but I think I've settled on what I'd consider a palatable mixture of Late Romantic/neoclassical/jazz (?) influences. The piano soundfont is the free Spitfire Labs Autograph Grand. I occasionally find that the Autograph Grand is a bit too bass-heavy and rather quiet in the upper registers, but it does an okay job; one that performs better higher up is the Labs Soft Piano, which I also sometimes use.

Hey everyone, While I've been quite busy with university during the past year, I've started uploading some of my compositions to a YouTube channel, which I think better presents my music as a score-audio combo. They're all still computer renditions, but I hope to begin uploading my own performances these next few months (including of other works, mainly Scriabin). Here's a waltz that I originally wrote for one of those community-organised composition challenges on MuseScore, in which it was required that a note be repeated at least once in every bar of a piece. I ended up bestowing upon it the nickname "Waltz of the B(ee)s" for that reason and gave the score to my music teacher as a gift. Among all of my pieces, I think this is the one I'm closest to recording myself, so I'll update this thread when I'm ready!

Haha some very astute observations @Jqh73o! 90% of what I play and listen to is probably Scriabin (slowly weaning off him, however). I made some effort to suppress his influence to see if I could let my personal compositional style roam free, but it looks like might've been a bit too obvious. In terms of quotation, I'm usually quite prudent with what material I choose to pluck and why, but a lot of the time things will weasel their way in subconsciously. The only Scriabin sonatas (is sonate the right plural?) I intentionally referenced were the 4th and the 7th, as you did point out. Of course, I'm a big fan of his majestic climax-restatements, so perhaps I was indirectly inspired by the Allegro de concerto, Sonatas 3-5 and the Fantasy in B minor. I was actually thinking of Kapustin's Sonata 2 when I wrote the repeated-note passages, mainly from the first and second movements, but I can see the resemblance to the 9th Sonata. The introduction with the tremolos and the first theme are both proper references to the opening of Scriabin's Symphony 1. I recall noodling around at the piano with Winkler's transcription when I improvised bars 35-38, which was the first section of this sonata that I came up with.

Thanks for your comments @PeterthePapercomPoser! Yeah, bringing audio up to the right volume seems to be a persistent issue with me, especially with tracks and YouTube videos. I usually err on the quieter side in case I blow somebody's eardrums, so hopefully I've corrected the MP3 to be more audible this time around. I'm also glad that the ending and my predilection for ii-V's stood out to you. I indeed tried to make the first and second themes avoid the tonic for as long as possible, mainly to douse the music in some forward momentum and partially because it sounds good. The fact that the second theme modulates from its tonic I to a cadence pointing towards the supertonic was entirely by accident when I was writing it, so when it came to the coda I needed to find a quick fix to move everything back into F major. Naturally, D7 → Gm7 ↔ C9 came easily enough; however, I did want the last two chords to almost blend together into a harmonic cloud of smoke so that quick ii-V alternation melts away. Once I get around to recording it I'll be sure to post a reply to this post!

Hey everyone, Just wanted to share a piece that I recently finished. If you'd like some context and a musical breakdown, feel free to pop out the spoilers; if not, have a read/listen and let me know what you think. I'd like to get some feedback on this before I polish up the score!

Did you still need these pieces recorded? I know it's been almost two weeks but I have a nice-sounding digital piano and thought I might be able to help 🙂

For context, the waltz that I'm writing currently has a very satisfying introduction (which I borrowed very liberally from the start of Scriabin's 5th Piano Sonata) and a first theme that I'm somewhat pleased with. Attached is what I've jotted down of a second, intermediary theme that I plan to develop later on, as well as some chord labels to track where I want the harmony to go; I'm a little less sure about this secondary theme. I think I've listened to this over and over again so many times that I've gotten quite familiar with it, but does any part of the chord progression feel stilted or weird? For a modulation to C minor, it's probably a bit convoluted. Also, I'm not sure if the melody 'seems' unique enough, or compact enough, even, to be memorable, esp. with its rhythm and contour?

Still a newbie on this site but thought I'd share as well 🙂 I'm still not yet out of my Scriabin 'phase' (if you can call it that), where after a long period of listening to sections all over his compositional repertoire, I've recently started sorting through all of his opus numbers in order. As of now, the Op. 37 Preludes have graciously infected me over the past few days. I think they encapsulate what makes middle-period Scriabin so intoxicating; a moody temperament, harmonies that remind me of slightly-burnt sugar, and, occasionally, some lovely lyricism. A bit of the Belgian vocalist Jacques Brel has popped back into my schedule for sanity's sake. As an ongoing student of French at school, I fell into a bit of a old-school French chanson rabbit-hole a while ago and only just evicted the last of these bangers...or so I thought. Nothing comes close to the theatricality of this. And after an extended period of time having only known Zhu Jian-er for his orchestral masterpieces, I went back for a couple of solo piano works. These two preludes (Op. 4) date back to 1955 and are some of his oldest, and though they evoke a somewhat more fluid and reserved sound than what I expected, numerous idiosyncratic features still stand out to me: beautiful melody and phrase writing, carefully-applied impressionistic harmonies and masterful mood-setting. Even parts of these piano works sound like they were conceived with an orchestra in mind, looking at bars 21-29 in Prelude No. 1.

Very nice! Though it lasts for a bit longer than most songs these days, I was hooked all the way through, even without lyrics. Your choice of instrumentation and timbre is heavenly and draws very well from the 80s 🙂

I quite like the theme you've written, especially seeing that it sounds very idiomatic with the clarinet (I am no woodwind player, however). It looked to me as if there wasn't much indication as to where it would be reasonable to breathe, but I guess that should be up to the player 🙂 Apart from rhythmic variation on a verbatim quotation on the theme, you could also choose to slice up the theme into different bits and develop ideas on those separately; for example, you could have a variation that only uses the descending figure from the first bar, or a variation that only develops with that rising appoggiatura. Harmonic manipulation, as Henry suggested, is also possible, as is a lot of things you could do to the theme (inversion and retrograde modifications, playing it at different tempi, embellishing it, as you've done, or even stripping it down to the basics). I'd be interested to see what other variations you might be interested in making are.

The 55 sounds considerably more light-hearted than the 56; given this contrast, these two actually work quite well paired together. 55 sounds like it quotes a very well-known posthumous bagatelle, if I'm not mistaken 🙂 Agreeing with Aaron above, 56 would be great if you could expand on it. There are lots of themes that you could work with separately (and possibly distil into their own pieces if you're skilled in thematic development). I quite like the hand-crossing gestures starting in bar 7.