Terve

Wow. What a piece, what a recording. Love the instrumentation and the choral writing is superb. This is awesome, I'd pay good money for it

What he said.

I don't care how old you are, I just really like your music. The freedom you obviously feel to build your quartal harmonies is really refreshing. Your melodies are also fresh and beautifully carefree (I mean that in a good way). And some sections of the harmony are really mature (I know I said I don't care how old you are, but I am very impressed you came up with the section from b.50 in movement 5 at the age of ten); but not only that, you seem to have an innate ability to keep your music cohesively within a single atmosphere, and even more refreshing is that it's a nice atmosphere with profound aesthetic beauty. Basically your music just sounds lovely (to my ears anyway); and I'm pleased that you are writing music because you enjoy the way it sounds (like in the 2nd (?) movement when you pile up all the 5ths). You're obviously young and there are aspects of your composition that reflect this. But you will learn more and mature more and I'm absolutely certain that you will make a brilliant musician and composer, absolutely no doubt. I think anyone who has said otherwise is probably just a little bit jealous, dare I say it. Finally, please do us the favour of uploading a recording of the piece when it is performed - I'd love to hear it live. Good luck for the future and keep writing. :P

Ooh, what lovely music. Not that you need any one else to tell you. :p It's gorgeous, thanks for writing it and good luck in the future, hope to be hearing your music in the cinema one day...

Aww, I trawled all the way back to July 08 find this piece because I remembered I enjoyed it so much... now it's gone :( !! I'm so sad...

Hey, I really like this piece, I have to admit I was a little shocked when the tango came in but as the piece wore on I guess I grew used to it - I quite like what you're doing but it did kind of make me unsure as to how I was meant to be responding to the music. :p I love your rhythmic variation and moments of lyricalness - like bar 51 etc - and the way it all sort of loses itself in a whirl of your individual and interesting harmonic world. Maybe I'd enjoy a bit more overall structure and direction... but then again maybe Schnittke would think it was great. :toothygrin: I think it has good entertainment value and so I'm sure it'll go down great in concert. Try and get a live recording of it then, I'd like to hear it. Thanks! (If you post the pdf and midi file separately on your first post you'll get more listeners).

I think there's a lot of interest in this, and it's a nice concept - the thin, pure, personal texture etc is especially fitting for the Nunc Dimittis text - but personally I think it lacks the direction that Part's music usually provides. One of the main reasons his harmonically and melodically repetitive church music manages to be so arresting is that it's all going towards a very spiritual climax, that uses all the simplicity of the musical idea / texture but weaves them into an all-encompassing expression of the 'message' of the text as a whole. In 'The Beatitudes', for example, the whole piece crescendos towards the final section: "Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven: for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you. Amen." These phrases are set in the same technique as all the previous, but new dissonances, pauses, and one spine-chilling extra melodic line (on "for so persecuted...") are introduced here. This coupled with the crescendo gives the whole piece a climactic section of direction and meaning which makes it more than the sum of its previous parts. I felt this slightly in your piece at your 'Domine' and 'Israel' climaxes, but I think if the last one (Israel) more elaborately summed up the harmonic ideas in the piece, we would get the cohesive direction needed here and the piece would be more communicative. Overall though, things to work on, but a nice piece. Well done.

Hey, I really liked this, I agree with reyeahman about the melodies being incredibly attractive. It was very atmospheric and illustrative; I actually really liked the octaves bit - it just seemed to fit with the understated, pretty, simple style of the piece. I also thought it was structurally great and loved your transitions. Well done!

[quote name='Rapha

Lol. There isn't a lot of music I don't like, but yes, of course, Pachelbel's boring Canon. I only hate it though because it's a vaguely pretty piece that is nonetheless so vapid that studying it simply becomes horrible after a while. And we 'studied' it in music at 12/13 for like a WHOLE TERM. Ugh, it makes me want to vomit. << I'll just interject here that I like Mahler :P >> Quite a lot of Beethoven genuinely bores me, I cannot get my teeth into it, especially the piano sonatas. It's just not my style. I'm not dissing it. I just don't get much from it. But I am horribly uneducated when it comes to the early 19th century. For some reason I find in history as well as music, barely anything from this period interests me, even though I love the surrounding eras. I have time and (usually) respect for most pop and rock etc, and am naturally really into certain popular artists. Though I would say that before I met my boyfriend (who is bigly into such stuff) I probably wasn't so much. There was a piece I saw recently by David Hill that was just so boring I couldn't believe it had been published. It was literally just five pages of Dmaj chords. I don't know how many other people really do like his stuff though, maybe they're just scared of his reputation. He's a brilliant organist.

Hey, this is very nice, I love the first section of your amen, and especially the section bb.45-51; actually I felt these bars were a more well-honed version of the theme you present at the beginning. I like the pedal notes at the beginning but maybe you could transfer some of the harmonic clarity of the later section to it? My favourite bit of the piece though was the piu mosso at 'exultemus' - the rhythmic interest here made the following phrase seem a bit lacklustre. Perhaps you could vary the note values on 'et ex corde diligamus' (and at other points) to represent speech rhythms a little more? This seems vital since you choose to quote the Gregorian chant itself near the end - set the text in more rhythmic freedom to your harmonic language, as to the melodic language of the chant in plainsong. The only bar I really didn't like was b.30 - too much movement going on in every part in what is otherwise a very static piece. Otherwise, I think this is lovely, hope you do manage to get a performance. One last thing - I really admire you setting both the Latin and the English texts side by side, it's a lovely touch. I remember one Christmas we were doing 'In Dulci Jubilo' (which has alternating lines of Latin and English/German) and my music teacher said he'd give

This reminded me a lot of a hypothetical cross between the TV/film writing of Harry Gregson Williams and Thomas Newman - it's partly the textures that do this, as your choral writing is sort of similar to the former's in the Narnia soundtracks, and the marimba is Newman's iconic instrument (in the American Beauty and Six Feet Under soundtracks). However, it's also because of the effortlessly descriptive nature of your writing, the percussive liveliness of the textures, and the loveliness of your little melodies. I do think they could take a little expansion though - the figure you have returning in the flute is too short for its potential. If you ever get to watch the opening title sequence of Six Feet Under, there's a moment in the busy marimba-led texture where a rose blooms in fast-motion, and a lovely strings chord opens up joyously descriptively. I got this satisfying illustrative feeling at many points in your piece - especially the end - you really brought across your imagery well I thought. I'm looking forward to hearing more from you. A few notes on your choral writing. It's odd, but seeing as it's simply used as instrumental texture it's largely acceptable. The long/unprepared/especially the quiet soprano Bs are technically pushing the boundaries of your average choir - though there will maybe be one (or two) who can sing this sort of nicely in a good choir. Generally, anything above a soprano A has got to be loud, and most people will find anything much higher than this very difficult to produce out of the blue, as in bb.128-129. You do need to indicate which parts the divisi chords belong to - it almost looks like you're asking your tenors to sing soprano Ds and Es in bb.128-9, for instance. You should split soprano parts more often than alto (unless you're writing for a church choir with young trebles) so in b.129 the B and G# need stems pointing up, and the D a stem pointing down. While the conductor might always change a composer's voicing directions, the choir certainly won't 'organize itself' like you said. :P Good work.

This was a really magical listening experience - lovely performance too. I felt that I wasn't being bombarded with avant garde 'freedom' but that actually this is a very restrained piece that never strays from the illustration of its subject and never gets carried away, and it just sits very well with me. There is enough melodic consistency, between ideas and within the ideas themselves (eg. the 'restrained' feeling created by upward semitone movements in something that you could loosely equate to a perfect cadence, 1st two chords of 3rd section) that the piece never becomes boring. I like it very much.

What I really like about this piece is the rhythmic interest in it (I especially like the second line of the score, the three phrases separated by a quaver rest, a semi-quaver rest and another semi-quaver rest); I really felt you had explored the original rhythmic ideas intriguingly by the end. I wonder though how accurately these ideas could be portrayed in all but the most perfect of performances, and also if there was a small section of longer notes I would think the piece would suddenly feel much more balanced. Overall, the piece's melodic catches keep you hooked in and the harmonic ideas are also lovely in a mercurial sort of way. I'd love to hear this live to get the full effect of the directions you have in the score (which I think is beautiful btw). This is one really interesting, likeable piece and I'm looking forward to hearing the others. :)

Hey - this is a great birthday present. ;) It's very fun, I like the little Tempo Primo bits in the slow section, as Euler mentioned. I watched the youtube video as the soundclick thing was being very slow. I think it's a good idea to put compositions on there - way before I found youngcomposers.com I was searching out all the videos tagged with 'original/new composition' etc. Good work. :P