bakhtiyar

I really like the initial thematic material. It's a bit quirky, but it still "fits" what you're aiming at.

This is good. There's some room for tweaking, but overall, I think it's pretty good.

Yawn. So we get our jollies by writing music that sounds like this. We're not "recreating" anything. We're not copying anyone. And we're certainly not forcing anyone to listen to it if they don't want to. Would you say that Handel copied Corelli, or that W. F. Bach or J. L. Krebs copied old Johann Sebastian? You're spewing pure nonsense. Good music is good music. Doesn't matter what style, who wrote it, or when they wrote it.

Hello, everyone! It's been awhile since I've posted here (a few years actually) but I thought I'd share a couple of new pieces with you. This one's not very new--but it's a very thorough reworking of something I wrote back in 1996: Piano Concerto - Allegro And then another, finished rather hastily last week, so that a local orchestra could start rehearsing it: Symphony in D Major

You might want to reconsider, BE. We (as in Vox Saeculorum) are going to be running an ad, either in the next (or the one after the next) issue of Early Music America. Since you're part of VS, any attention generated will have the potential of going your way as well. So if anyone wants to "steal" your work, you have the leg up since you're already recognized as a new Baroque composer.

Individuality isn't about being different, it's about being yourself.

Did Mozart start out writing convincing Classical music? Or did he have to work at it? EVERYBODY has to work at it. Whatever they write. If you just plop the stuff out from day one, it will just be musical diarrhoea. It may take some a short time, others a long time. But there are things to be learned before one can write convincing music of any sort. Bach tried to emulate Buxtehude and Vivaldi. Handel tried to emulate Corelli, Scarlatti, and anyone else that caught his fancy. He was a notorious plagiarist. Yet all of these people, with all their copying, eventually "found their own voices" within the scope of Baroque practice. Really, this whole thing about "finding your own voice" is BS anyway. A person has independently taught himself to write music, is comfortably doing so, likes what he's doing, and does a good job of it too. Then some academic comes along and tells him that he needs to find his own way? Dude, he found his own way and now you're stepping in to tell him how he SHOULD do something he doesn't really want to do? Where's the individuality in THAT? A show of nonconformity when you're not a nonconformist is a waste of your effort and of other people's time.

Don't try to understand it. But if you're going to write music to earn a living, do try to do what they say so you can support a family. In your spare time, continue to write these masterpieces. This will be your real work, the work you will be remembered for when you're long gone. In my case, there's lots of room for improvement. Abandoning the baroque style is not one of the ways of going about it.

Can you paint at all?

Here we go again...:laugh: Just by being a "classical" (lower-case 'C'), you're limiting yourself. If your composition instructor doesn't venture beyond the realm of "art music", conventional instrumentation, etc., then he's guilty of the same sort of limitation that he's implying you have. The question is, do you slavishly copy the Baroque masters or do you add something to it that is your own, without compromising the fundamental Baroque quality of it? All of the Baroque greats were distinguishable from each other, yet they worked within the same framework and aesthetic. Some of the worst Baroque composers turned out inferior imitations of their more competent counterparts. And it shows. The composition you wrote is indeed very good. I can write Classical-style pieces just as convincingly as I can write Baroque, but I'm a Baroque person and that's where I'm staying...for the time being at least. I'm trying to see where I can infuse new life into the style, but that will hopefully become more obvious in time. But I can afford to do that because I don't do this for a living.

I'm told that Einstein recounts Mozart having told his father that he cheated on a canonic exercise in order to meet a school requirement. Evidently, the fugue wasn't one of Mozart's strong suits, even though we have examples like his Kyrie that would suggest otherwise.

Actually, the order of the voices really doesn't matter. I do make sure that the final entry, regardless of the number of voices, is always in the tonic key, but I think that's more a matter of my own preference. Two very well-known examples start in the middle voices. The third movement of Bach's fourth Brandenburg is a fugue that starts in the tenor voice (viola) and the first movement of the double violin concerto (BWV 1043) starts in the alto (second violins).

Here's the finished third movement... Concerto in e minor (III. Allegro) Now it's on to the second movement, and making note of the suggestions y'all made for the first.

I don't see (or hear) anything wrong with it. The treatment of the subject, the expositions, and the contrapuntal devices he uses are totally appropriate.

I don't know that any new music is really that merited, but I'd have to agree that, at the very least, modern "art-music" shows far less musicianship than these other genres.