What I can improve on

As I am a newbie at composing, I decided that practicing specific topics is probablly better for me rather than composing new crappy pieces. Anyway, here is my attempt at practicing harmonization (among other things). It's a short 25 second piece, and the melody is kinda repetative, but I'm trying to make it interesting via chords rather than different melodies. What can I do to improve this short piece?

Thanks!

practice1.MID

I'm very new here, a starving musician and feeling a bit awed by it all!

Certainly a lot of energy in this piece.

I listened and wondered about 'repeating' the opening motif but in the relative major after the cadence at about 7 seconds, alternatively at 16 secs. The cadence at 7 secs maybe could be approached via IVa or II7 under the same melodic notes.

It may be possible to modulate further on or invent another motif after the cadence at 16 sec; and a modulation to the dominant (minor) is worth thinking about (or even dominant major in a brief modulation to get back to the tonic minor.

M

Hi, and welcome.

Your melody sounds fine to me. If you repeated it over and over, it would be a problem. Your harmony sounds fine to me too, though I agree that you might do what the previous poster said. The only problem I'm hearing is that your inner, harmonic voices don't move naturally. You might improve by getting an understanding of the concept of voice leading - that is, understanding where a line seems to "want" to go, where dissonances "want" to resolve, that sort of thing. It's a way of thinking of the relationship between chords - thinking of them as part of an unbroken line, rather than as separate.

Here is a brief article on Wikipedia to get you started: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_leading

There is nothing else wrong with this that more experience will not improve. :D