Your First Work

This thread is mostly for those of us who are relatively experienced at composing, but anyone is welcome to participate. I did something similar on the old board.

I thought it would be interesting to do a bit of a retrospective on who we were as composers when we first started this business...rather like looking at old pictures of us as kids or something.

If you dare, post your very first work (or earliest extant effort) here in this thread - or a link to a thread elsewhere on the board that contains it, if you've already posted it. It should be fascinating to see where we started and how far we've come. Tell us at least something about the piece, and how old you were when you wrote it.

Don't be shy about it! Since I know this could be a sensitive area, I would ask that we all be kind and considerate of each other in commenting on these early efforts. I'm saying up front that if anyone says anything nasty about anything that gets posted here, it will be edited or deleted. I (and the moderation team if they choose) will be arbiters of this. If you don't think you can be nice, or you don't like the rules, you know the way out.

Here we go!

Ok, I guess I will start it off. I do not consider myself as an accomplished composer or even a true composer for that matter. I would say that I have tried before to compose things and have liked my efforts to some extent. I have two compositions that I am considering my real "keepers" so far. That would be my hymn and soon to be my cello sonata. The others are sort of just me trying to get an idea for what is going on. I do not have a music class that I compose for and I do not have a job that I compose for. I do not know a lick of composition theory. I do know basic theory, but the relationships such as melody writing, 2 part writing, counterpoint, etc. I do not know anything about. Composing is just a much liked hobby of mine. I haven't given it as much effort as I would like. I do not compose as often as the rest of you guys. So, I would say that I am still a beginner composer.

I first started a couple years ago when my piano teacher required me to right a theme over the week. I was probably about 14 or so. So, I wrote this march like theme and never developed it into anything. My teacher was impressed with what I had written and said that if I went into college for music that I would be very happy with the results. Well, I didn't finish the theme (I may do something with it someday), however, I did write a full composition from a different theme. I have never entered that composition into the computer so you will not be getting my very first. However, the one I have posted here is one of my first compositions. I wrote this when I was about 15 (and of course didn't really finish it because I have never really finished anything except my hymn. :P) I hope you enjoy one of my little thingys. It isn't really much of anything, but it is kinda interesting to see how my mind worked 3 years ago.

Etude.MUS

Hrm. My first composition was a major work... it's my concerto for horn and chamber orchestra. I suppose I'm a bit unusual in that I started out with a big project and took years to finish it, and never really doodled at all before that.

http://www.youngcomposers.com/forum/Horn-C...No-1-t1706.html

I think my style changed noticeably during the 2 1/2 years I spent composing the horn concerto, and has evolved quite a bit in the 1 1/2 years since I finished it. It's just hard to objectively trace its development when I write so little.

What an interesting thread, shouldn't it be in Composer's Headquarters though?

Here is my earliest extant work, a piano trio. I never dared to move behind what little theory i knew back then, which usually produced boring and monotonous results, but this piece was, although based primarily on three chords, suprisingly colourfull for my ''early period''.

Hopefully you'll have a good laugh, heh.

Edit: I found the courage to upload my very early sketch for the revision, it uses the same basic idea but it is improved on various points.

Okey..

Well this really dates from quite a while back.

These files are from when I used to write music for band - drums bass guitar,

that type of band.

Alot of it is really rubbish, but it's who I am and who I was.

Alot of these date from 2003-2004. I do have earlier stuff, but I can't find it.

You can see how some of it improves over time, and my leaning almost towards

classical, although it's very slight. Unfortunately the pieces aren't in any order,

but...

And then I put in one or two of my first classical pieces, or experiments.

The one called "new celebration - dan" is one I wrote for GCSE music last year,

and it represents my first realised attempt to write 'classical' music.

I have attempts before it, but I can't find them.

Any of the pieces with flute, violin, or acoustic guitar are probably when I started

to head in a different way, and I ended up here, where I am now.

Some other earlier pieces of mine are on this site.

That awful trumpet concerto, that brief capriccio, and possibly something else.

There you go then!

(btw, change the extension of the old stuff.mid to .zip i.e. old stuff.zip and then unzip it)

P.S. some of the levels in the midis are awful, sometimes you can't hear the drums well, or the bass..

old_stuff.mid

Here are my very first works. They were commposed for Harp (The Mystic Lake) and for Piano (the others) and I love them all, but the reviewes told me that these don't have any structure (could it be because I was a beginner?).

Anyway, my profesors told me it was a very good beginning compared to others even older and more experienced than me. Hope you enjoy!

PD. Many of them are REALLY structure-less (String Duet) because I wrote them like there was no tomorrow.

Awesome thread. Here is the link to my very first composition:

My First

I was 13-14 when I wrote this, and this was composed with an old program called Midisoft Music Magic. In fact, I used this program for about 10 years before buying a higher end professional notation software.

There really is no basis for this piece. I just experimented and composed what sounded right to me, at the time. Actually, this is how I compose today, I just experiment and write down what sounds good to me (obviously, I am much more careful and picky now). I think my inspiration to compose may have been due to listening to Mozart's string quartet in D minor, but I had no idea it was Mozart at the time. I just was, and still am, impressed by that piece. I also was so envious how someone can write something so beautiful, so I had to try it myself, to see if I could do it :w00t: And I couldn't :wacko: That's why I kept trying, and trying, and trying :D

Obviously, my first piece sounds nothing like my current style, or any style really :D

Hi, my first work is this. It is a round for a choir but I never put any words in it...

hhhff.MUS

Oh my. I can't resist. Out of consideration for your sanity, I will not post any of my very earliest Frankenstein monsters. Abominations of musical nature, those are. I have used them for scrap, occasionally. No, I will show you my earliest real effort. This piece took me five hours to write, in collaboration with a friend I had at the time. Having no ideas of musical structure, I sent him the beginning section, and he transposed it and sent it right back as the development. The bit between the ascending scale in the bass, and the triplet section is his, kind of. I changed the melody to fit. Whatever. My old obsession with Beethoven, especially the third movement of the Moonlight sonata, may show. I called it 'Dark Bass'. I believe this is the sixth and final iteration of it produced in those five intense hours.

Actually, I'll offer another piece from a few months later. I have no memory of writing this piece, but it's on my computer, and it has a certain weirdness I have come to associate with my music. My love of pitch and volume mpcs shows. I called it 'Orchestral Masterpiece' with, I'm sure, a liberal dash of sarcasm.

DB6.mid

Orchestral_Masterpiece.mid

Ravel's Radical Rivalry - It's interesting for a first composition, I think the melody sounds quite impassioned. However, every beat seems to drag on forever. Try setting the tempo to 170 and see what you think!

Chris Shaver - Also interesting! (#5) Sounds like something out of a horror movie actually.

CaltechViolist - HEEHeehhe... :huh:

this is interesting so far, i'll listen some more of these eventually. Keep 'em coming!

Requiem%20Aeternam[1].MID

My first composition, 2 years ago on classical guitar.

cmajstudy.mid

You guys all rock so hard. ;) This has been really enjoyable listening to these little gems.

Here's mine. If this isn't my earliest work, it's certainly the oldest one I can find.

I was almost 10 I guess when I wrote this little Sonatina. I performed it on one of my first piano recitals. I was a Classicist even then...and a little too in love with Alberti bass. I do like the right-hand crossover to the bass in the B section, though.

All of you guys had better first compositions than me, congrats!

Some of you had pretty structured pieces, such as RRR, Letehn, and J Lee. Are you sure these are your first attempts :P

Some pieces didn't have structure, well, like...mine for sure!

Caltech, your horn concerto was your first?? My lord :wacko:

Wow, are you guys serious? I am actually getting beginners praise for my etude?! I kinda like this :P I never really thought too much of it. I guess I just kinda get lost in my own criticism of my work and think that whatever I will do it will suck because I am not that great. I may start thinking things a little differently.

Chopin - this was my second or third. Thank you for that compliment. I am going to enter my very first into the computer and maybe post it here pretty soon. But, yes, this is my closest to first piece that has been entered into the computer (I used to just do everything by hand because I didn't have Finale).

Letehn - I do agree with you that it is a little slow and draggy. However, I cannot stand it going as fast as 170. I think that it looses the passionate side that you talked about. When I originally wrote this I felt that any fast than 100 would make the whole thing sound to rocky. What I mean is that the rhythmn would sound like the whole piece was rocking back and fouth like the very turbulent sea during a storm. I didn't like it and I still don't. But, I am kinda liking the idea of it going a little faster and maybe extending it into a full fledged composition. I would definitely like to break out of the rhythmic drag. I think it works ok for this piece, but this is the way I always compose. I have the hardest time being loose (like adding a really beautiful, gracreful scale pattern in the middle of a piece) It is not that I do not want to, but I just have trouble getting past things not adding up mathematically. I think this is my greatest downfall and I wish I could break the habit. I am trying anyways, but when I compose if things do not come out beat for beat than I go insane on the sheet music. I wander if anyone else has ever had this problem. :wacko: As of now. I am thinking the best tempo is something around 120.

Actually, Chopin, your piece was perhaps the most surprising (pleasantly) of the lot to me...though they're all fine efforts.

I've always been very structured creatively. I latched onto forms from day one. I've never written a free-form piece in my life.

Letehn, I actually really like that work! Some neat harmonies going on there, you should write more on that.

Hands, wowie! That's a cool bass line, with the #4s going on in the rambunctious bassline. Nice.

RRR, that was very jazzy, and I got the sentimental idea you were going for. I like the harmonies, although rather static, but plenty of minimal-goodness. Nice.

Mr. Graham, that sure is a happy piece of music. :D Very cheerful and sunny.

*ahem* I lost all my 10 or 11 or so rags that I wrote when I started out composing, and the waltz and the 2 string quartets, and most of the video game music, but I do have a coupld semi-early gems I'll share.

First, there's Arabian Crap, or Arabia in G, or something. This is the piece where I learned it's ok to give the performer something hard to play. It's for piano, and is based on a simple melody in the Arabic scale. Written at about 15 or 16.

The second is a composition which started my whole fascination with meters of 7. It's called Lucky Seven, and it's for Piano Four Hands. It's pretty...neat, I guess. Written just before the Arabian thing, at around 15 or 16.

haha, I guess mine wasn't very impressive.

Wha...oh my, how did I miss that?

Meta, that's actually pretty darn good. Were you able to play that? Sounds pretty tricky...I guess you weren't a beginner at guitar even if you were at composing.

I'd love to have heard those rags, Nick. What you have here is nifty, though. Your pieces often have an ironical sense of humour about them. :D

My first work.... time to dig out the file cabinet....

Well, I never really composed until last november, and the first "thing" I wrote was a double canon, well, that's what I call it- it's a canon w/ two themes at the start and then kinda goes harmonic... it gets really boring after the first minute, so sorry about that. I tried to introduce a second theme halfway through, but I never got it to work well.

double_canon.MID

Caltech, your horn concerto was your first?? My lord :D

Hey, what can I say? As it is, I was 19 when I started working on it (and 21 when I finished it) - which is still a lot older than most of our members are right now.

I have only been playing guitar altogether for..3 years on the dot somehwere this month, classical guitar for about 2 1/2 years.

I had only been playing a year when I wrote that study, and I wanted something tricky because, ...well most studies seem tricky. =\

Seems as though, I didn't choose music. It chose me, or perhaps SomeONE chose it for me.

I'll chime in late in the day. Composed when I was about 13, my first composition (done on the computer at least) was entitled simply "C Quartet". What's funny is that it isn't actually a quartet - it's a trio with piano, violin and pizzicato strings. I must have thought back then that a quartet was just something with four staves on the music. ;) As for how long it took to compose, several days I think. I was pretty slow back then.

Listening to it now makes me cringe but I guess this whole thread sort of has a theme of "if you show me yours I'll show you mine" so that's OK.

There's quite a lot of impressive stuff on this thread for first time composition efforts. Great how Lee's sounds kind of like something Mozart would have written at that kind of age. :)

cquartet.mid

This is the first thing I EVER remember composing- I must have been five or six. I worked on it (as seriously as someone that age can ;)) for about three months. Then I had this. I just wrote it down now- I've had it memorized for about nine years. Isn't that scary? (I just couldn't figure out how to write it down... but I got the rhythyms perfectly written now! Ha!) And I seriously didn't change a SINGLE NOTE after those three or so months of working on it. Anyway... I called it Underwater Harmony because I used pedal on it. I liked the left hand pattern, as you can see... a bit overdone, but we're being painfully honest here. >_<

So. here goes nothing... my first composition is laid out in the light.

SonataQuartet.pdf

Underwater_Harmony.MUS

Darned you and those technologically advanced, if-you-want-it-you-can-get-it type kids these days. I am still stuck back on Finale 2004. I cannot listen to any of your compositions because 2006 is incompatible to my version. It would be helpful for me and others to post a midi file of the same composition.

Anyways, I do the same thing and have the same situation as fuz Ph.d. (;) ). I am in the middle of writing down my VERY FIRST piece that I completed when I was about 14 or 15. I have notated parts of my first piece using the ancient technique known as manuscript paper and pencil. However, I do have it memorized. I am going to keep the old notation the same until I get to areas that are not written down then I am going to probably enter the new stuff correctly as opposed to what I have wrong from before. (I can already tell that I wrote the whole thing in the wrong key signature!) I hope to have this in this thread before Tuesday or so. :)

Hello! I'm through a second stage of my carreer as a novel-writer, poet and music-composer. I composed this like a week ago, so you can see the difference between the old ones and the new ones. I posted the older ones at the beginning of this thread.

Hope you all keep composing and reading books!