Like As the Waves Make Towards the Pebbled Shore

My submission for the Shakespeare summer competition. Looking forward to hearing from the judges. Hope anyone else who listens enjoys, and comments of any sort are always welcome.

This is definitely one of my favorites now. I guess I'm just weak against the powerful seduction of strings in small numbers.

Thanks, KJ! Really glad you liked it.

Cool stuff; interesting hemiolas in there and there and other rhythms. Very unique.

I could't see the score (it didn't open up). But I could listen to it... Yes, I like it a lot. I hear consonant and dissonant stuff, combined, which is beatuiful for me.

There's only one thing I don't like very much: the transition from piano to forte in 1:36... I would do it gradually or with a pause. But it's your work... Elegant and modern.

The ideas behind this piece are amazingly simple and well executed for the most part of it. I'm delighted to hear how the depiction of time is gradually trascended by the melodies, very much in the way that Shakespeare's works have also trascended time and sparked so many different, yet equally stunning, interpretations. The classic trio (violin + cello + piano) is perhaps the only chamber ensemble I feel really comfortable writing for, and I'm glad to see how it was also your ensemble of choice. Yet another worthy entry for the Competition, which is getting all the more intimidating the more competing pieces I listen to.

Congrats!

Thank you to everyone for the kind comments! I was honestly a bit unsure of the piece while I was writing it, so I'm really glad to see that my intentions came through the way I had hoped.

1 hour ago, Luis Hernández said:

There's only one thing I don't like very much: the transition from piano to forte in 1:36... I would do it gradually or with a pause

There are actually several measures of crescendo into that section written in the score, but apparently they didn't make it into the mp3. I don't know if anyone else is having problems viewing the score, but I will go ahead and re-upload it just in case. There are a few small errors in it that I need to correct anyway.
 

EDIT: It just occurred to me that altering the score after the due date for the competition could be a little dubious, so instead I'll just re-upload the score with no changes

2 hours ago, fishyfry said:

Thank you to everyone for the kind comments! I was honestly a bit unsure of the piece while I was writing it, so I'm really glad to see that my intentions came through the way I had hoped.

Ohhh boy. Same here, fishy. I was simultaneously proud and embarrassed until I actually listened to mine a few more times. I actually had to take some time to warm up to my own music

You captured the relentless aspect of time here very well and that is what I like best about the music, the rhythms, two against three and the like. The minor key, the elegiac mood also suits the text well. Some of the tonal excursions were a tad too far out of key and abrupt (bar 13) but it's only a few scoundrel notes.  I listened to it three times and enjoyed it. But the radical changes in volume did not help the mood and were distracting imo. Great job!

It's good to hear that I wasn't the only one who had to have some time to appreciate my work, KJ. The instrumentation as well as a lot of the ways I chose to handle my material were a bit of a new experiment for me.
 

Thanks for the compliments and the constructive criticisms, Ken. I had a particular tonal scheme in mind for this piece, but I agree that there are several places where it could have been handled a bit more subtly. If I could go back, I would refine the playback a little, to better represent how I would interpret the dynamic changes.