How Lovely Is Thy Dwelling Place

Hey folks,

This is my first attempt at composing for choir. It's obviously not a full-scale piece. It's meant for use as a short prelude. I would love some tips on how to spice up the piano part without disrupting the peaceful nature of the piece. Thanks!

P.S. I know you all prefer MP3 to MIDI so sorry about that :/

How Lovely is Thy Dwelling Place MIDI.mid

I'm pretty sure you weren't trying to follow baroque rule writing, so I won't harp on that. However, given that, I think you could have branched out into less homophonous writing. I think what you have here is fine (emphasis on think) but believe you should introduce some polyphony or canonical writing to add some intrigue. Nice!

That's a lovely little piece! I don't think you need to spice up the piano, personally. It's a peaceful song with accompaniment that fits the mood. If you try to get too spicy, you might try to do too much at once. My advice (and of course feel free to ignore it) is to keep this piece as it is and go write another one, and another. The next one you write, aim for spicy. Then before you know it, you'll have a suite, and your suite will have variety as a whole. If this was part of a larger set, and that larger set contained more spicy material, this piece would act as a calming interlude between more dramatic pieces. I'm sure that in a church this music would be very effective. Performed live, I imagine this piece would sound like a serene lake on a chilly Spring morning.

Quite nice!  Nothing wrong with simple, it allows the text to be clearly understood.  And church choirs in particular are always looking for pieces that they can put together fast!  When you need a different prayer response, benediction, and two anthems each and every Sunday, plus more elaborate music for major church holidays, and, by definition, a church choir is generally open to anyone who would like to participate, regardless of previous musical experience, it makes a little room in an always frantic rehearsal schedule to have something that can be learned quickly.  This would come together easily with a few run-throughs and uses the text very nicely.  Lovely job!