My piece that got to the finals of a competition

Hi, everyone! I'm a 19 year old classical piano student who has been taking composition lessons on the side for 2 years by now. The first piece i'm posting on this forum is the fourth work i've finished overall.

I started writing it about a month ago, and a week ago, a day before the competition deadline, mailed them the recording I made in a hurry on the same day. Turns out I got to the final round amongst 10 other candidates (composition majors, amongst them 2nd year academy students... so i'm a bit nervous about what's going to happen.) We were selected from around 50 applicants. Going to have to perform it in a week!

I'm quite proud - due to severe lack of time, I only got to play the first few seconds of it to my teacher quite a while ago, and she couldn't give me any comments, since... there wasn't much of the piece to comment on, yet. We didn't have time to meet again due to my piano studies, so in the end, I had to write the piece all by myself, without any of her assistance.

The title in estonian means "The guide through the darkness", inspired by the theme of the competition (and the big contemporary music festival it's a part of.) The piece, first and foremost, has a spiritual meaning for me. The "A" section was written during a period of deep depression i'm glad i'm now already recovering from. The "B" section was written later.

From a compositional standpoint, I aimed to explore different ways of using the white keys and the black keys alone. Modal music and pentatonics. At first it was in numerous smaller and larger sections, but I soon realized that a constant movement would be better. It does have an underlying system - there are always two voices, one which plays a long, sustained note (the "guide". hence the title), and the other one that moves towards it. There's a bit more to it, but i'm not going to write it all here. :)

Anyway, here's the link:

https://soundcloud.com/sven-sander-estakov/teejuht-labi-pimeduse/s-n6TlA

Hope you enjoy, and please, feel free to leave any criticisms!

Everything in the middle is fine. A bit lacking in development, either rhythmically or dynamically, but fine.
The beginning and end are just kind of... there. They go on for a long time without development, but not so much to call it minimalistic. The gradual buildup was cool using sixths below to have a second growth tier, but until that point and after that point the effect of a white key soundscape was replaced by redundancy after a little bit. Good luck to you!

I liked it!

As Monarcheon said, there is a bit lack of development. In my opinion there should be more variation in rhythm.
For the rest I have nothing to say about it.

Good luck and please let us know how it went!

Maarten

On Mon Apr 03 2017 at 6:54 PM, Monarcheon said:

Everything in the middle is fine. A bit lacking in development, either rhythmically or dynamically, but fine.
The beginning and end are just kind of... there. They go on for a long time without development, but not so much to call it minimalistic. The gradual buildup was cool using sixths below to have a second growth tier, but until that point and after that point the effect of a white key soundscape was replaced by redundancy after a little bit. Good luck to you!

 

Yes, I wondered for a bit about what to do with the beginning and end, but decided I would leave them like this, because I wanted to create an image of stillness, without much developement for the first 30 seconds or so... 

Maybe that wasn't the right thing to do, but I felt like it was/is. In a previous version, I had a beginning with more rhythmic variety from the get-go, but that sounded horribly off.

I will at least be able to play around with the dynamics more when I perform it in the finals. The dynamics I didn't have time to think about when I made this recording - I was so short on time that I was still writing down the last ideas and making the last changes on the day before.

But thank you for your feedback!