piano quintet "Veil" - Character Piece for Piano Quintet

    Hey, my name's Keifer Brown. I'm 18 years old and I started learning composing in, roughly, August last year. I've written mainly for string orchestra but I haven't had any of my music rehearsed live, so I don't know what my compositions really sound like except in a sequencer. I've been looking at this site for a bit and I decided to post a piece I've written here for critique as you guys seem to be really helpful and nice! :)

    I have attached sheet music (Veil Sheet Music.pdf) and an MP3 (Veil Render.mp3) for a piece I've written for piano quintet, called "Veil." Any advice is welcome! I look forward to joining this site's community as well.

Thank you for the reply, Monarcheon!

1. You're right, they are artificial harmonics. I'll correct that! Is this written correctly?:

2. I was aware of the relative shortness of the piece but I didn't really see where development fit in with my overall plan of the piece. 

3. I wasn't aware that was a problem, thank you. My ear tends to "forgive" dissonance (if that makes sense) so I have trouble with hearing issues with that.

4. Ok. Would you mind clarifying if it's a hard and fast rule that you have to divide notes going across the center (except for whole notes) of the measure?

5. I did in fact want a direct modulation. Do you think a common chord modulation would fit better? I rather like the effect of the direct modulation but I'm so inexperienced that I may not know what I want.

6. When you say "heartrate machine with little blips in the line," do you just mean that's because there are technical issues with the piece, or are you talking about how the overall piece sounds to you? And how can I avoid this?
EDIT: Are you by any chance talking about the more or less constant eighth note motion throughout the piece?

Thank you again so much for taking the time to give feedback! I really appreciate it! :)

12 minutes ago, Keifer Brown said:

You're right, they are artificial harmonics. I'll correct that! Is this written correctly?

Yep. Make sure that the diamond is a perfect fourth above so if you need to add a sharp or flat to it, do it.

12 minutes ago, Keifer Brown said:

I wasn't aware that was a problem, thank you. My ear tends to "forgive" dissonance (if that makes sense) so I have trouble with hearing issues with that.

It's not a problem. Since this piece was mostly tonal to my ears, I applied the normal guidelines for it for the review, but if you want to do it, that's fine. Resolution is the problem, not so much the act itself.

14 minutes ago, Keifer Brown said:

Ok. Would you mind clarifying if it's a hard and fast rule that you have to divide notes going across the center (except for whole notes) of the measure?

It depends on your time signature. For a simple quadruple meter, yes, that's required. But if the time signature was 1/8 + 5/8 + 2/8, it wouldn't be a problem, make sense?

15 minutes ago, Keifer Brown said:

I did in fact want a direct modulation. Do you think a common chord modulation would fit better? I rather like the effect of the direct modulation but I'm so inexperienced that I may not know what I want.

It's your piece! I give you another perspective, but you like what you like.

Thank you for the clarifications! :)

I really loved this, great work! As noted above, at very rare occasions some notes feel like they're not in the place one would have preferred. I understand the idea of how they were supposed to sound, but it didn't sound perfect enough to do the needed effect.. I believe a simple revision would be all that's needed to fix these parts.

Thank you for the feedback @Vadrif D. Zobrist! I'm so glad you loved it!

I'll definitely keep that in mind. I've been working hard to write something good enough for someone to play so I can learn what actually works as opposed to what I think will work. Until I can manage that, I'll focus on keeping errors of that nature out of my work. Thanks again!