Whirlpool

A few weeks ago, I was intending on writing another wind band piece but then it became hard and so I started procrastinating by tossing out this piece over a few hours (though I'd had the idea floating around in my head for a while). I also spent a small amount of time at a real piano to make sure it was playable, and although I couldn't get it all up to tempo just then I'm sure that with time it would be easy enough.
I showed it to my tutor and his main problem with it was that the overall arc wasn't very convincing - it didn't sound 'complete' and the ending didn't seem fitting, mostly due to the fact that I don't really have a home key. There are three key moments of rest/stability: A minor, E major, and F# major. The first of these isn't really solidified enough (it moves away too quickly), and the other two sound very disconnected. At the time, I hadn't really invested a lot into this piece and I wasn't writing it for my course, but rather just to get some ideas out. So, I kind of left it to rot for a bit since then.

Thinking about it now though, I wonder if I could improve it by reconciling those three areas of stability into the same key. For example, introducing the E major early on, and then figuring out the last transition such that the ending can stay in E major. I do like the underlying idea and a lot of the progressions.

What a surprise.

It's a wonderful piece, I like it very much. I love the part almost at the end when it becomes harder with those chords, to go back afterwards.

Honestly, I don't see the problem with the home key and that... I don't see why a piece must have a home key or whatever. You can do what you want. If you feel you need a "home key", work on it to find it. If you think it's good as it is, there's no need to change anything just because it should be in a particular way...

In music anything is possible.

@stewboy

I wish I could compose something like that.

You succeed in making a piece on one instrument, with almost single rythmic idea, that is also interesting.

Usually rythmicly repetitive pieces makes me bored in half a minute.

In this one I didn't get bored for a second, you kept changing chords and scales.

Thanks for sharing and I hope to hear more music of yours in the future.

Thank you! This piece was really one of my 'exploration' pieces where I'm just experimenting and playing around with what I can do with chords. They can often end up a little unfocused and unstructured but they can result in some really neat ideas which I then reuse in more thought-out works :)

@stewboy

May I ask how you do that? 

Unfortunaly, when I grew up the only thing my father listened to

(therefore the only thing that I heard in the house, and heard for hours upon hours during to this day)

is music with one or two chord progressions of three or four chords, so that's my default :(

Please teach me how to get out of this pit, and I'll be so greatful for that.

I know how to compose without a chord progression, you can see my "battle" piece under "orchestral pieces",

but it's really difficult to me and... actually I don't think that I never came up with a piano piece with more than two chord progressions...

If you have the time for that, please tell me how you come up with special chords, how you do your modulation, and...

basically I'd like to see a talk by you about how you composed this piece.

Please consider that, and if you do it, please do "@" and then my user name, like I'm doing in my messages, so I'll get a notification.

@stewboy

Just to make it clear- I took theory lessons for a few years, so I know how to do that theoretically.

But when I'm composing my own piece... well... :(

You see, it's like math lessons when you learn a new thing.

You can understand it when the teacher does that, you can go through other people's solutions and understand them,

but doing it yourdelf is a whole different story.

You know what?

Don't tell me how you did that. I'll try to do it myself through work, cause that's how you really learn.

If I succeed I'll publish my work on this forum.

Thanks for reading everything I wrote (if you really did).

@Rabbival507

Doing it yourself through work is really the best way. And I mean doing it over and over, and over, for years. You don't necessarily need to share everything you write, it's just for your own benefit. I took part in an online weekly one-hour composition event for a few years, and it was a great opportunity to experiment because if something didn't work, you only spent an hour on it so no matter!
When I first started writing music (10 years ago I think) I wrote quite pop-music kind of chord progressions. Although I improved very gradually over the years to become more and more interesting, there were two pieces of music in particular that were major influences on my style and my harmonic language, which might or might not be of help.

The first of these was Janacek's opera 'The Cunning Little Vixen'. You can find the full opera here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQhLyG3_HnQ (skip to any random point and you'll find beautiful music) but you can also find a cut-down orchestral suite at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a79nSbmy69U which will give you a very good idea of the overall musical language. I played this opera while in my city's youth orchestra, so I got a lot of opportunity to hear the music in action and think about how it worked.
The second was 'Loops II" by Philippe Hurel, a piece I learned for my final undergraduate recital for my bachelor's. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8WtE7uI8a8 is an ok recording. You probably need the score to fully appreciate it, but it really expanded my definition of 'consonance' and I find myself using ideas from it all the time in my music now (like in my 'Tarantella' guitar duet I posted recently).

As to how I wrote these progressions, it was mostly instinctive, so I'm not sure how much I can explain. Bar 87 is a particularly good example of this - while writing I just 'knew' that it had to go to an F# chord. Probably on analysis I might be able to find a specific reason. I'm not saying that F# was the only chord it could go to or that it was even the best chord, but my mind was positively crying out for it to be an F# chord and it just couldn't be anything else at the time. It just flowed naturally in my mind as I was writing it and I didn't have to think about it at all. That's often how I write - through instinct (and also through playing around with music in my head while walking anywhere). Instinct can only come through practice. Keep writing, do silly stuff just for the sake of it and then look back on it afterwards and see if you can figure out what worked and what didn't work, and why.

I have listened to this through a handful of times; the piece reminded me of Scriabin's Prelude in C major from his op. 11 set (embedded at the bottom). I really like the initial figuration, which you spun out for a considerable span of time whilst maintaining my interest, but I'm sorry to say that I didn't care much for the section where the texture becomes syncopated between the hands.

To address your concerns: the main weakness in the large-scale structure, to my ears, can be located in where the music breaks off into the F-sharp major section (after which you introduce the textural shift mentioned above.) In my hearing, the main climax of this piece is the glorious affirmation of E major in bar 67. Whatever comes after that sounds to me like a dying away, and being the classically-trained listener that I am (classical with a small c), I was expecting a reprise of the initial tonality and material, perhaps modified in some respects, or even something that is recognisably a version of the opening material. That being said, I don't think the fact that there isn't a governing tonality (or 'home key') is a problem in itself, as other members have pointed out; the question is how you can end satisfactorily in that different tonality, whatever that may be. The problem I had with the overall structure is that you have an influx of energy from about bar 87 onwards with the (re-)introduction of F-sharp major harmony. I was led to expect this F-sharp harmony to be transient, probably because this was how it functioned in bar 62. Instead, you stamp your foot down and go, nope, there's going to be a section in F-sharp major. Fair enough. But I was still expecting the music to move at bar 95, where the texture changes, and even at bar 110--i.e., I was happy to accept this section as a parenthesis of sorts--but this expectation was never fulfilled. I suspect that is what made the reprise of the original material in bars 111 et seq. sound so flabby and formulaic to me. (The insensitive mock-up didn't help things.)

I think you would do well to re-write a version of this piece that maintains the opening texture throughout--the shifts in tonality and rhythmic accents provide more than enough momentum and interest to my ears--and see what would come out of that as an exercise. Try to bring the music back to the opening tonality and figurations from bar 67; I think you can afford to keep everything up to bar 86. You may well find that the product of that more aesthetically appealing than what you have now.

Let me split my further comments as they pertain to two different dimensions of the music, harmony and [surface] rhythm, although the two aren't always easy to separate (and it isn't clear to me whether it's advantageous to do so).

I love the idea of the music getting ever flatter. You nearly traverse the entire circle of fifths, and I think the introduction of flat(ter) elements was well-paced. (I disagree that the initial tonality is necessarily in A minor, incidentally: to my ears, it begins incontrovertibly in C major, although what the governing tonality is after that--F Lydian/major?--and where the substitution of one tonal framework for the other happens aren't as clear.) You make good use of flat submediant relations (i.e. I-bVI), and that's how you allow for this drive towards E major as the climax, and I didn't mind the unresolved ninths as much as I thought I would, with the effect that I hear a certain haziness between the harmony of the root and the harmony of the scale degree above that root; e.g. in bars 40-44, there's a shift in focus from C-flat major to D-flat major, and it's not easy to place it, although it happens somewhere within bars 41-42. (I think you should insert pedal markings to make your conception of the harmony clear, although I like the idea of leaving it to the discretion and musicianship of the performer.)

The harmonic reinterpretation of bar 23 in bar 29 was effective, since you subverted the expectation of a repeat through this harmonic shift. I find it interesting that I hear B-flat as the chord tone in bars 25 and 26, whereas I hear G as the chord tone in bars 31-33. (By analogy, it should be A-flat.) That being said, it's not hard to explain. I heard the main harmonic motion as that between F major and B-flat major-ish with an added sixth (or I-ii6/5; take your pick) up to bar 22, so I wasn't inclined to hear the return of F without an accompanying F in the bass. On the other hand, the shape of the figuration in bar 30, which emphasised G and E-flat as the consonant notes, the insistence on E at the top of the figuration in bars 31-33 and the fact that this was repeated for three bars led me to hear this as an E-flat major chord in second inversion that was nonetheless tense; i.e. I was waiting for the arrival of E-flat in the bass. I wonder if it might be more effective (if less subtle an effect) to change the figuration from Bb-A-F to A-Bb-F in bars 25 and 26. I'm not sure if I was convinced by the weak harmonic transition from bars 47-50; essentially, you've introduced the notes of the natural E-flat minor scale by bar 48, and although this anticipates the following E-flat minor, it doesn't make that E-flat minor sound like an arrival, even though it feels like it should be one because of other events (the introduction of the scalar motif [i.e. Eb-F-Gb in the left hand, the introduction of new material, the start of a new period [bars 51-58]). I wonder if a plain bII-i would have worked better. In any case, I do like this play between E-flat major, E-flat minor and E major.

(Speaking of which, I think you could have done more with that scalar motif. Perhaps, if you did rewrite this as an exercise, you could combine this scalar motif with the opening material for the reprise?)

In general, your sense of harmonic pacing is good, although I found the phrase structure somewhat distended at times. Cases in point: bars 10-11, 14-16,  23-26, 29-33, 40-44, 47-50. In contrast, I felt that the built up to the E major wasn't long enough. I think that's because we get so little of the flat 'pre-dominants'--only bars 65-66--whereas just an additional bar of some other flat pre-dominant--say, B diminished (i.e., 'ii[7]')--or even D minor (either root or first inversion) would have helped. Or maybe it's not a matter of length, and what I really want is increased rhythmic activity leading up to this climax. (It is arguable whether the E major in bar 67 is a tonic or a dominant; I personally hear a dominant-like quality to it yet I wouldn't say that A major is the governing tonality at that point. But it isn't really in the Phrygian or the Mixolydian, either. I would prefer to refer to a harmony like this as simply E dominant.) I think you have a predilection for two-bar units and you shy from breaking this evenness, and that saps the vitality of the music somewhat.

This discussion allows me to segue into rhythm. I love how you constantly shift the patterns. That being said, your preference for metrical regularity restricts what you can do somewhat. The repetition of bar 3 into a two-bar unit is anodyne; why not try changing bar 4 into a 2/4 bar (you do implicitly change metre from compound duple to simple triple from bars 1-2 to bars 3-4), with the r.h. figuration thus: A-D-C-E-B-D-G-C? That would break the monotony of having every bar here begin with C-B, while throwing off the listener, too. I think you should strive to make the piece even less regular than it is. And for bars 8-10, why sit on the bass A with the same figuration? I think you could easily excise one bar, and change the bass to A (and the figuration correspondingly) at some point in bar 9 (perhaps the fifth quaver?); this would reinforce the impression of compression given in bar 8. Likewise, I don't think the unexpected accent in bar 16 provides sufficient interest, let alone momentum, in this passage. I think you'd want to reserve stasis for special moments; as it is, the frequent recurrence of such moments of flatness comes across more as uninspired vamping than anything--sort of like an improviser stalling for time.

There's probably more I could say, but I've spent too much time on this as it is.