Late Night Comp

Hey, I just signed up to this so forgive me if I'm doing this wrong! I just want to improve my compositional skills and thought this'd be a good place to start?

I wrote a piece yesterday for viola and piano. I'm not too sure what I need to do with it now. I don't think it's finished but I don't know what's wrong with it. I'd love some critique! 🙂

Link: 

I think that it's a great place to start in.

I wish I had found this site when I just started composing.

So anyway... you have Agent P for a profile picture! Yey!

Is it because P is also short for picture...?

Ok so that's a very good first composition.

I believe that the advice I can give you is that you should do what everybody does when they start composing-

Just keep composing.

By doing that you'll improve yourself.

In general- I don't feel that there's anything I can really remember from this piece.

After years of work I got my family and friend to hum some of my melodys,

and it feels so great to know that someone else other than you remember your pieces.

At the first time I met my composition teacher for a private lesson and not in a workshop

he told me this: "Music is the are of repeating yourself in various ways"

Of course, I'm not asking you to write a loop,

actually I hate repetitive music,

but I'm asking you to give my ear something to hold on to.

I'll try to give you an example looking at the piece I wrote for my third lesson with that teacher:

It's the same rhythmic idea over and over again.

That way people remember it.

I hope that was helpful :)

P.s. here's the piece if you want to give it a listen.

Let's see if you can tap the rhythm five minutes after listening to that?

(humming the melody would be a bit more difficult,

the mission was to write a piece without repeating a chord more than twice)

@Rabbival507

Hey, thanks for the feedback! This isn't actually my first composition, I've been doing the occasional one amongst songwriting for a good few years now. But only now starting to take it seriously - it's why I joined! And it's Agent P because I just really like Phineas and Ferb.

I think I agree on the memorability of it. There were a few little ideas that I liked but I wasn't sure which one to use so I just threw them all in XD But I tried re-jigging it now.

Thanks for the feedback again! :)

@exfairy

May I see the notes?

You know, so I'd be able to know...

watcha did there (Badoom tz)

@Rabbival507 Does this work??

Yea that works,

let me listen again, this time with the notes in front of me.

That would be super difficult to do,

maybe even impossible.

Go outside and take a stick in your hand.

Now put it on something,

say a chair or a table.

Take the stick in your hand and push it over the table (gently).

Now, in... say sixth of a second:

lift the stick and touch the desk/chair with your finger.

I don't know if that's really a good demonstration but you got the idea.

Ok so I noticed that you have this thing at the beginning and the end of the piece (there it's one octave higher):

 I mean the whole sentence but it starts with this.

So well done! You repeated yourself!

And yet, I don't believe it's that memorable.

try to limit yourself to one single idea.

Do you remember what I told you about my composition teacher?

He said that after I gave him this:

It might sound nice, but it has too many ideas running all over the place.

I'm not telling you to delete what you already wrote, but try an exercise.

Create an empty score for piano and viola.

write 7-8 bars of an idea. Now try to base your whole piece,

or at least half of it, on this same idea.

If you feel that you can't develop it any further you can repeat yourself or add another idea.

I hope that's helpful,

I'm pretty tired right now and I kind of confused myself.

Back after a while and a holiday. I've worked more on my composition. I'm a lot happier with this one, could definitely do with some more work and more dynamics but I still like it. Thoughts?