Driftwood

Hey yc! I've been working on an SATB piece based off of Ralph Cheever Dunning's Poem called Driftwood. This is just a draft, and there's still some things i'm not happy with (and a serious lack of dynamics), but i'm hoping I can finish this piece and add it to my portfolio in a few months. :^) Please let me know what you think of this piece, and how I can improve it. Thanks.

P.S. If you'd like more info, or if you want the piano version, let me know and i'll hand it over.

P.P.S. If you'd like to perform this piece, please let me know. It'd be super cool to hear this with human voices!

Treatment of harmony is actually pretty interesting, especially with your inversions. Some pretty cool changes. There are a couple spots that I would look into, like in the last measure of the second page, the tenor and bass do a really awkward voice exchange, two measures before the 3/4, the prosody on "against" is somewhat strange (you say a-GAINST, not A-gainst), and resolutions that contradict harmony by way of retardation/suspension in another voice.
Is this supposed to be like a chorale? I feel like there's a lot of inner voice movement that you can play around with some of these chords and it seems somewhat flat at the moment.
I know it's a pain, but you're going to want to write what each line of the choir is singing instead of just implying it in one line, especially since you do deviate from standard chorale setting.
 

@Monarcheon Thank you so much for the input!

Thanks for bringing the weird cross-voicing on page 2 to my attention, I didn't even think about that (whoops). As far as the rhythm on "against" goes, I'll think about ways to change it to fit normal word stress, as that's probably something I should do with a few other sections as well.

18 hours ago, Monarcheon said:

Is this supposed to be like a chorale?

No, I guess not. I rarely write things that are supposed to be one thing or another, but now that you've mentioned that, I'd like to compose a chorale to work on my voice movement. I usually just write chords using the piano and split them into SATB lines, but I understand why that can be problematic.

18 hours ago, Monarcheon said:

I know it's a pain, but you're going to want to write what each line of the choir is singing instead of just implying it in one line

Damn it.

Thanks again for your help!

45 minutes ago, Carmen Hunter said:

 

I usually just write chords using the piano and split them into SATB lines, but I understand why that can be problematic.

 

That's a great place to start.  If you then go through and sing each line, you may find you naturally want one part to move a little sooner, hold a little longer, or fill in a scalar passage between point A and point B, and it will start to feel more linear and less chord, chord, chord.  🙂  This sounds nice and is a good fit to the text!  It's definitely worth your time to clean up the score so it looks professional and put it in the portfolio!

@pateceramics Thanks so much!