Psalm 27 Chorale

Any feedback would be appreciated.

Are you trying to follow the rules?
1. "The Lord is my light" is strange because "The" is not a stressed syllable. 
2. m. 3's leap of an augmented second does not resolve properly downwards by step.
3. After the fermata of m. 3, the outer voices form a direct octave by upwards motion. The bass does not outline the tonic triad.
3a. The same happens between mm. 3-4 and m. 5.
4. Same problems mentioned before in m. 6.
5.  m. 7 has an upwards motion of contrary fifths. Only downward is acceptable.
6. Same problems mentioned before happen in m. 11 and 14.
 

1 hour ago, Monarcheon said:

Are you trying to follow the rules?
1. "The Lord is my light" is strange because "The" is not a stressed syllable. 
2. m. 3's leap of an augmented second does not resolve properly downwards by step.
3. After the fermata of m. 3, the outer voices form a direct octave by upwards motion. The bass does not outline the tonic triad.
3a. The same happens between mm. 3-4 and m. 5.
4. Same problems mentioned before in m. 6.
5.  m. 7 has an upwards motion of contrary fifths. Only downward is acceptable.
6. Same problems mentioned before happen in m. 11 and 14.
 

 

1. I'm not exactly sure what your talking about, I'm just using the Psalm straight out of the book.

2. the m3 augmented second is the leading tone of the secondary dominant, so I don't know why it should resolve down, plus it sounds bad.

3. I was told in Music Theory class that Direct octaves is when any upper voice(Soprano Alto Tenor) leaps to the root of the chord and the Bass note is the root. Besides that, no way do I see a direct octave.

3a. again no Idea what you mean.

4. no idea.....

5. its not contrary, its parallel 5ths, and its the only "wrong" thing I've seen so far.

6. again, no clue what your talking about.

Take the PDF and mark the errors you are talking about.

And I'm aware of the parallel 5ths at the cadences. 

And I'm not trying to follow the rules, I use the "rules" as tools to aid me in composing.

2 hours ago, isuckatcomposing said:

1. I'm not exactly sure what your talking about, I'm just using the Psalm straight out of the book.

It's about following the scansion. "the LORD is my LIGHT". Putting "the" on the downbeat makes it sound like the stressed syllable, which it isn't.

2 hours ago, isuckatcomposing said:

2. the m3 augmented second is the leading tone of the secondary dominant, so I don't know why it should resolve down, plus it sounds bad.

You said later that you don't necessarily want to follow the rules, and that's fine. I agree with you it sounds good, but it's not "correct". In strict counterpoint, you're supposed to avoid it in a melodic line altogether. 

2 hours ago, isuckatcomposing said:

3. I was told in Music Theory class that Direct octaves is when any upper voice(Soprano Alto Tenor) leaps to the root of the chord and the Bass note is the root. 

That's not correct, or at least that's not how I learned it. It's disputed the cases where a direct octaves are okay. Yours is one of those exceptions that some consider fine: where both the outer voices move upwards, but the bass leaps and the soprano moves by step to the same pitch class. Some wouldn't say that's okay. It depends. Direct octave leaps in similar motion are absolutely not okay, but you don't use those 🙂

2 hours ago, isuckatcomposing said:

5. its not contrary, its parallel 5ths, and its the only "wrong" thing I've seen so far.

My bad, I meant unequal fifths. 

EDIT: I'll stress here that I only made those observations because I didn't know what kind of feedback you were looking for. I see "chorale" and I'm like "oh, maybe they mean counterpoint?" It's 100% okay (and even good) you don't use those rules, I just didn't know what you were going for. That thing about the scansion though is a little strange though. 

Yes, I appreciate the clarification. We just had a different learning background and thats totally fine.

I never learned about how lyrics go on music. So this info is new to me and I'm interested in how to fix this.

And I guess next time, if I say chorale, I mean 4-part harmony. 

Thank you for the comment.