Piano Prelude on a Theme by a Redditor

I did this short piece based on some themes written by someone on r/composer. They admitted they weren't very good at harmony, and indeed the original context of these melodic ideas was not great: a structurally incoherent attempt at a "sonata" with abrupt transitions and awkward harmonies. Certainly good work for a novice, but their lack of expertise on how to compose broader structures did not do their fundamental ideas justice. Despite the poor framing, I felt their themes had incredible latent potential. With their consent and approval of course, I recomposed the themes into a short, coherent whole.

The recitative-like opening was initially only about 7 bars long -- but I extended it to the length you will see in this video because I felt its ideas deserved some more substantial treatment.

The main melody, and much of the ideas for how to harmonize it, were taken as directly as I could from the source material. I reharmonized it in a few places where I felt the original composer's choices were awkward or otherwise made little functional sense, but the overall structure is still mostly there. The middle section contains substantially more original content, as well as the coda, although everything was consciously inspired by and taken from the source material.

 Although I wished for a bit more of a tempo change, it was still generally pretty nice. The perfect fourth in the theme kinda threw me off, though.

I don't know but this reminded me of bach and dance of the knights

Nice Prelude.  Have you ever thought of writing variations?  I was going to say that this is a nice Chopinesque piece but then the heavy triplets came in in the left hand which reminded me more of Beethoven.  Kudos on the excellent performance of this piece (did you perform it?)

3 minutes ago, PaperComposer said:

Nice Prelude.  Have you ever thought of writing variations?  I was going to say that this is a nice Chopinesque piece but then the heavy triplets came in in the left hand which reminded me more of Beethoven.  Kudos on the excellent performance of this piece (did you perform it?)

 

This is just the computer's playback! Funny enough, apart from a little bit of reverb stuff I didn't play around with it at all -- this is just what gets output when I click play. Finale's playback has always been pretty good.

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This is just the computer's playback! Funny enough, apart from a little bit of reverb stuff I didn't play around with it at all -- this is just what gets output when I click play. Finale's playback has always been pretty good.

Wow - it sure fooled me!  I'm used to my Yamaha XG midi piano sounds, but I must say your sounds aren't very hammery nor harsh.