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Prelude for P.


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Good day, J. Santos:

I assume when you say this is experimental that you are referring to the harmony? The piece should be effective in that respect. MIDI performances of piano are always terrible - you never get a true sense what real pedalling and voicing sound like. If you haven't already, be sure to play the piece on a real piano to ensure that you find all of the harmony to your liking, and be picky about it. This is important to do with any composition but is especially important when you start exploring new harmonies that you haven't dealt with much before. I've never written a piano work that didn't change substantially after I started playing it. It's not the form or musical content that changes much - just the details, accounting for ease of playing and effectiveness of the sound. Many things that sound like they work on MIDI don't work that well on the real instrument.

On a different note, I'm uncertain if you consider this piece "finished" or not. If you do, ignore what follows. If not, read on:

If this were my composition, I wouldn't be satisfied with the rhythm in bars 9-25. In the first eight bars, you have a very natural rhythmic flow. But the continuation of your cadential rhythm from bar 8 in the subsequent phrase is not effective to my ear. Two possibilities come to mind: broken chord accompaniment (steady flow of 8ths in LH rather than stopping on dotted half), or syncopation of the top note on off beats (thus, starting on beat two: eighth/quarter/quarter/eighth, or perhaps better eighth/quarter/eight-eighth-eighth with octave displacement on the second to last eighth). In my inner ear, option 1 sounds better in this context, but both work. The goal is to avoid a sense that the music keeps stopping on beats 2-3. If anything, you want increased motion here to build on the first 8 bars and lead to the dramatic contrast at 27. What you did in 16-18 is a good example of that, and for me those are the most effective bars in the 9-25 span.

Hope that helps. Keep it up!

 

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