Variations

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Are these all the variations you could come up with?  I'm not even sure if this piece exceeded 1 minute.  All you did was change the figurations, their rhythms and some chord voicings.  You kept the harmony the same throughout which actually makes this more like a passacaglia or chaconne.  You didn't engage in any kind of motivic development or manipulation such as fragmentation, inversion, retrograde, augmentation, diminution or transposition.  You also could have changed the mode or the key or both to give this more character (not to mention meter).  What I also like to do is use the original material as an underdrawing, embellishing it with added notes or ornaments in between such as scalar runs or arpeggios.  I hate to say this but the pieces you've shared on this forum including this one suffer from severe underdevelopment which I don't know if that's because of lack of effort/laziness or maybe you just don't know how but I'd prefer to think the former because I think you're capable of much more and just not living up to your potential.  Maybe you'll find some of the ideas I mentioned helpful?

At first glance, it looks like a page from a piano exercise book so I let my 7 years old daughter give it a try. She found the left hand too challenged at bar #8 and her right hand too challenged at bar #22. She finally got bored to death before the end and went back to the good old Erik Satie Gymnopedie. It is quite simple but at least it goes somewhere. I suggest that you listen to Erik Satie Gymnopedie carefully as a starting point. The theme is longer than four bars, it has a start and an end but mostly even though it is simple, Satie found a way to develop and even surprise the listener with smart changes. Nevertheless, you tried something and that is what is good about it. We all learn from our mistakes. You will learn.

Hope this comment will help

On 8/9/2022 at 10:10 PM, PeterthePapercomPoser said:

What I also like to do is use the original material as an underdrawing, embellishing it with added notes or ornaments in between such as scalar runs or arpeggios.

I like doing this too. In fact, that's usually what my first 2-4 variations are is embellishing the starting melody in increasingly quicker rhythms, so if I'm starting with a quarter note melody, I might go eighth notes, triplets, sixteenths, before moving on to something else like meter. Slower starting melody, more embellishing variations, faster melody, less.