5 Textures || 1. Flowing

This is the first of the set and also the first one composed. This was also my first work in which I attempted tonal vagueness or an impressionistic style.

This is, in a word, fantastic! I love the impressionist language you employ here: the chromaticism and the "flowing" of harmonies. The crunch of the melody in tritones, flavored with growling bass arpeggios, only to be released at the end in a glorious restatement in major triads. This really is good stuff, in my opinion.

It seems you have a gift for melodic phrasing. The melody isn't stark and singable; it sort of sinks into you such that you don't realize the entire piece is really just the same musical phrase framed in different rhythms and harmonies. That requires depth and maturity I typically only find in much older composers. I am very impressed.

That said, I do think your scoring could handle a little more decoration. With such impressionistic musical language, you should include a bit of written language to reflect what's going on. This isn't just 'Largo.' This is more like 'Largo con moto' or 'Upon hearing the dolorous sound of winter rain' or something equally expressive. You could also add more technique or expression text to the music, and perhaps clean it up somewhat. For example, the empty bar at M7 isn't necessary; you could put a fermata atop the end of M6 to indicate a long pause and get rid of the empty bar altogether (the same could be done for M13). I'd like to see more hairpins or cresc./decresc. markings in here, too, since that's the way I heard it played. (Good job on that, too, btw!)

I think you show lots of promise as a composer and I hope you keep it up!

Best,
Jörfi

1 minute ago, Tónskáld said:

This is, in a word, fantastic! I love the impressionist language you employ here: the chromaticism and the "flowing" of harmonies. The crunch of the melody in tritones, flavored with growling bass arpeggios, only to be released at the end in a glorious restatement in major triads. This really is good stuff, in my opinion.

It seems you have a gift for melodic phrasing. The melody isn't stark and singable; it sort of sinks into you such that you don't realize the entire piece is really just the same musical phrase framed in different rhythms and harmonies. That requires depth and maturity I typically only find in much older composers. I am very impressed.

That said, I do think your scoring could handle a little more decoration. With such impressionistic musical language, you should include a bit of written language to reflect what's going on. This isn't just 'Largo.' This is more like 'Largo con moto' or 'Upon hearing the dolorous sound of winter rain' or something equally expressive. You could also add more technique or expression text to the music, and perhaps clean it up somewhat. For example, the empty bar at M7 isn't necessary; you could put a fermata atop the end of M6 to indicate a long pause and get rid of the empty bar altogether (the same could be done for M13). I'd like to see more hairpins or cresc./decresc. markings in here, too, since that's the way I heard it played. (Good job on that, too, btw!)

I think you show lots of promise as a composer and I hope you keep it up!

Best,
Jörfi

 

These are tentative scores that I mostly hastily put together just so I could have the idea on paper. When I submit these for colleges I will clean them up accordingly. Thanks for the feedback and advice

Hi @veps,

This is your first compositions at a young age and you are very promising to be a composer! I love very much the bell sound all over the prelude, and the thickness and texture reminds me more of Brahms since Brahms also has some impressionistic touch in his late piano works. 

Jörfi @Tónskáld's suggestion is very detailed. I would like to add more, for example adding the slurs to indicate the phrases, pedal marking if necessary. For the enharmonic spelling the E double flats in b.5 and 12 are unnecessary and can spell D natural anyway. In b.13 RH spells Bb-Ab while LH spells A#-G# and I think LH can follow the spellings of RH since it's used throughout the prelude. A calando at the end will for sure end the music more satisfactorily. But all these things are minor details which you will learn when you write more, and more importantly your core part as a composer is very promising! Your piano skill is great as well esp. in prelude no.5. 

Thanks for joining the forum and sharing the music! You can definitely spend some time on music by other members and you may find more inspirations in them!

Henry

Yes, a nice impressionistic piece, flowing, lyrical and nicely played. I particularly liked the ending, the way it just happened without any kind of cadence.

Easy to close ones eyes and let the music just happen. 

Great job accomplishing your goal of tonal ambiguity!  It's also amazing that so far you're posting only self-recorded performances of your music, which is a rarity!  I think given the harmonic ambiguity, your use of mixed sharps and flats is often justified.  Thanks for sharing!