Cuckoo!

Yet another improv, i worry im boring people with these! I'll stop doing it soon, I.promise!

I've started writing down my compositions/improvs again. I have a couple of minuets I'll upload soon, I just get so distracted when I sit at the piano. I've composed, via improv, a piano sonata in C major, I was thinking of the third movement when I improvised this. It reminds me of Haydn, I want the third movement to be light hearted and playful because the second movement I composed is in c minor and I use every trick up my sleeve to pull on the heart strings. I wish I recorded myself playing it, I worry my memory of it could get corrupted because it has more complex counterpoint.

The first movement is like a piano concerto and is full of flashy runs in both hands. It has a Mozartian air and I use some of his signature moves but it has enough of me in it so it's not a cringey pastiche. Well I hope not!

The improv here is a 'first run' so it's full of hesitation and mistakes but it made me smile when I listened back to it so I thought I'd upload it, I've been quiet for a few days so why not.

Cuckoo!

This is another amazing improvisation. I'm using the first minute of this in the conclusion of my next video, which is about turning @Quinn St. Mark's Etude into something that sounds a little more like a performance. I'll be sending a mass email out to Young Composers about this.

Hi @Papageno,

22 hours ago, Papageno said:

Yet another improv, i worry im boring people with these! I'll stop doing it soon, I.promise!

No for sure! Your improvisations are probably better than many composed works including some of mine. They are just different, and yours is very perceptive and sensitive!

This is soothing music. It really does imitate the cukcoo sound with that rhythm. The scale  around 01:40 is very classical for me. The new section in 2:15 starting from Ab major is captivating with the modulation.

22 hours ago, Papageno said:

The improv here is a 'first run' so it's full of hesitation and mistakes but it made me smile when I listened back to it so I thought I'd upload it, I've been quiet for a few days so why not.

Yeah I don't find any problem here at all! It's an improvisation and all these things make it unique and real.

22 hours ago, Papageno said:

I have a couple of minuets I'll upload soon, I just get so distracted when I sit at the piano. I've composed, via improv, a piano sonata in C major, I was thinking of the third movement when I improvised this. It reminds me of Haydn, I want the third movement to be light hearted and playful because the second movement I composed is in c minor and I use every trick up my sleeve to pull on the heart strings. I wish I recorded myself playing it, I worry my memory of it could get corrupted because it has more complex counterpoint.

The first movement is like a piano concerto and is full of flashy runs in both hands. It has a Mozartian air and I use some of his signature moves but it has enough of me in it so it's not a cringey pastiche. Well I hope not!

I really look forward to all these!

Thanks for sharing!

Henry

Thank you Henry and Chopin for your kind words and encouragement, it means a lot to me. 🙂

This is fresh and nice.

On 5/23/2023 at 11:47 PM, Papageno said:

Yet another improv, i worry im boring people with these! I'll stop doing it soon, I.promise!

You're not, and don't stop. 

This is an improv? Damn dude, this is really structured and well put together. You should hear me improv at the piano. I wind up going to space and forgetting where I even started. 

I like the light-heartedness of this. It definitely fits your description. I'm not too familiar with Haydn's works; I learned a few from mandatory school studies, but mostly glossed over his era to venture into music more to my taste. One day I'll dig deeper into his style, but for now I'm satisfied with your interpretation of it. 

Does "cuckoo" come from the 5th to 3rd motif? It for sure makes me think so, nice idiomatic writing. Coincidentally, isn't that the millennial whoop? haha

I like your style, and I'm glad you've been active on the forum recently. Keep the pieces coming, and keep us all updated on your progress!

On 5/23/2023 at 11:47 PM, Papageno said:

The improv here is a 'first run' so it's full of hesitation and mistakes but it made me smile when I listened back to it so I thought I'd upload it

eh who cares about mistakes. I'd listen to your recordings over a thousand midi renditions of pieces any day. Thanks for sharing 🙂

Thank you very much that guy. I have no self confidence in music because I've not studied it like others have and I learnt to play and compose by myself through my ears if that makes sense. I just don't know if I'm creating noise or music sometimes. 

Up until I was 11 years old I never listened to classical music. My only exposure to it was through adverts on TV or TV shows and movies. Then one afternoon my elder sister of 2 years came into my room and gave me a magazine. It was a first edition of a new magazine that had just come out about composers and their music with a cassette tape of some of their work.

This was back in 1992. She didn't want it and only bought it on a whim because of the price. It was about Tchaikovsky and featured some of his ballet work and his piano or violin concerto, I can't remember. I found the music captivating, I never knew music could make me feel such emotions and create such vivid pictures and tell stories. Before that I was into Michael Jackson and Bryan Adams. 

I enjoyed reading about his life and learning about the history of his time. Then the second edition came out and I bought it with my pocket money and a switched turned in my head. It was about Mozart and had Eine Kleine Nacht music on one side and his Jupiter Symphony on the other.

OMFG! My mind blew! I can't put to words how it made me feel, it was like a landscape of a foreign world. The night music was amazing to my ears but the Jupiter symphony just pulled me away into my minds eye. The minuet for example created pictures of Spitfires chasing Messerschimtts, you know how they turn and dive. Might seem odd considering it's a minuet but to a boy of 11 the counterpoint triggered those images.

Everyday after school I would go to my room and listen and unwind. I wore the tape out! I ended up collecting all the editions for quite some time and enjoyed hearing the music and reading the history and biography. A second Mozart edition came out and I was hooked. This time it was his piano concerto 26! Magnificent! 

Eventually I got tired of not knowing what all the blobs and lines meant, how they related to what I was listening to so during the summer break when I was 14 I taught myself to read music. I learnt to play basic melodies on my little sisters toy piano.

It had two octaves and my fingers could just about land on a single key without hitting a neighbour, it was that small, but I delighted in playing melodies from the magazines I had bought which all had easy play renditions of the music on the cassettes. I learned to play the melody from the second movement of mozarts 26th and Boccherini's minuet.

By this time music was playing in my minds ear almost constantly, I think because of my anxiety. I didn't know I was autistic, Aspergers wasnt really a thing back then. I just knew I was weird.

After the summer break I asked to study music but I had already chosen art which I had a gift for so they said no. I showed the head of music a composition and he said, OK, you can do the exam and if you pass it you can study music. I passed it 97%. It was really basic anyway so I ended up doing music and just doing art in my spare time.

I had access to a real piano now! My music teacher would give me the keys to his room which was an old out-building with a mini grand piano. I would spend 30 minutes everyday after school just playing some of the melodies I learnt and realised I could play my own melodies.

I saw patterns that I could reproduce but didn't know how to define any of it. It was so exciting to play, I can remember the adrenalin of excitement kick in as i approached the piano and lifted the lid. It was magic!

After a few weeks my music teacher heard me play and was impressed enough to ask me to play in front of the school at some assembly. I improvised a small piece in C major. My fingers were trembling but I managed to create something listenable. Then he entered me into a competition.

I got to play a Steinway in front of a large audience and play a second run of what I had played previously. The judges didn't know what to do, I was the only one improvising and that wasn't quite what they were looking for so they gave the award to a trumpet player. I didn't mind, I was more interested in the sound of the Steinway. 

A few months later I was attacked walking home from school. The area I lived in was in a city that had a really high crime rate and many boys from my school were battling the boys from a rival school. Two boys from the rival school saw me in my uniform and knew I was easy prey. This was the third time I had been jumped in recent times and my trust of my safety outisde took a long time to rebuild. I stopped playing after school. In fact other than listening to music and following the scores I didn't play that often except during lunch breaks where a crowd would gather to listen. 

About this time my mental health deteriorated because of the constant violence where I lived and the ptsd, I retreated further into my own world, music was my escape. It was more than sound, it was a language I began to understand and my sensitivity to it grew. I realised I had a juke box brain and could listen without listening and music would be constantly playing in my minds ear. I would play around at trying to listen to entire concertos and not lose concentration in my minds ear. Sometimes other music of the same key would interfer and it was frustrating, or my mind would change the melody. I found that if I had the score I could hear more detail. I loved Cosi Fan Tutte, especially the trio when the two women and the old guy sing about the ship leaving with the two soldiers, so I enjoyed reading that and hearing the voices too.

It was mostly mozart I listened to, but also my own. I could play choral music, hear the Kyrie, I would make it dramatic, plan out the instruments. I dreamt of being a neoclassical composer and being able to play the piano professionally. I was 16 and I left school to go to college. I didn't choose music, I became obsessed with languages instead. Music became just something I listened to and hid, it wasn't cool to like classical where I lived in a working class inner city estate.

I quit college after a year because of social problems and mental health and just had menial jobs like cleaning, factory work, construction work. I was chronically underemployed throughout my life because of autism and its affect on me being able to socialise and deal with sensory problems.

12 years ago when I was 30 I bought a digital piano and started playing again. I didn't take it seriously and played whenever the whim took me, mostly when I was emotional and needed to release some trapped feelings. Emotions get stuck in me and I found playing would calm me down and release them. Especially happiness, that gets stuck and it makes me dizzy but I can release it by dazzling at the piano, which is mostly noise though.

When lockdown happened because of covid I started composing minuets and watch YouTube videos on music theory. I composed a few shirt pieces using midi software. As my piano playing gotta but better I dropped the midi composing in favour of paper composing at the piano when I composed the set of D major variations. 

Life got in the way again, I divorced my wife and moved into my own place with my piano a few weeks ago. Now I can play as much as I like and its been wonderful to share my improvs, especially as I've got some good feedback. I really do doubt myself.

Looks like I've written another book. I'm hyperlexic, that's my excuse. If you made it this far, thank you!

Darren.

2 hours ago, Papageno said:

music

what Mozartian heights  - and/or others - do you you seek? i say rage rage for the creation of -your- lights!

3 hours ago, Papageno said:

I have no self confidence in music because I've not studied it like others have and I learnt to play and compose by myself through my ears if that makes sense. I just don't know if I'm creating noise or music sometimes.

You should change your attitude because your playing is beautiful. Here's a little secret about me. Although I can play around on the piano and compose / notate my music, I am unable to improvise. You have yourself a gift. And some gifts just come in different forms.

3 hours ago, Papageno said:

Looks like I've written another book. I'm hyperlexic, that's my excuse. If you made it this far, thank you!

😂 I made it this far. I'm really sorry that you had been attacked while you were younger. Whatever was going on back then, it only made you stronger though. And your talent is definitely something I envy (in a good way, not the dark jealous way!). I want to encourage you try your hand at notating a composition. MIDI is definitely tough because of the lack of authenticity, but I want to remind you again that tomorrow (May 27th) I will be talking about how MIDI can actually be tweaked to sound more authentic. BTW, I am featuring your music and playing as the conclusion of my next video, so I hope you are able to make the debut! If not, it will be posted for you to watch later on. Thanks for sharing your story, it was a pleasure to read.

1 hour ago, AKAChristopher said:

what Mozartian heights  - and/or others - do you you seek? i say rage rage for the creation of -your- lights!

 

Lol, I love that poem!

I think I want to reach a level of authenticity of the period I'm trying to emulate. I don't want to sound like any one composer but find my own voice within that period. I'm sure it's possible to extract the essence of the style.

The more I look into the composers that influenced Mozart, I realise how his style came about. He almost always spoke about the human condition and about love. He wrote to please the common man as well as the connoisseur.

I want to be able to do that too but with my own voice. I'm not naive though, the great masters that I read about as a kid, they had something about them quite special that was evident at an early stage in childhood. We are at such a disadvantaged living this fast paced, hectic, distracted modern life.

I'm realistic about my own expectations and goals. I'm happy as long as I'm enjoying creating music, it's a therapy for me and a great way to meet like-minded people. My self doubt stems from my lack of formal training I think. It's hard to be objective about your own creations.

Some argue that there's no more original tonal music to compose. I don't believe that and I can foresee a resurgence of tonal music, especially opera. There's still a few gems left to discover. I think that's the best word, discover. Most of the best ideas have been used most likely, but music, like all over arts is by its nature infinite.

I think composition is a great hobby that, like most hobbies, is enhanced by having goals. I'm working on completing my set of 8 minuets and trios, a piano sonata, and creating a Youtube channel with my complete works played by myself. 

I have so many other projects on the go so it's OK if it takes a while.

2 hours ago, chopin said:

You should change your attitude because your playing is beautiful. Here's a little secret about me. Although I can play around on the piano and compose / notate my music, I am unable to improvise. You have yourself a gift. And some gifts just come in different forms.

😂 I made it this far. I'm really sorry that you had been attacked while you were younger. Whatever was going on back then, it only made you stronger though. And your talent is definitely something I envy (in a good way, not the dark jealous way!). I want to encourage you try your hand at notating a composition. MIDI is definitely tough because of the lack of authenticity, but I want to remind you again that tomorrow (May 27th) I will be talking about how MIDI can actually be tweaked to sound more authentic. BTW, I am featuring your music and playing as the conclusion of my next video, so I hope you are able to make the debut! If not, it will be posted for you to watch later on. Thanks for sharing your story, it was a pleasure to read.

 

Thank you. I thought my story might shed light on me and how my music came about. 

Before I re-learned to play piano I was using midi software on my phone to compose minuets. I transitioned to paper after I gained the ability to play what I wrote at around the time of my variations in D which I wrote partly in midi, partly sat at the piano, and partly while out and about.

For those that want to improvise. I can't emphasise enough being able to read scores and develop your minds ear, and developing the relationship between your minds ear and your fingers at the piano. I'm not aware of any composer that didn't develop that ability and its attainable to anyone that practices it. You will also learn to compose fast, just as quickly as you type English. It's within all of us and I think I stumbled on it by accident for want of a piano teacher as a child.

Beginning with question and answers. Think of a motif in your minds ear, find the notes on the piano, play it until it matches what you heard. Hum it if needs be. Then come up with as many answers as you can. Do this for a few minutes everytime you sit at the piano and it wouldn't be long before you develop a strong relationship between your minds ear and your fingers. If you already play the piano, you have a head start in this. 

You'll become aware of structure similar to the way you're aware of points you want to make when speaking. When in conversation, you become aware of an idea you want to say and it actually has structure and relationship to the context of the conversation and you'll be aware, subconsciously usually, of where in the conversation your are, beginning-middle-end, and the purpose of that conversation, whether the topic is your day, your political beliefs, etc.

YouTube is a fantastic resource for listening to your favourite music while following the score. Then find the score and listen to it in your minds ear. I was lucky as a kid because my local library was huge and had an extensive library of scores. So I did that as a kid for fun and that might be why I developed improvising ability. It's a joy to sing with your fingers and speak your mood and emotions. It's attainable to any musician that understands that music, being a language, can be spoken as well as written. 

For fun if I'm at the piano and someone talks to me, I play music matching the tone of what they are saying until they laugh then I try to capture their laughter with trills and such until we are both laughing! It's good when one of my kids is relating a story of why they are pissed off and I stamp a few minor chords in FFF, then play a melodramatic tear jerker until I get a smile.

We learn to speak before we write and we copy our mother's speech at first. The great masters are our mothers so to speak and looking at their written speech, hearing it, we can learn the language. The classical era is best suited to this due it's clarity and simplicity i think, but I'm sure even complex baroque music or atonal stuff can be approached in the same way.

I envy those that have had piano lessons, learned to sight read to grade 8 or above and have formal theory lessons in all the styles throughout the ages. In time I'll study it because I will need the knowledge to transition to string quartets, then orchestral composition. Even though I can hear chords, it's not detailed enough in my minds ear to extract the delicate counterpoint and I know it would be full of errors.

Another book. I have trouble sleeping at the moment and I find writing relaxing and I'm opinionated so that's creating these essays.

Darren