Castle On The Mountain

Hello Guys,

This is my brand new piece of music. What do you think?

Hi @olivercomposer,

I think the G# Dorian really fits the misty atmosphere of the castle on the mountain. The modulation to F minor in 1:00 is great but I think the preparation can be longer. Here I feel like it's typical trailer music like a cookie cutter when the music is pushed for no reason. That brass melody is very beautiful, the progression to the relative major Ab major and then its flat submediant E major before getting back to f minor is great, and the Picardy 3rd ending is wonderful combined with that harp too, but they all sound typical to me. Maybe you can try to write something for solo music or chamber setting? Here they are all very effective and will make good film and incidental music, but to me not something unique enough to be what's you. In the solo setting and chamber works you can work more on the music materials themselves instead of just orchestral colour and effect. It's not that writing on orchestral works bad though, but sometimes the colour may make the music beautiful even though the content is less convincing. I am quite nitpicky on this one since I feel like you definitely have the talent to write more unique music!

Thanks for sharing!

Henry

I personally think that this works for the kind of mood that you want to present.  BUT, and I've spoken about this before, there is something to be said for exploring more complex relationships between your melody and harmony.  You start this piece on what the ear can only assume to be the tonic area and then expand from that.  But what if you didn't start on the tonic?  In Borodin's Polovtsian Dances he starts on the 2nd and 6th scale degrees with a harmony underneath that is clearly not the tonic area - and he takes his time at arriving at the tonic too!  And that already introduces a lot of harmonic interest and complexity without even modulating yet!  To practice this you could try to start a melody on the strong beat (not a pick-up) on the dominant chord.  Once you master that, you could move to starting on the subdominant or the supertonic, since they're both pre-dominant chords.  And no need to remind you that you needn't start the melody on a chord tone in any of those cases either.  I really enjoyed this piece though - just thought I'd share some advice!  Thanks for sharing.

55 minutes ago, PeterthePapercomPoser said:

I personally think that this works for the kind of mood that you want to present.  BUT, and I've spoken about this before, there is something to be said for exploring more complex relationships between your melody and harmony.  You start this piece on what the ear can only assume to be the tonic area and then expand from that.  But what if you didn't start on the tonic?  In Borodin's Polovtsian Dances he starts on the 2nd and 6th scale degrees with a harmony underneath that is clearly not the tonic area - and he takes his time at arriving at the tonic too!  And that already introduces a lot of harmonic interest and complexity without even modulating yet!  To practice this you could try to start a melody on the strong beat (not a pick-up) on the dominant chord.  Once you master that, you could move to starting on the subdominant or the supertonic, since they're both pre-dominant chords.  And no need to remind you that you needn't start the melody on a chord tone in any of those cases either.  I really enjoyed this piece though - just thought I'd share some advice!  Thanks for sharing.

 

Thank you for your advice! I swear I won't start my next piece of music on tonic! 🙂 

5 hours ago, Henry Ng Tsz Kiu said:

Hi @olivercomposer,

I think the G# Dorian really fits the misty atmosphere of the castle on the mountain. The modulation to F minor in 1:00 is great but I think the preparation can be longer. Here I feel like it's typical trailer music like a cookie cutter when the music is pushed for no reason. That brass melody is very beautiful, the progression to the relative major Ab major and then its flat submediant E major before getting back to f minor is great, and the Picardy 3rd ending is wonderful combined with that harp too, but they all sound typical to me. Maybe you can try to write something for solo music or chamber setting? Here they are all very effective and will make good film and incidental music, but to me not something unique enough to be what's you. In the solo setting and chamber works you can work more on the music materials themselves instead of just orchestral colour and effect. It's not that writing on orchestral works bad though, but sometimes the colour may make the music beautiful even though the content is less convincing. I am quite nitpicky on this one since I feel like you definitely have the talent to write more unique music!

Thanks for sharing!

Henry

 

I just tried some orchestration techniques with this piece of music that I read earlier. Maybe it's not the most unique piece of music, but it's very far from trailer music. (I hate most of the trailer tracks.) Yes, the modulation part would have been longer, I agree with you! Next time I will compose a very unique music piece which not start on tonic! 😄 Thanks for your comment!

It's very well done, I think. So, yes, we are in a fairly predictable harmonic context and the orchestration effects lead us a little where we expect, but I find that it fits perfectly into the very popular musical genre at the moment for the accompaniments of music in the image, in series, (epic...) sequences of films, and also some probably video game sequences (I know little about this field).

it therefore seems that the criticism of this too predictable aspect is related to the fact that we lack the image that it could accompany, to judge the whole.

But for my part, I find that the goal is achieved with some thematic passages that remind me of Grieg

Hey OliverComposer, its awesome.. love the vibe of the song...

On 6/15/2023 at 6:25 AM, powertabber said:

Hey OliverComposer, its awesome.. love the vibe of the song...

 

 

Thank you!