String Quartet + Woodwind Piece

You know my take on this, but I'll get this thread started. You have a beautiful melody, and this will be the star of your piece There are two thoughts here. If your harmony is simple functional, and you mainly stay in key, you HAVE to have a good structure and melody. If your piece is not melodic, than harmony becomes a lot more important. The main issues I see with this piece:

• Your solos come out of nowhere, and make your piece sound unfinished, and lonely.
• Your ending was much better in the version you send me over Discord, what happened to that? Your ending here sounds very drawn out and unfinished.
• At 6:14, you have an odd key change. The problem with something like this, is that you mainly stick in key throughout, and you already set expectations for your audience (simple functional harmony).

I would reupload your newest version for better feedback though!

12 hours ago, chopin said:

Your solos come out of nowhere, and make your piece sound unfinished, and lonely.

I 100% agree...when I first started writing this piece I wasn't quite sure which direction the structure would go and I was just writing things to fill up space and hopefully get things going. I was aiming for about 4.5- 5 minutes. I think if I take out those sections and work on connecting what I have, I'll be solid. 

12 hours ago, chopin said:

Your ending here sounds very drawn out and unfinished.

If I may ask, what about the ending sounds unfinished? If you guys couldn't already tell, I'm a big fan of hymns, and stuff like that allows me to throw in little hints of things I like into the piece lol

12 hours ago, chopin said:

(simple functional harmony)

How do I keep it from being so simple?

The ending sounds unfinished because you haven't harmonized it. This is my opinion of course, but if your piece isn't specifically a "solo", or if you are not executing a cadenza-like passage (something Beethoven is known for, especially in his Piano Concertos), I would probably just avoid long drawn out solos. Solos have the advantage of being a tension breaker, tension builder, or "the main character" of a piece. But this short piece needs to take advantage of the time it has by communicating as much as it can in such a short amount of time. The solos waste valuable time.

And you don't need complex harmony. When I say "simple functional" harmony, that isn't a criticism. Chopin's Fantaisie Impromptu and Beethoven's 5th Symphony use simple functional harmony and they are masterpieces. In fact, you wouldn't want overly complex harmony since your piece is highly melodic, and complex harmony would take away from the melody.

Oh yeah, I didn't even realize that - my bad

I wanted a chorale-sounding finish and I think this really works

I also LOVE this part - I have that melody + chord progression in there 2x with alterations