Alacrity, for two pianos

This is a piano duet I wrote for a competition coming up in August. I don't have much to say about it, I wanted to experiment with some rhythmical devices and also the concept of 'gating' through different modes and harmonies.

I do like the rhythm and the whole piece has a rather jazzy feel.
Atmospherically, there is a nice sense of mystery and the more subdued middle section heightened that.

Your score is also a thing of beauty. Although I noticed in bar 163's top part you cancelled that sharps in the key signature (usually double bars here, I forget sometimes too) but on the first notes you also have accidentals doing the same thing. That seemed a little cluttered.

Anyway, good luck in the competition.

I agree it sounds kind of jazzy. Must admit that I'm not a fan of overly "rhythmical" or dissonant music, so I was never going to be a fan of this. Looks quite complex, and has a fair bit of variation (maybe too much?). Would hate to be attempting to play this piece!

Is it really all that dissonant? Maybe compared to music from 1750.

It's too bad you don't enjoy rhythmical music (I'm not exactly sure what that means). It's one of the basic components of music - saying you don't like music with interesting rhythms seems to me like saying you don't like music with interesting melodies.

I have to say I don't think this sounds jazzy either. I can hear some John Adams influence in this, especially towards the end, but my jazz friends would be appalled if I told them this was jazzy. But I do appreciate the comments about the score - I did notice after you pointed it out that I could use a different time signature in that bar to reduce the accidentals.

Great piece.
The main adjective that comes to my mind when listening is "fresh".
It really is a very fresh work, and with rather a lot of warmth - both things I enjoy.
Great, exciting build-up towards the end, with great rhythmic control in especial.

I do spot the influence of jazz in this piece, especially the first third. You must have realised people were going to draw subconscious parallels to Take Five, when you used 5/4, and that piano figure at the start.
Also, in bar 145 (secundo, right hand), and parallel places, the d naturals would be better respelt as C double-sharps.

I like it a lot. Great rhythmic drive and a broad harmony. Personally I quite like the incessant modulations. I could imagine some people missing a clear tonal centre and preferring the modulations to be less abrupt. But I think the rhythmic force provides enough coherency to bind the piece together, so the harmonic shifting isn't too disruptive, but creates a sense of continuous "development", together with the thematic material that is all closely related, yet always varied.

The only thing I don't like about the score is that you change key signatures a lot, even if it's just for one or two bars. I think it would be much easier to read if you just used accidentals for short passages in a different key, and only wrote different key signatures when you want to stay in a key for a longer period.

Yeah, it's always a struggle for me to determine how to make scores look less cluttered - I think I'll experiment with a few less key sig. changes and see how it looks.