Evergreen Revised: 7/27/11

Impressive, Justin. I really love the brevity of your material here and how you treat it. Very impressive work, I'm quite... QUITE impressed! I wish the like option were still here.... *votes 5 stars instead*

Justin, you are this big fan of Mahler and in the past have given it your shot at attempting to write massive Mahlerian symphonies of your own. Despite all of that I think your most creative and inspiring work comes out of your solo piano work. I have now heard 3 completely unique and original pieces by you that are loaded full of wonderful harmonies, development, and interesting rhythms. I am a big fan of you and a piano.

This is pretty great. You reuse material in a structurally pleasing way, and I really like the chords.

How do you imagine a pianist playing the three stave section starting from bar 32? It is impossible to play the parts where all three staves have notes (like bar 33) as it sounds in the recording. I suggest you remove first quaver of the middle stave where this happens, like you do in bar 74. Otherwise this is pretty faultless.

I agree with Ian on playability. Notationwise I would suggest to limit the occurrence of 3 staffs a much a possible. For example from ms 83 onward could easily fit in 2 staffs.

After all the praising reviews the piece itself disappoints a little. The continuous flow of eights, but more importantly the ostinato rhythm of the melody does not or almost never change. Ms 40 is an happy exception, and there you only moved the theme a quarter measure. This kind of shifting is the key to keep the piece interesting. Harmonically the piece has its moments. From ms 40 is really well done, and the move to quartal chords in ms 44 I really enjoyed.

Other than some play-ability issues that Ian has pointed out and that I definitely agree with, I really enjoyed this piece. I love the harmonic language, it's very interesting and a very fun piece. It's an extremely difficult piece, but otherwise, with lots of practice playable. I almost would like to learn it myself! Well done!

Thanks guys!

In re: playability, thanks for pointing that out. I was in haste to get this thing done and up online so I didn't check the finer details. With some clever exchanging of hands, however, it can be done. Those downbeat 8ths will have to go though, agreed.

Disappointing play-ability issues aside in this performance (really, Tokke, that's beneath you, even in a hurry -- you're a real musician, you shouldn't ever have three different registers of the piano being hit at the very same time! I.E., measure 33 ), I thought that this was very well written. I thought your build-up was great, and your harmonic choices fantastic. And I always love looking at a score that's pleasing to the eye as well as to the ear -- I'm of the mind that 1/4th the art of music is in the score, and making it look beautiful as well as the music ^_^

When you get rid of the play-ability issues, you will have brought forth great art!

Thanks for sharing, this is really enjoyable work

Excellent Harmony, sounds beautiful, just ironically the most beautiful parts cannot be played, is not a matter of "check" but "conceive", you did not write this in front of the piano did you ? is very easy to fall into mistakes when just writing in the computer, for keyboards and guitars.

You can make this for 4 hands, and would sounds as beautiful as in the recording, fixing all this for two hands, will perhaps spoil your original conception, you can try but you'll see you liked more the sounds of this 1st version than the possible 2nd.
2 pianos would sound terrific, and you don't have to remove but even add stuff...

Ian suggestion can work, removing the 1st quaver but I don't know if you'll like the interruption in the flowness, also in some notes the position wouldn't be good.

Write in 2 staves, that will automatically show you when something's wrong, leave the 3 staves for something terrible like Prokofiev 2nd concert cadence (mov.1) otherwise write in two.

But it doesn't sound beautiful.

EDIT:
I Rated 3, sorry, make it playable and I click 5.

I liked the harmony utilized, but the texture got stale after a while.

Excellent Harmony, sounds beautiful, just ironically the most beautiful parts cannot be played, is not a matter of "check" but "conceive", you did not write this in front of the piano did you ? is very easy to fall into mistakes when just writing in the computer, for keyboards and guitars. You can make this for 4 hands, and would sounds as beautiful as in the recording, fixing all this for two hands, will perhaps spoil your original conception, you can try but you'll see you liked more the sounds of this 1st version than the possible 2nd.2 pianos would sound terrific, and you don't have to remove but even add stuff... Ian suggestion can work, removing the 1st quaver but I don't know if you'll like the interruption in the flowness, also in some notes the position wouldn't be good. Write in 2 staves, that will automatically show you when something's wrong, leave the 3 staves for something terrible like Prokofiev 2nd concert cadence (mov.1) otherwise write in two. But it doesn't sound beautiful.

I agree. Justin, you essentially have already written this for 4 hands. You have two distinct parts intertwining throughout. You are going to need to write in a few extra things, but I think as it is now it is screaming at everyone that it needs to be played as a 4 hands piece. It is a massive sounds. It is very grandiose. So, I think you want to increase that effect by adding more. If you figure out the 2 piano parts I might like to play it as a 4 hands piece with my mom. We do that every once in a while. We could do a live recording for you.

Guys, you're making a big deal out of a very simple problem to fix. Calm down. Three staves is not that uncommon. Just check out a bunch of 20th-Century repertoire and you'll see. The point of the three staves is for notational clarity, to keep the different ideas from colliding with each other on the page. I've seen as many as four staves for a single piano, from a piece from the late 1800s. The removal of the first 8th won't ruin the flow because something else is being struck during that time.

I am not going to make this four-hands. There's no where near enough material to warrant it. It was not conceived as one; it was conceived from start to finish as one person sitting at one piano.

The point is not that three of four staffs is uncommon, but in your case unnecessary. The argument of clarity only counts as your players are too dumb to read multiple layers in one staff. And for the sake of argument, multiple layers is maybe even more common than more than 2 staffs

Oh, and I should not make it 4hands either. I agree here with you. As if all massive piano works need more than two hands...

Tokke, just the fact that you want a person to play those alternating fifth and sixth intervals in the one right hand throughout the entire piece is enough of a problem. It is not technically impossible, but to do so would be exhausting not to mention slightly awkward. Those eighth note intervals would be much better suited to being played with two hands while other parts where played by another pianist. The one handed method is not conducive to the kind of connection or legato that you would want. I mean it is your piece and you can do whatever you want with it, but no matter how cool it is people are not going to be able to play it the way it is written.

i love the piece though. I have listened to it about 10 times today already.

I'm not sure I see the problem at all. The fixes Justin needs to make are quite simple and I'm sure he's already working on a score that includes them. I've showed this to a pianist I know and he played it quite easily - only a few parts were difficult for him. Sooo, it's definitely playable. I tried to record it Justin BUT... my microphone broke :<

Actually this is quite doable as a 2 hand piece as the tempo is not fast. There are a few tricky spots I would work with figuring which hand could take over a part -mm 42 - 43 for example I would need to figure how to catch the accompaniment when the top and bottom voices have this nice rhythmic interplay.

The one place where it is not pianist are the rolled chords at the endinmg measures, if you just have therolled chords two octaves higher where they go g-e and then end with a final one e - c. The left hand can easily cross over the rh there but as written the pianist will have problems getting a clear voicing as the voices cross too closely.

I love the impressionistic harmony and Grieg like melody. Good pianistic writing which would benefit working with a pianist to work out the a few small spots such as the ones I mentioned.

Notice to all: I revised it! Check again.

I guess I am seeing the revised version, since I see NOTHING to complain about in the terms of playability. I did it just fine too a few minutes ago with minor errors. I would keep in mind, though Justin, your demographic is severely limited with your lack of material and density of complexity in this piece. You require a lot of effort to not do much musically, if that makes any sense. It's a problem I had too. Your rhythms are almost ostinato and your main melodic motif is never really developed. Now, if you were going for a minimalist approach, I might reconsider the complexity of the vertical aspect of the piece. Maybe thin out the texture and not use so many chords. I'd need to go back and look, but it doesn't seem like you have a structure of chords, it's more of a through composed piece dominated by closely related chords directed by the melody. I'm not entirely sure that's true, I'd need to study it rather than just play through it once and give it a listen. RIght around 3:22 is the best part because there is an unstable period harmonically. I would do something to make almost a B section around 4 minutes. Something other than the slow build from unison to the the quartal area to the build up back to the first theme. Maybe something in a minor key region? Doesn't even have to be long... maybe 30 seconds of an otherwise glorious piece!

So keep up the good work! I do enjoy your piano works.

-Connor Lidell.

dislike

dislike

What about it?

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Errr, ok, random thought of the day. Elaborate?

Anyway, just wanted to say I came back to listen to it again Glad to see it's playable now!

I think he was trolling This is wonderful.

Well, I'll be damned, that was.... ever green!!!! This is a wonderful mood piece! You set the mood in pretty well and developed well to its climax. You more or less used the same style throughout, but you variate the harmonies and thematic materials, which is good. This reminds me of the pieces Dario Marianelli wrote for some of his movies, particularly 'Pride and prejudice'.

In a nutshell, great piece, sir. Keep it comin'.