Forums

This is my debut single entitled "Cupidity". Please listen to it and give me some feedback! Here is a link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iL5Xd2s1nbE

Try everything. Just write music instead of thinking too much about it. There's no real "rule" how you should write a piano concerto, unless you're specifically copying someone.

Thank you! I'm using NotePerformer, which you can get a trial version of for 30 days. You can't directly export audio with the trial version, but you can set Audacity to record while Sibelius plays.

A piece I composed a while ago, but thought to share. I wrote this in response to a Reddit challenge to write a piece in a mode other than major/minor, and I chose to try Phrygian, but in practice it more or less turned into regular minor with the occasional lowered second. Nonetheless I'm proud of how the piece turned out.   

So I have been studying counterpoint for a long time, like more than a year. And I have tried writing fugues before because I am a fast learner and I figured that if I studied counterpoint, I would be able to write a fugue. Well, that hasn't happened yet. My 4 voice fugue attempts have always been futile(getting parallel octaves even when I'm trying hard not to get parallel octaves). So I figured that maybe, I'm just not ready for 4 voices yet. That and the fact that I have done canons before my extended study of counterpoint(mainly Bach style counterpoint I'm studying because I view Bach as the master of counterpoint and who better to learn from than the master) made me decide to do a 2 voice canon. And since all of my previous canons have been in major keys, I decided to do this one in a minor key. Now to decide on the voices. There are so many voice combinations. Here they are for 2 voices: Soprano and Alto Soprano and Tenor Soprano and Bass Alto and Tenor Alto and Bass Tenor and Bass 6 voice combinations may not seem like a lot, but it does lead to a lot of decisions. Then after deciding on the voice combination, there is deciding whether the higher voice or the lower voice is the comes voice(in other words, the voice that starts the canon). And then there are decisions related to contrapuntal techniques(like do I want it to be a crab canon(1 voice is the retrograde of the other)? Mirror canon(1 voice is the inversion of the other)? Table canon(1 voice is the retrograde inversion of the other)? Augmentation canon? Diminution canon?). I decided to go simple with this canon. No inversion or retrograde. No augmentation or diminution. As for the voice combination, I decided on soprano and tenor. This naturally lead me towards doing a canon at the octave, one of the most simple of interval canons. And I decided on doing my canon with vocals instead of instruments(which is why you will see that I don't go any faster than 16th notes in the canon). If I were to write this canon for instruments, I could easily put in a 32nd note entry. But, unless the piece is very slow, 32nds are hard for the human voice and at a certain tempo, it becomes impossible. So the fastest that I go in this canon is 16th notes. I have put a lot of text in the music, the text is my own contrapuntal analysis of it. Is there anything that I missed? And are there any mistakes besides the parallel octaves? Here is my incomplete canon: