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Thank you for your reply Kvothe. I am currently taking courses in music harmony and classical piano. So in the coming years, counterpoint will also come up as a field of study. I am aware of the books, however i am trying firstly to develop my skills gradually. I also own the Study Of Orchestration by Samuel Adler, which i hope to read and undestand some time in the future. Thank you for the feedback and the book propositions!

Thank you JP S. i watched the video and found it helpful. I will try to apply it to my compositiion as well as other that i create. I am currently taking courses in music Harmony and classical piano. And yes, i tend to put a lot of ideas in my composition so that is something i should also look into in the future in order not to overpopulate the songs and learn how to develop each idea fully. Thank you again for the reply.

Hi @elmarad40 I have listened to your piano composition and followed it with the score. I think you have potential here, for there are motives that can lead into strong phrases, which lead into either period or sentence form. Then you can create small form (ABA), which would work great for this. I think Ryan video and Schoenberg book "funadmentals of music composition" would help you greatly. Schoenberg is not expensive. There are books, but I do not your budget. One is "Anysis of Classical forms" and "Musical Composition" You might also look into harmony and counterpoint. Walter piston has one on harmony and one counterpoint. But there others. And there courses you can take. If you are studying composing, see if you can courses. If not, it is harder. I know when I was music major, there were none, sadly.

Thanks for your nice words and for listening, @MJFOBOE. Nino Rota is one of my favorite composers (specially his "circus" music) so I am really happy that you said that! 😄Glad you enjoyed! Thank you!

For me, this will always be the catchiest song from a video game. It keeping popping into my head quite often in the most random moments since its release so many years ago.

There was something I was going to say about this part specifically and I remember like 3 days ago saying "When I get home I have to remember to say it" but now I'll be damned if I can remember what it was.

I've recently been rediscovering the Metroid series Crazy story: About 12 years ago, I covered this song with a friend on OCR. I believe our mix is still up, and someone actually made a guitar hero cover of it.

Thanks Vince! Yeah, in the case of this casting, where we ended up (by pure chance and luck) having 10 unique solfege degrees thrown with the solfege dice, it almost became a serial tone row. If we had gotten two more solfege degrees (Do and Fa) it would have been a complete 12-tone row. Thanks for your review! You're welcome and thank you for buying me the harmonica and Muzoracle! You've enriched my and other's lives for sure! This has been the most drawn out casting I have done thus far and I hope you gain from it!

Well, keep in mind I don't write concert orchestral works much and neither did the composers I worked with when they were recording orchestras. So I'm not an expert on concerts. But from what I DO know about concert composers: Most of them come through academia. If you're a student, that's your best shot. Some churches might also have small orchestras. Otherwise, volunteering or getting some other job with an orchestra and building up a network with orchestra directors and what not you may eventually get them to perform some of your shorter pieces (not much longer than 4 minutes) in a concert. If you really build up a good relationship with them, they might even start commissioning you, which a single commission could be a 5-figure amount of money. But that would probably take years of networking and essentially proving yourself. The reason it's so difficult to get an orchestra to play new music in a concert, even if it is very good, is that orchestras have become very niche and they need repertoire on the bill that is basically guaranteed to put butts in seats; names that people recognize. If there are too many names people don't know, then they risk not selling many tickets. That's why so many concerts these days pull from games and films: It's the best source of "new" material that people will pay to see. Honestly, you may just want to reach out to orchestras near you and straight-up ask them about playing your pieces and what sort of hoops you'd have to jump through (don't phrase it like that though).

Ah there's the rub: what is the best route then to be consider for new composers?

Well, that sounds cool! I will give it a listen!

I find the music in the tradition of Ennio Morricone and Nino Rota .... their Italian movie scores ... a bit of Film Noire here ... hauntingly beautiful music. Mark

Thank you for your compliment!

Thank you for your compliment! This is not a lyric adapted from any Celtic legend. It's something I came up with myself, and the inspiration came from the game "Warcraft III".

If you're just wanting an orchestra to perform your uncommissioned music, then they may charge a rate to print sheet music copies and otherwise prepare the piece. Especially for student pieces. Like, recording an orchestra for example typically costs 10s of thousands per hour. In concert music, if they commission a piece, they would pay for that piece and then pay out performance royalties to the PRO on top of that. Also in concert music, if they did not commission the piece, but choose to perform it in a concert, the composer is paid royalties through their PRO. BUT I'm not aware of many orchestras outside of music college ones being in the business of playing concert pieces that that don't already come from classical repertoire, films or video games anyway. In short: If it's for a concert and you're trying to get them to play your piece in it, they may want some amount of money to prepare the piece, but not a raw fee simply to "play" it. They have to pay to play it. But it is a bit of a moot point. Most orchestras, at least that I'm aware of, won't even give an unknown composer consideration for concerts.

If a work is program, then shouldn't composer be paid?

I have written another piece for my friend Kat's Casting! This time Kat asked the Muzoracle if she will graduate from a 4-year university. (Muzoracle is a storytelling/divination tool similar to the Tarot card deck, but with cards with musical concepts and 12-sided Musician's dice and Solfege dice.) My interpretation of the cards and dice are displayed below. Since the first card drawn was a Conductor of Percussion card, I chose to use Piano, an instrument that Kat likes. The second card drawn was a Major 7th of Woodwinds, so I chose Clarinet, an instrument that Kat used to play. And finally the third card drawn was an Octave of Voices card, so I chose a solo Soprano singer. If you'd like to find out more about Muzoracle and how castings are interpreted go here: https://muzoracle.net/ This short musical interpretation of Kat's Casting is about a minute and a half long. Since the black 12-sided Musician's Die landed on F, the piece is in the key of F major. I created the following melodic/harmonic underdrawing guided by the cards and dice. The first solfege die landed on Ti and the card indicated a percussion instrument - in this case, Piano. So I had the Piano start solo on an E (in the left hand). Then I had the Clarinet and Soprano enter on an anacrusis into a melody that uses E, Db, C, and B. Since the interval of a Minor 2nd is prominent in the casting, I decided to transpose the whole melodic/harmonic underdrawing down a Minor 2nd giving me access to tones needed to create a V7 of F. I then used that dominant to bring the piece into F major and repeat the melodies and harmonies at the pitch level of F before repeating the piece and ending on an F7 #11 chord. I also liberally used accelerandi and ritardandi, guided by the accelerando/ritardando card in the 1st position. If you've gotten this far, thanks for reading! And I hope you enjoy listening to this short chamber work I wrote to represent Kat's Casting. Comments, critiques, suggestions, or observations are of course, always welcome. Thanks for listening!

Heyo! This is a really nice opening. It’s actually a higher quality hit than some of the drum corps hits I’ve heard! It has good movement, then ends on the sustained note, with the high trumpet accent at the end to bring in the energy. I also like that it comes in with a cymbal swell rather than starting with silence - I think without it the hit could feel like too much all at once. I understand the whistle (some directors do that, like the Disney College Band). My one tip, could you please make it last 16 counts? To my count it sounds like 14, so I would recommend moving the high trumpet two beats later, then it may sound fitting to have a little more movement beforehand leading up to that section. Cheers and happy composing:) Please let me know if this was helpful

Could you please let me know if any of that was helpful?

Thanks for the opportunity to provide feedback, and sorry I think I forgot about your reply. I just rechecked my notifications and found yours, so here are my comments. Hopefully this isn’t too late. First off I think you have a lot of nice ideas. You have a composer’s intuition, and these ideas sound like things I would have written when I was first starting. You have a nice sense of melody and accompaniment, and each of the phrases seems to pair the melody with an accompaniment pattern or echo pretty well. I think this is a high quality start to future composing yet to come. Finding it’s already good, I think each of these ideas of yours could actually become their own pieces. Changing meters so often makes it sound like a separate thing, so could you consider making a separate piece out of something like measures 1-16? Then I think the next easy improvement in quality would be varying up your melodic and harmonic pacing. It sounds like each idea has a similar feel for 3 or 4 measures out of the phrase, so could you look into some of Ryan Leach’s videos on Period and Sentence form? Here’s one: Cheers, and happy composing:)

Well... if musicians don't have to make a living or if they have some modern royalties to grant patronage to them then this may be false...

I can't imagine why it wouldn't be true tbh

Well, I wasn't really thinking about that 29 years ago! I wrote it in some bar or coffeeshop...🤣

Hi there, I understand you were trying to write a barcarolle. Let break this down. You have the correct meter 6/8 and the right tempo (moderato). That is step in the right direction. However, you do not have the folk like character that piece calls for. Remember...you are writing a character piece that mimics a folk song that Venetian gondoliers would sing. Thus, the theme needs to be lyrical in character. And the bass line, none the less, needs to support that. I recommend watch this: Chopin examples