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Very nice dreamy, yet mysterious and passionate prelude! I like the frequent changes of the time signature. While initially looking complicated, the rhythm of the piece has an intuitive pulse and a continuous flow. I noticed, that your score is without a key signature. But since you often change harmony from keys with sharps to keys with flats, this decision avoids that the score is cluttered with natural signs. And when listening and reading the score I like that the more serene passages correspond with the flats, while the more passionate passages feature more sharps! In some bars, I would like to see more octave brackets to make it easier to read when playing. Personally, I refuse to read more than three or four ledger lines. However, I agree, that too many octave brackets disrupt the visual impression of the runs in the score. I completely agree with @PeterthePapercomPoser's suggestions for improving the recording by “fine-tuning” the articulation, dynamics, and tempo for each individual hand or even voice. Since I do this with my piano works, I know that it is a lot of work to literally maintain two scores, one for the printout and one for the recording. But it's really worth the effort to achieve a sound that is much closer to a live performance. Thank you for sharing!

you can't delete the whole post and other people's comments, you can just delete your part of the convo by leaving just a dot/period in place of the things you wrote. I think the system requires there to be something there so just leave a dot/period

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you can edit out what you don't want to be in the post by clicking the three dots in the right corner of the window

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I'm on a trip lol

This book was intended as a supplement to harmony studies; on its own I don't find it very useful. For self‑teaching it's unsuitable — it tries to cover too many topics in too little space. Could you post a few of the exercises you solved from the book? I'm curious to see how you approached them. By the way, have you studied harmony in a formal setting, for example at school?

What about 'better than Peter'? @PeterthePapercomPoser

Thank you very much

It's been too long! I thought I would share this piece written for my theory and composition class at Berklee. We were asked to work with a couple of "exotic scales" from a selection including the whole-tone scale, the octatonic scale, and modes other than those derived from the major scale. I felt drawn to the Lydian Augmented and Spanish Phrygian modes. I ended up with a contrapuntal rock instrumental in rough ABCA' form. The A section is in B♭ Lydian Augmented, the B section is in G Spanish Phrygian, and the C section an unbroken transition into D Spanish Phrygian. Finally, I modulate with the common tones D and A back to B♭ Lydian Augmented, for the A' recapitulation. The title (Iridescence) was inspired by my understanding of modes as a concept. With many modes sharing the same collection of notes, the tonic note that each mode centers on is what makes it unique -- gives it a unique color. And, iridescence is when something appears in different colors depending on the angle of viewing. I see that as a fitting metaphor. The artwork is my own, made with ProCreate. I didn't paint it for this track, but as a birthday present for my mother, inspired by Kate Bush's song "Kite". She is a massive fan of Kate's and introduced me to her when I was a little girl. I rediscovered her recently and I've been spending a lot of time with her early work. My current favorite album is Never for Ever...whose influence I thought was bleeding into this track. So, in the end there is some relation. 🙂 I hope you enjoy! Any feedback on both the mix and composition is more than welcome. ~ GP P.S. I was required to include a detailed score for the assignment. It might be too precise for a rock track in general, but if enough people are interested I will upload that, too.

I think I got the idea for n.2!

Hello @Alex Weidmann! Nice mysterious Prelude! I'm surprised that @Henry Ng Tsz Kiu hasn't reviewed it yet since it's in his favorite key! 🤣 I have a few technical nit-picks: I've recently changed the way I write for piano through Musescore Studio 4 which I think might benefit you to hear about. If you favor the Musesounds Piano as I now have come to prefer, then in order to have more control over balance between the most important melody notes and less important background chords/figurations, you could actually load up two (or more) separate pianos and change the way they're displayed in the Layout section of the program (by deleting the bass clef portion of the right hand piano and deleting the treble clef portion of the left hand one). Then, not only will you be able to change the balance between the hands in the mixer, but you'll be able to give separate dynamics to each hand - an amount of control which you would lack with just one grand-staff track. Although you'd have to put in pedal marks for both tracks, and hide them in the top track. As well as hiding dynamics that are redundant. But I think bringing out the most important notes in each chord and passage will greatly improve at least my impression of the work. Another thing is the tempo. I noticed that you're trying to create a sense of novelty through the use of unusual rhythms and meters. I think it could be even more effective if you included an ebb and flow to the tempo by simulating a sort of constant rubato with choice accel.'s and rit.'s here and there. I can refer you to examples in my own catalog if you'd like, where such rubato gives a very satisfying result (at least in my opinion) and cases where the piece would suffer greatly from the mechanicality of the rendition if not for the rubato. Some places to consider including an accel. and rit.: bar 30 accel. into 31 I think would be a nice paired with that crescendo you already have. Other than that, nice job! I also question the interruption of the expected 4/4 flow of the beginning melody with the 9/8 measure - I think that's unnecessary. Thanks for sharing!

On playing this through myself tonight, I noticed a few further corrections and cautionaries that were required. So here is my latest version of the score.

This time I wrote a piece inspired by an exercise from Chapter 2 of Persichetti's "20th Century Harmony" on Scale Materials for 2 Bb Sopranino Clarinets and Bb Bass Clarinet. The prompt was "14. Construct a canon for three clarinets in which each performer plays a different synthetic scale on a different tonic." Synthetic scales are scales that are "specially constructed, often non-traditional scales created by altering, adding, or omitting notes from standard diatonic (major/minor) scales." I chose to use the written C Acoustic Scale, F Ukrainian Dorian Scale, and B Phrygian/Dorian Scale. I've been told that I should have perhaps tried to choose scales that would sound more harmoniously with each other. But, funny enough, that's exactly what I was trying to do. I didn't choose scales at random but tried to tailor each part of the canon to the previous material by improvising a scale and only later figuring out what scale I was using. But let me know what you think! Thanks for listening!

Again, I have another quote from Gary Lachman's "Beyond the Robot: The Life and Work of Colin Wilson". And if you've gotten this far, thanks for reading!

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The fugue subjects are from Marchant's collection 500 Fugue Subjects and Answers, which you can also find online. It was a very long time ago when I studied counterpoint; my teacher recommended Jeppesen’s Counterpoint, which I used. It deals with 16th‑century vocal polyphony, but the fundamental principles remain valid in later centuries as well. From a didactic point of view, I would definitely start with the vocal counterpoint idiom—either Renaissance practice or the tonal counterpoint foundations laid out by Fux. I would only move on to Baroque / Classical instrumental practice (such as the approach in Goetschius’s book) after you’ve mastered the basics of pure voice leading.

I finally learned how to make glide notes and might've overused them a bit 😅 the main chords that you hear in the start are made of music notes, and then adds harpsichord and piano. the song itself kind of sounds medieval from my instrument choice but that's kind of on purpose. I added an arpeggio and an octave change to the chorus to add some needed depth too. this is by far my best work. I first thought of something like witch town when all I had was the barebones chorus and it didn't really sound that good for a piece, but it was all I had. then I thought of night of the small town but I wanted some synonyms so I thought of dawn of the city. the whole song gives off some halloween- ish vibes but Its way past that competition took me about 5 days and probably around 4 - 6 hours in total

Thanks for the original score of the fugue. I will transcribe it and listen to it. And I’ll keep the page of themes for the future. Who knows if one day I'll be capable of composing good fugues, lol. If I may ultimately ask again: Do you have books or authors to recommend to me? Thanks.

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