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Melodies Themes Motives Harmony Chords Textures Form Development Structure Time Originality Creativity Score Presentation Instrumentation Orchestration Playability Execution of Given Challenge Taste 7.5 6.5 5.5 8 6.5 9 6.5 6.5 Average: 7 Standard

@Thatguy v2.0 Entry: From Above, not below Melodies Themes Motives Harmony Chords Textures Form Development Structure Time Originality Creativity Score Presentation Instrumentation Orchestration Playability Execution of Given Challenge Taste 10 9.5 9 9 10 10 10 8 Average Score:8.2 Review: Melodies Themes Motives (10): I truly felt you have achieved the top tier of what atonal writing should be. Like the unsettling of high winds, the melodic materials take on whirlwind adventure. I have nothing else to say on this matter. Harmony, Chords, and Textures (9.5): The tonal clusters of this piece truly blew me away. Nice touch. Form(9): Free form is excellent choice. Organity and creativity(9): you truly were pushed creativity to the mast here! Score (10): The score was readable. However, the only might I suggest is: the pedaling in the piano. instrumation (10): As I meantion before, Pianist like to change the pedal every now and then. If you hold the pedal too long...the notes become blurry. Execution: perfect! Taste: I am giving this 8 because is not for everyone, but it is for some.

Melodies Themes Motives Harmony Chords Textures Form Development Structure Time Originality Creativity Score Presentation Instrumentation Orchestration Playability Execution of Given Challenge Taste 9 (too simple) 6 6.5 8 7.5 7.5 8 7 Average: 7.4375 Standard

nice! quite a fitting piece. there is a lack of theme though. some interesting chords and great texture. Average: 6.875 Melodies Themes Motives Harmony Chords Textures Form Development Structure Time Originality Creativity Score Presentation Instrumentation Orchestration Playability Execution of Given Challenge Taste 4 8.5 9.5 7 7.5 7 6.5 5

I felt using col legno in the bass to introduce dies irae would set the mood. Then in the mid to high strings, I thought, there could be different ways to create variations from that. The introduction of piece lead to tonal cadences but not in traditional sense. I think that is why some think. The high sense of Chromaticism threw everyone off. The raising chromatic lines is very 19th century of me: Wanger! The romantics knew to use chromaticism a lot. Waltz like section, might seem tonal, but it is bi tonal. It is a challenge to use to use 19th and 20th century ideas. 🙂

To its improvement, I remixed one of the pieces in the post directly above:

id give it a 6.7 out of ten.

Awesome music, and welcome! Dude, you're fantastic. I almost went this route, kinda the dancey macabre but fun way. Loved it Your music is very well thought out, score is clean and neat, you obviously know what you're doing. Lovely playback too, the rendering is really smooth and polished. We'd love to hear your feedback on some of the entrees, you sound like you have a lot of knowledge for a young age. Well done! 🙂

the mp3 file wont open for some reason. is there a fix?

Cool music! Ah, col legno... I should have used it, really nice color touch. That was probably my favorite part, like footsteps of whatever we're running from haha. You did some cool things in the intro too, I like the overall esthetic you went for. Some of the entries used winds which were really cool for color, but we just had different options with strings. I like the shrill atmosphere the strings are capable of, sounds like you too advantage of that too. Well done! Vote for your own piece, or your favorite, or mine! 😛

agreed (this is not a joke lol)

lol I love the character you put in your posts as much as your music. This is so cool... descending chromatic harmonies like spiders, soft sweet out of tune sounding melodies, extra spooky reverb... so great. I really like how you gave us scary vibes, but there was a sense of lightheartedness too. Perfect score for character, this is a front runner to me! Nice work Daniel, glad to see you back around! 😄 vote for me

7.5/10

That happens to all of us. I will say this to you. Do you realize YOU'RE the reason we have a Halloween competition in the first place? Do you remember asking in the shoutbox about competitions, and I asked you about it? Then the staff talked on Discord and came up with the ideas and polls and implemented them, because of you. Then, since it was fun and poll based, I wanted to enter because I've done nothing but guitar stuff for the past months. The piece I wrote is one of my favorites, and it wouldn't have existed without you being the catalyst. You view this competition as a failure, but you helped create an avenue of innovation for me and others, AND you got to learn about the harmonies you deployed in your piece. You learned some things that worked, and some things that didn't. Thank you for helping make this competition a success.

Always

Never lol

Wow! I haven't logged in for a long time. I didn't expect that my work received such good reviews. Thank you so much for liking my work so much!

My friend, @MK_Piano and I were fooling around with some of our scores on a discord call last evening. He had the bright idea to modulate something that's written with an intense emphasis on negative emotion, in a minor key, to a major key. (I have no idea why I've never thought of this lol) This can be done by selecting all notes in the score, and transposing up by a third, diatonically. (Obviously this doesn't take into account any off-key chords used throughout the score, but the result is just as fun to playback lol). Adversely, you can do this in reverse to a score written in a major key. Here's an example, where I've instead of modulating between relative major/minor, I've went through the trouble of modulating to the Major of the same key. (C minor to C major). I used my Halloween Submission as a test dummy because why not. Hah!!! Take a listen: YCF Halloween Composition 2025.mp3 Bright Town Fanfare (lol).mp3

Check out these five canons (with accompaniment) that I composed over the past couple of days:

Outside of rock guitar solos (and even then I prefer not to), I never use an improvisation as a complete melody. Personally, I dislike improvisation. I see composing music as the sonic equivalent to sculpting marble or painting on canvas. It is something that is shaped and refined until it realizes a vision. I think it was Michelangelo who said "I saw the angel in the marble and I sculpted until I set him free". I believe that should be the approach to composing music, and as far as I am aware, it is how all the greatest works were composed.

8.5/10

7/10

7.5