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Clicked on this and listened to it, but I just got defeated in trying to write a white-heat piano piece in one sitting, and my brain hurts, but having even read Beethoven piano sonatas ON THE TOILET! Beethoven himself would not turn up his nose at this, and it DOES sound a bit like him, though not derivative; I would say in the style of, it's like one of his easy-going first movements of a piano sonata. I WILL listen to the whole thing.

This is a really good piece, and I have really been enjoying your music! Very exotic, and you are well-trained and have done your homework.😃

Hey, some of you pianists here learn this right fast, ya hear? 🤣 Ich koennte auf den Boden gefallen und sterbend lachende!-W.A. Mozart. My German is improving...but still rudimentary.

BTW, I never mess with dynamics, slurs, bowings, etc. in Noteflight; it takes a long time to enter there anyway, and dynamics sound exaggerated. My scores if written in manuscript have these things, but if writing direcly into Noteflight as this one, and the one I just posted are, I also don't bother. Anyone playing my Noteflight music may edit the scores themselves.

12 Variationen Über Das Lied "Heidenröslein" Free Sheet Music by Robert C. Fox for Piano/Keyboard | Noteflight Began this piece at about 11:30 last night and trying to finish in twelve hours, writing directly into Noteflight, and it is a virtuoso showpiece. Took on a life of its own, and I can't even play piano! I am giving myself a sort of Diary in the comments!

Hey Mooravioli, I like your piece. The harmony is weird and complex. I think for this kind of music the danger is making the harmony too unconventional, which makes the piece hard to listen to. A lot of people that experiment, do it too much. You don't: you keep the listener hooked and curious, and know how to tell a story through chords. Another thing that helps is your use of melodic motives. Really nice! I especially like the resolution and ending from bar 195 onwards. Consider using a tenor saxophone instead of alto, it better suits the melodies you've written. Low notes on sax are often harsh and unpredictable, writing a little higher in the instruments range can give a nicer sound/more freedom to the player to choose the right sound. You can also definitely explore the vibraphone's abilities more. Remember that professionals can play four notes at once! Listen to some bebop vibe players for reference. Also, five sharps (or four for tenor)? why would you do that to anyone? If you raise everything a semitone (Eb major, concert pitch), your players will thank you. As for the genre - this isn't jazz. I would probably call it contemporary classical. If you want to write jazz, listen to the music. If you'd like to write in any style, you need to be familiar with that music. Of course that shouldn't discourage you from writing this music at all! It sounds cool, and that is what matters. I just wanted to say, if you call this jazz and show it to a jazz musician, they will look at you like "🙂 that is really ~interesting~ jazz 🙂". For improvisation, your best bet is to write chord symbols and let one player completely free, like in traditional jazz songs, because that is what players are used to. Saying 'feel free to improvise' and 'improvise less' is very vague, and may not give the effect you want. What you could say is 'feel free to embellish' or something, if that's what you had in mind. In general: if you don't want someone to play the written notes, don't write the notes...

Thanks!

Hello @Henry Ng Tsz Kiu! Thank you so much for your lovely reply! I am really happy you found it soothing! And your suggestion is something I've been debating on for quite some time on the piece but have been unsure about. So, I take this as a good sign to extend it a little more! Seun

hello, it's been a while because i switched browsers, but here's a new song! also, can someone tell me what genre this is? i can't tell.

I started getting serious about music beginning with heavy metal music over 20 years ago, which Black Sabbath pioneered. Without Ozzy Osbourne, I'd not be a composer today. RIP Prince of Darkness

String player here as well. @HoYin Cheung has given great suggestions/advice. Side note: I'm currently marking bowings for an orchestra to perform Brahms Symphony 4, and Brahms loved his long slurs! Most of them are impractical and I think he didn't really think about how that would translate to the musician playing...but they do give an insight to how he wanted the players to phrase the music. I rarely mark bowings in my own music as I think it depends on the player/section/orchestra and how their style/approach to music.

For the crescendo and ff part, for instance, m.24-28, string players have the tendency to use more bows. That will mean the slur across measure 27 and 28 will be seperated in to 2 strokes. Otherwise, you made good notations. And the principal section player will make the decision for you and confidently use their own sets/rules of strokes as long as the whole section are using the same.😆No worries.

I am a violinist and a former orchestra player, so my advise should be realistic. I think most of the slurs you marked on this score is appropriate and practical, given most of the lines are in pianissimo or pianississimo. One useful thing to know is that, 1) if the part you are writing is not the main melody that do not need to be that is not that pronounced, and; 2) if there happens to be a decrescendo leading to a p or pp, then the string player is able to play the passage as slow as possible on the same stroke and the bow is treated as infinitely long. That may seem ridiculous, but that's the case. You play the "feeling" there. Tl;dr, 4-5 bar is totally possible with above prerequisite. One reason behind this playing style is that, it requires good technique to make the bow change unnoticeable. Due to the structure of bow, there is more tension at the bottom than at the bow tip. That will mean a natural decrescendo playing down bow (from bottom to tip) assuming a constant pressure applied. The reverse happens too, where a natural crescendo will occur playing upbow. So if there are any bow changes, the shift from cresc. to descrec. might be audible. While experienced players may control the pressure to mitigate the effect, they avoid changing bow unless the same phase really require 2 bows to project with expressiveness. Therefore, most of the cases, we keep it done in one single stroke for the above situations.

Hello! I’m not sure if this is the right place to ask, but I could really use some advice. I’m currently writing an orchestral piece, and there’s a section where the strings play almost entirely on their own. At first, I used a lot of long slurs, but after reading some books and posts about orchestration, I realize that may not have been the best approach. In your opinion, how should I notate slurs in this passage to make my intentions clear to the performers? The section is very slow, so large slurs seem to be impractical. Thank you very much for your help!

I tried to take the given advice into account, and now have a full start-to-finish version of the score! I've put a lot of hours into this and I'm rather proud of how it's turning out, especially considering my overall lack of experience. Transitions between sections of a piece are one of my main weaknesses, and consequently I tend to scrutinize them a bit more, but I feel there's still room for improvement (for example, I can't tell if measures 82-83 sound good or just out of place). That being said, I'm definitely open to suggestions for anything in this piece (especially notes on the ending, another one of my weaknesses). I've improved a lot but I've got a long way to go.

In classical music, a piece is like an album and movements are like songs in the album. The main difference is that usually people don't listen to movements out of order, since the order is important to the flow of the music, but that's pretty much what a movement is.

Not to belittle anyone or be pretentious, but I think it's best to use the correct terminology when discussing these things. A piece can have several movements. Think of the piece (for example, lets say Beethoven's 5th Symphony) as a novel, and a movement as a chapter of that novel (in our example, there are four movements in that symphony). Movements don't have to be similar (melodically or harmonically) and can have varied moods or personalities. Pieces can have anywhere from 2 movements to infinite (a bit impractical and illogical, but theoretically possible). Most of the time, there is a unifying element that tie together the movements, be it musical or external narrative. There are cases where movements are so different from each other that they can be their own pieces, but that is a rare occurrence.

Great music! I think the bongo sticks and trumpet work perfectly with the theme!

sorry I haven't been posting any new songs.

So, a lot of songs have different movements, and I don't know what they are! most of the time, movements of the same song have a completley different melodys, and are just in the same music genre, and I use FL studio where you just click to add notes and choose an instrument. can someone tell me what a movement is?

Hello Everybody, It has been another long while since I've posted but I've definitely been composing during my time away. This is a work written for a 2-week composition festival I attended, lots of great opportunities and people when I was there. The festival is called the "ICEBERG Institute"(https://www.icebergnewmusic.com/about) if you're interested. Anyways, hope to hear your thoughts on this piece in regards to harmony, melody and rhythm. I am trying to work in a new(jazz?) idiom and I'm not sure how it sounds to others. Thank you for the support

pretty good! both sound like an average rock song!

So, remember when i said i wasn't gonna be posting because i was working on a song? Well here's the song I was working on. Please reply how you liked It! i made this song with only instruments from deltarune chapter 2 so it's a bit like Serious.

Haha thx! Yeah I try to be playful here which sounds quite Haydnesque. It's not finished! There will be a fourth and final movement and stay tuned! Henry

if you like my work, please follow me and subscribe to my youtube channel. i will post every single song i compose.