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Hello everyone, I want to share a Bagatelle I just composed. I composed it all at the piano (my first piece composed in the piano, instead of through Sibelius) and wrote it down afterwards. I posted it on the "Incomplete Works" section as I was having second thoughts about the B section but I ended up not making so many changes and only some improvements here and there. It is a Bagatelle in F major for piano (thanks to @PeterthePapercomPoser for giving me the clue to find out the style of the piece). I played it in a Yamaha P-515 digital piano with the Bösendorfer piano sound. Since my playing is not so good I had to record the whole thing in three different parts and then mix them in Audacity. I tried to fix any sound issue that appeared but there are two particular spots that sound strange as I was not able to mix them better, so sorry about that. Also, I make a couple of mistakes here and there. The good thing is that, since I composed it by playing it myself, it is not a particularly hard piece to play. The piece is in ABA' form with the main theme (A) in Fmaj and a contrasting section (B) in Fmin. Any comment and feedback is more than welcome! Thank you for listening and hope you enjoy it!

Posting a prelude I wrote again with sheet music this time Prelude_Op11_No1_20240218_222441.mid

Your explanation seems to be the most logical.

I just checked the "Fur Elise" and it is a Bagatelle, not a Barcarolle. It seems we both got mixed-up 🤣. And you are actually right, Bagatelles are normally short piano pieces light and melodic in character so it will suit this piece perfectly! I will probably name it Bagatelle then. Thank you so much for the compliments on my playing! I am still learning so my skills are not too good, and I had to record everything in three different sections which I had to mix later 😅 But I find knowing piano helps so much for composing faster and, of course, it sounds much more beautiful that with Sibelius and Noteperformer. I will try hard to keep on learning even though it is harder than I expected :S. Thank you!!

I am not familiar enough with naming conventions about the barcarolle. I just threw that name out there because I thought that Beethoven's Fur Elise was a barcarolle and I considered your piece similar enough to it to warrant a comparison. Btw - I really liked the way you played it! It has a very personal touch of rubato. I wouldn't change how it's notated - it's very individual and not cookie-cutter as @gaspard would say.

Thank you so much for your comment and encouragement, @PeterthePapercomPoser! After reading your comment I learned to appreciate the B section a little better and tried only to make it a little longer instead of changing it almost completely, which was my original plan. I guess the only thing I can do for feeling more comfortable and less self-conscious about the contrasting, development, and variation sections is only to keep on practicing until they come up to me more naturally and learn to trust more my musical decisions. I checked the link and I really liked your idea of varying themes and musical ideas only a little (making it stay almost the same) but doing it in a recursive way so, in the end, it results in a totally different musical idea. I will try to use that as a practice for developing pieces in the future. Could it be considered a Barcarolle? I though Barcarolles were mostly in compound meters but I do not know much about the style. My piece is in common time, even though I cannot imagine it without the exact same rubato that I played it with (so sometimes I am even wondering whether I actually notated the tempo incorrectly). I ask about it because I will post the piece soon as a completed piece in the forum when I solve some audio issues but I have not idea how I could call it. I normally like to call pieces by the style it is in "Minuet in Fmaj, Waltz in Fmaj, etc...". In this case I am not sure what it is and I do not want to call it "Binary form piano piece in Fmaj" 🤣 Do you have any idea in which style/form this piece could be fit? Would Barcarolle be appropriate? Thank you for your comment and hope you are doing great!

Yes, the Oldroyd book is outstanding. The one by Hugo Norden, Foundation Studies in Fugue, is an excellent short book to get you up and running pretty quickly on your first fugue. After that the Oldroyd, and maybe the exhaustive one by André Gedalge, called Treatise on Fugue, of which there is a public domain copy you can download for free, though I forget where. Before fugue, if you really want to go deep into Canon writing, for your strettos and whatnot, Hugo Norden's Technique of Canon book is fascinating.

There is no standard, of course, but one minute seems like it oughta be about the shortest, and three minutes maybe the longest. It might be worthwhile to look at the durations of some of the more well known cadenzas in the repertoire.

Sibelius Symphony no. 7 The Shostakovich symphonies Stravinsky's Symphony in Three Movements

Do you mean this in a stylistic sense, as in the tenth is his only symphony where he writes in a more 20th century style, rather than his usual late 19th century romanticism? Because I can see where you're coming from if so, but if not, chronologically, symphony no. 4 and all those after it were written after 1900, and a good few of those are among the greatest symphonies of all time, let alone the 1900s (nos. 5 and 9 especially) I would argue that should be how we define this question, since after all it's literally "the greatest 20th century symphonies" and those are symphonies written in the 20th century.

No reason to be sorry my friend. We all do make mistake aren't we?

This is my "Caprice for Solo Violin No. 6". With such works generally being composed in sets of multiples of 6 (Locatelli's and Paganini's caprices for solo violin coming in sets of 24, and Bach's partitas and sonatas for solo violin and solo violoncello being six each, and in more modern times even Ysaye's sonatas for solo violin coming in a set of 6), I look at this 6th Caprice for solo violin of mine as being perhaps of greater importance since with it I have finally completed a set of six caprices for solo violin (spread over 13 months from March 13, 2023 to May 5, 2024). Here are the links to my previous 5 caprices for solo violin: https://www.youngcomposers.com/t44427/caprice-for-solo-violin-no-1/ https://www.youngcomposers.com/t44439/caprice-for-solo-violin-no-2/ https://www.youngcomposers.com/t44505/caprice-for-solo-violin-no-3/ https://www.youngcomposers.com/t44826/caprice-for-solo-violin-no-4/ https://www.youngcomposers.com/t44862/caprice-for-solo-violin-no-5/

Hi @JorgeDavid! I think this is a quaint little barcarolle! The theme really works and is beautifully simple. I think every note you wrote here is essential and related to the main theme. It is so good that there's no shame in repeating it - Beethoven does the same thing in the Fur Elise. Also, your arpeggiation of the dominant chord happens very naturally and arises from the melody. As for how to vary your melody - you already made a quite successful variation in the parallel minor! Other ideas might be to change the tempo and meter to give the same material a totally different feel. Also - check out this topic: Thanks for sharing!

Thank you!

Hello everyone, I have been playing around with the piano and composing for the first time something by playing it myself first and writing it down on paper later. I am not good at playing piano so there are many mistakes and I had to record parts separately and mix them later, so there are a few issues with the sound when different sections are mixed. Also, my digital piano is not super expensive so I am sorry about the sound quality. I composed first the main theme, and, since I liked how it turned out, I tried developing it into a longer piece (just a simple piece in binary form). However, I always get lost when turning themes or ideas into pieces and have trouble composing pieces with a natural and well-designed form that flows well. For example, in this piece I had the theme ending in a Half cadence in bar 8. If we call this theme "A", I though on doing the following: A finishing in HC -> A finishing in PC -> Development (in other key) -> A finishing in PC However, even after deciding in a form-design for the piece, I always run into problems, some of them are: The repetition of all main theme A sections always sound too similar and repetitive and I never find good ways of varying them. When I finally come up with a beginning for a development or contrasting section that I like, I have troubles for making it flow naturally both in its own and also when transitioning to the original theme (most times I can only transition after long dominant arpeggios). Troubles for writing introductions and Codas to frame the piece. In the case of this piece, in the end I wrote a development section in the parallel minor and, even though I like the beginning very much, I soon started not knowing where to go and end up finishing with a rushed arpeggiated generic HC for coming back to the main theme. I feel form and making the music flow naturally is one of my weakest points when composing. Do you have any advice or suggestion about how to go about it for improving? Also, what are your methods for turning themes and ideas into full pieces? How do you go about deciding on things such writing a contrasting/development section, transitions, designing the form, introductions, codas, etc.? Thank you!

I was criticized on another forum for the lack of context of my presentation : It is therefore a piece completed a week ago, for solo voice (mine, baritone) orchestra, church organ, orgue de barbarie at the end (I'm not sure about the translation of the name of this instrument, if you can help me by the way... Barrel organ Seems strange). I use sample libraries. The voice is recorded with a Schoeps MK4 couple in XY. The poem is a rise in tension of a dialogue that goes wrong, between the husband's murderous jealousy and the wife's falsely mystical answers (who has the last word by finally proclaiming her freedom). Have a good day,

Thank you for your detailed response and kind words. "I'm curious to whether this is for double string orchestra" - Excellent question because I too am not quite sure myself. It is something that I ask myself all the time but I try to ignore it. To be honest, I think this particular work is better suited for an orchestra. Primarily, I chose solo instruments for playback because it sounds better. I can feel from your comment that our musical tastes are almost identical. For example, "I myself am quite partial sustained melodic ideas," and "Atmospheric music is generally not my taste because it doesn't command me to feel an emotion like most, Baroque - Romantic period" is something I would say. I almost had to look twice to see if was me who wrote that or you. I'm glad that the music was able to move your emotions. "Also at 17:05, I can't stop hearing Brahms lullaby. I am scarred by that challenge we had earlier in the year." 😂 haha

Have made some revisions to this piece now, and have elaborated the piano part into hopefully something more interesting. Have also made a much improved score. Hope my enharmonic spellings are correct? Haven't yet implemented all of the spread chords in the rendition, but will get to that soon.

I'm sorry if it seemed that way! I didn't mean to sound unreceptive at all 😓 I understand there were mistakes made in the piece, and I have come to accept them even before its completion; it's just a little disheartening because I had spent a lot of time on it, is all. Then again, I think everyone feels that way when receiving criticism over something they're proud of.

Personally I think a good music should last atleast 3 minutes just so everyone could enjoy it for more than a few minutes.

I'm writing a violin cadenza and the playback says it's about 2 mins long although I estimate a real life player would take about 2 mins 15 s. How long should it be?

Hi all of you, I come back with this little steal to submit to you. The text is a dialogue, in this form of popular speech of the beginning of the century (last)... I wanted to make this alternation between the woman's love exaltation (With the complicity of the church organ) and the squeaky violence going crescendo of the man, while evoking the turn of a street song.In the end, we will hear the organ of barbarism to which the last word belongs... I sing the vocal line, which is not simple... Thanks !

Hi! 🙂 New guy here, hobbyist composer with barely any musical education. 😅 In the past I've played a bit of piano and more recently tried to learn to play guitar with poor results. 😅 Looking forward to learn from you folks and maybe even collaborate? 🙂 But first things first, I thought it made sense to show where I'm currently at. Here's a demo that I've compiled recently: Essentially, I've collected the best of my drafts which I hesitated to call done, as I usually do, and compiled them into a music demo in order that hopefully makes some sense... I also have a soundcloud account, though it is pretty empty for the reason stated above... 😅 Any tips and suggestions are welcome of course, I'll be hanging around reading and trying to improve. 🙂

It's completely understandable to feel a bit disheartened when receiving feedback that challenges your approach to composition or orchestration. However, it's important to remember that constructive criticism is an invaluable tool for growth and development as a musician.