Leaderboard

Hi all. This piece was developed as an extension to the baroque section of my work "The Sun Dappled Forest" (posted previously). It was supposed to form part of the original movement; but I couldn't make it work, due to the differing tempos. May incorporate it as a second movement to that work; or make it a standalone piece. Any comments greatly appreciated. Haven't yet developed a score.

Hi all, Here is the second work I am submitting to this forum- my Mini Piano Concerto No. 1. It's called a Mini Piano Concerto because it doesn't use a full orchestra but instead decently-sized sections of 5 string instruments First thing I have to say is that this is by no means the last complete version of this piece, there are some changes that I will continue to make, for example: Use combinations of bass clef and treble clef in the introduction of the exposition of the 1st movement and in the third theme of the second movement to make it easier to read Possibly rewrite the first theme of the exposition of the first movement (and its return) in 3/4 rather than 6/8 as it has been suggested to me recently. I disagree with that judgement personally, but I'd be interested in what you think. Some of the transitions need work. I say some because of the intended story of the piece which I will explain later. There are defeinitely a lot of notation errors (for example places where notes have flat and natural signs at once). Some of the thematic material might be developed more- here I'm thinking of the fragmented material in the first movement. Anyways, in short the idea behind this piece is a sort of 'tortured soul' kind of thing, with an idyllic, dreamy second movement (no concerto would be complete without one in my opinion). I should also point out that this was my first ensemble work, so I'm not proud of the orchestration at all. I have attached the mp3 file generated by Sibelius, the PDF score and a Commentary/Analysis document I wrote to give you some technical insight into the piece and to try to explain why I made the decisions that I did. (Yes the dates in the file titles are still the most recent even though they're from September, I haven't uploaded the wrong files). Good morning/afternoon/evening/night! P.S. I'm posting this at 3:25am so apologies if it's just one big rambling mess.

No, thank you for the feedback Alex. Is your piece posted here BTW? I believe all my pieces are definitely playable, not by me (or not yet at least) though lol. What I didn't expect is your comment regarding Spanish flavour, I did think ulterior nocturnes as well as Nº3 had (perhaps they have) more of that than this one. Kind regards!

Thank you Alex for your kind words. The strings effect is done by a cello quartet performing random tremolo and glissando simultaneously. You are lucky because the sound is available free from Spitfire Audio through their Free VST called LABS. The Instrument is called "Amplified Cello Quartet" and the specific patch is called "Chatter". You would probably need to adopt a notation style like the one used by Zenakis in Jonchaies or even more radical used in Polytope or Metastasis if you want it to be performed live ;o) I don't think Finale or Sibelius will do the job notating this LOL. Nevertheless, have fun with those free instruments. In DAW we trust. Cheers,

Thanks so much for listening! My original goal with this piece was to amend "The Sun Dappled Forest", along the lines suggested by Morgan Allan. It has an ABCA structure, but nobody seemed to like the recapitulation: so I intended to remove that part, and replace it with an expanded C section. Morgan wrote that he wished I'd done more development of the Baroque style C theme: so I decided to try that. Unfortunately I then found I couldn't fit the new material into the piece, because it's natural tempo was too fast (140 bpm vs 120 bpm). I tried to write a linking passage to change tempo; but couldn't make it work. So I've now written a new ending for the first movement, and included the above posted work as a second movement. Have attached the new version of the first movement below (which I just finished last night). Thanks Peter for pointing out the meter changes. Did you find they spoilt your enjoyment of the piece? I wrote it in Music Studio for iPad as usual, and I have the whole piece in 4/4, because that app doesn't allow any meter or tempo changes within a project. The first and last notes of the 1st violin part line up perfectly against the grid, as the first notes of the first and last bars. However some of the phrases end on an off-beat, and this is especially obvious in the contrapuntal section. For the most part, the music then comes back into alignment with the grid in the next bar. Though the contrapuntal section is more complex, and remains out of alignment for several bars. This was intentional, because it makes the piece less predictable, and mixes things up a bit. For me it also gives the music a bit more energy and impetus. I suppose it's a modern take on the Baroque, since I've also used an electronic keyboard sound.

I noticed that this piece keeps having rhythmic hiccups in it for no reason. If you had a score then I would be able to look and understand exactly what kind of meter changes you use in this piece or if your changing to the offbeat all of a sudden was intentional or accidental. If you wrote this in a DAW rather than a notation program then I'm betting that it's an accident. You might be attached to it by now and wouldn't want to change it which is fine, but it might make your music sound more rhythmically "correct" if there is such a thing. When I try to count beats to your piece I eventually end up on the off-beat for no good musically inspired reason that I can hear. Baroque music does not usually play with the beats in this way. If you had a score to this and it were, say, in 4/4 or 2/4, then the hiccups would be noticeable because of the presence of 7/8 or 3/8 bars which allow you to add/remove one 8th note from the pulse thereby causing the listener to have to readjust their sense of the rhythm. A lot of Baroque music was dance music and for that reason those kind of rhythmic hiccups were avoided because they would make the music impossible to dance to. Thanks for sharing!

Hey man, cool piece. I'd love to see a score whenever you get a chance to make one. I get kind of like a gothic/film score type of vibe with this. Right around 1:30 was my favorite part, just because you gave us some counterpoint. I think this piece could have benefitted with more of that. What's the overall goal? I'll have to check out The Sun Dappled Forest for more reference I suppose, but 2:45 seems awfully short for an orchestral multimovement work. Keep us updated on the grand scheme you have planned, I dig what you have so far!

Cool polyrhythms! They do kind of emulate the impression of multiple skipping stones on a pond. I like the melodic fragments you pepper throughout the piece in between the ostinati. There is also much interplay and imitation between the different instruments taking each other's parts at different times. I wonder what the stomps are meant to represent? Maybe that's the point at which the stones stop ricocheting and finally fall into the water? That's really creative if that's what it is. I noticed that you chose to use a piccolo instead of flute in this piece. It sounds really metallic and shrill most of the time to me. I wonder what your motivation/thought process is behind that choice and how it would sound with a flute on that part instead. Thanks for sharing! P.S.: I also noticed that you've solved your problem with finding adequate titles for your music by composing it with programmatic content in mind which I think is a good strategy!

@ComposaBoi Just curious, if this could be achieved, would that be a selling point for you personally? I ask because depending on the success of a product I am building, Music Jotter, I could potentially collaborate with @guseyn to help achieve this type of engraving with his software. Music Jotter can very well be tweaked to convert its notation to Unison style. Of course, I have to have discussions with the author of this software to see if we could make that happen, but I am curious to hear your thoughts about this as a potential customer. My focus with Music Jotter is easy to use, highly accessible and somewhat good looking music that can make for a really great composing experience. But I really care about professional quality output as well. In order to reach the professional level quality that you are talking about though, I would need the help of another individual who is solely focused on researching engraving rules. Let me know what you both think!

@chopin By the way I finished the first example:

@guseyn I love this. It's like Lilypond but much easier to use. I can actually see really huge potential for something like this. I think the reason why you are getting negative feedback is because some people are confused on the differences between a music notation software, and an engraver. Music notation editors do have their limitations. A music engraver is more focused on layout and beauty, whereas a music notation software is focused on entering notes, sequencing and playback. Have you tried it? This looks much easier to use, and I like how it renders the music as you type your text. With lilypond, you have to compile your code to generate a PDF and that gets really cumbersome. Just want to point out that engravers are a different type of software than a music notation editor. They are generally more tedious to use, but focus on output results. The examples are beautiful to me. But if you don't like the font, I'm sure @guseyn can create options to update the font to something more modern looking. Don't let the font fool you though, take a look at how the score formatting looks. Your biggest thing to look out for is collision, and spacing.

I had a quick play through, and I think the spread chords are challenging; but manageable. I've seen harder ones in Rachmaninoff and Chopin. Definitely more playable than my piece "Joy", which is fiendishly difficult! (I sent it to a pianist recently, and he's requested I rearrange it for four hands, because it's otherwise too hard to play at tempo.) Your piece has a Spanish flavour that I really like, and it's fun to play. Thanks for sharing.

TY