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The final piece of my four Piano pieces set and just a lame joke. Can be developed into a postmodern minimalistic masterpiece by repeating the joke forever and forever...... Joke in A flat major.pdf Hope you enjoy this one! Henry

Most people here are students, and it's the end of the semester. They're busy, but luckily, we have decades-old-posts to keep you entertained. Cheers, friend! 💋

Hey there Your posts are becoming a bit spammy. Maybe try going into greater (or just some) detail of the purpose of your posts. What are you doing to other people's music that makes it post worthy? If it's production technique, I'd mention the steps involved. I mean, we have youtube to listen to these tracks already. #composesomethingoriginal

Hi everyone, I composed this piece as part of my bachelor in music. I hope you enjoy it. Leave a like or a feedback if you want! 😊

@Henry Ng Tsz Kiu No problem I don't think it is careless at all haha! Yes I'm using Musescore 4! Might try some of the librairies they added on musehub in the future but for this project I sticked to the regular musesounds.

Hi @Jonathanm! I relisten the whole piece according to yout analysis. Now following your analysis the motives are quite apparent, sorry for my carelessness haha! Probably if you can leave the score here the thematic coherence can be more easily spotted on, as the image in the YT video is a bit blurred haha! Or you can provide the analysis under your video as well, it isn't boring at all, in the contrary it helps us to get more deeply into the music! Btw I want to ask, do you use Musescore 4 here for the audio? Feel free to review othet members' works here as well! Thx for sharing and joining us! Henry

@Henry Ng Tsz Kiu Thank you very much for your nice comment! I understand why many parts feel all new from a listener perspective and that is something I have to work on. From my perspective they are not and I can provide a very short analyse. The introduction motive at bar 1 with the strings is the same that start the first cellos solo which is then reused in the fanfare theme. It is reused in some other places but sometime transformed a little bit. At B you have the main theme that you can hear until the clarinet solo. The idea of the introduction is repeated in the begining of G, which then lead to a longer lyrical section at H, which is reminescent of the first cello solo of the piece, altough pretty different I concede! Then this lead to another fanfare section where the brass reuse the same motive from the initial fanfare and the strings have a mix of this motive and the main theme. This lead to the real return of the main theme at J, which is pretty similar to B. For the rest of the piece you can hear these two motives almost everywhere but again it is not striking I concede. F section, as well as the bass clarinet solo, are based on the melodic material from the transition b.38-43. (Sorry for this long message I hope you were not too bored by this analyse... 😅)! Thanks again and have a great day Jonathan

there’s more where this came from

Another piece from 2018, in a style that... well, i'm not really sure. It's got bits that sound classical, bits that sound romantic, and to me some portions even sound more modern like new age, folk or pop. I wrote it in 4 days so everything kind of just flowed. What do y'all think? Any feedback is welcome

instruments: Shakuhachi: Japanese bamboo flute Nokhan: a kind of Japanse high pitch flute like Piccolo Shamisen: a kind of plucked string instrument with 3 strings Koto: Japanese version of Chinese Guzeng as I don't know how to notate Japanese traditional music, there is no score here all in all, hope you like it! the video: 【日本民乐】作品8之1 无标题_哔哩哔哩_bilibili

A little piano sonata originally composed in 2018. I tried touching it up a bit... I'm still not happy with it (for example I left out any dynamics except in the beginning and ending measures), and i'm publishing it still in its rough form. Here's why: I think this piece illustrates one of the main problems I face when composing, which I've mentioned before but basically is: too many ideas for multiple ways i could do things, + lack of knowledge that would guide me to choose one of those options over another. I often feel like I have no guiding forces governing the choices I make when composing, and so I end up with pieces that don't have that cohesive deliberateness indicative of someone who really knows what they're doing. Any feedback is welcome, on this piece specifically or on how I could solve this greater issue with my composing. That being said, please enjoy 😅 I'm still quite fond of this sonata, it's got a decidedly galant sound but with my own idiosyncrasies thrown in.

laziness

I lol'd at the ending 😄 Congrats, this is now begrudgingly stuck in my head. How dare you craft such an invasive little earworm 😛

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@FILMSCORE Thank you very much for your messages! I am teaching piano at the moment, but I have to be honnest... right now I'm not sure where composition is going to lead me. I don't think I want to work in the film industry but never say never! Have a great day Jonathan

Definitely. That's important too. i think I was suggesting more that if a composer matches your preferences and listening expectations because they truly resonate with you and that's just the music they compose when they're focusing on what's beautiful for them, this would lead to a more satisfying experience of both composing and listening than if the composer was putting aside what they find beautiful in order to specifically meet your expectations. I suspect there's not a lot of difference between what we're both saying.

Yeah. Well thats a big big philosophical difference. While I certainly regard music (at its best) as a form of self expression, there is a tremendous amount of theory and historical experience to learn and draw from. Or not. Myself, I've never regarded music as anything less than a shared communication between composer/musicans and an audience -- I have expectations and likes/dislikes when I select/listen to music. I only assume others are the same. So, while as a practical matter I write for myself, I would like to think I am communing with this vast spring of muscial history and ideas to the extent that I strive to understand and learn from it. Does it make me uncomfortable? Absolutely. But I can attest that in the uneasiness, the growth happens.

Hi @Alant! I listen to your revised version with your real performance. The first section really reminds me of Liszt Consolation plus Schubert op.90 no.3 plus Chopin op.25 no.1. I love how you change the texture and accompaniments for varities, at the same time maintaining the simplicity of the music. Lovely music and lovely playing as well! Thx for sharing and your updates! Henry

Hello @Jonathanm! Welcome to the forum! I really really love your modulation in b.8, so beautiful!!! I love b.9-15 too, and also the A section itself, however I think the transition from the serene passage before it can be longer and more well-prepared. Again I love your modulation to Ab major in 1:53! I love your transition to section D, very well done, and the bass clarinet is greatly used there! I love your cor anglais in section E too, and also when the flute join and after that the strings!! The all strings passage after feel so warm to me. B.90 passage is wonderful with the harp and the texture is very rich. The cello melody plus flute countermelody in section H sounds fascinating as well, and I absolutely love the b.133 passage after it! The climax to J section is really well prepared here! And a lovely peaceful ending! Your ochestral and harmonic colour is really really well done, congrats on that!! I really love how you allocate melodies to different instruments for their own timbre. Maybe for me the only shortcoming would be the coherence, since I feel like the whole piece is beautiful but the ideas are all new in each section for me. Nonetheless, this piece is very well done and enjoyable, congrats on that! Henry

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Lmao! Your own B-A-C-H motif, perhaps? 🤔

That's what would make it fun for teachers to inflict it on their students. 🙂

@Henry Ng Tsz Kiu @PeterthePapercomPoser Thanks you guys, that's helpful to hear. Peter i didn't know that about beethoven! Wow even he had insecurities

Everyone is different and it's likely that John Williams is understandably perfectionist, and his insightfulness allows him to see what he could have done better. Being human, that's likely to lead to some degree of self-criticism and regret. My tendency is to look at things a little differently. I don't see any flaws in any music, including my own. That's not to say there aren't plenty of ways to improve, but ultimately, the music was that person's best expression of themselves, to the best of their ability at that moment in time. That different strategies or ideas could have been used is not a flaw (the way I see it), but a springboard for future improvement. Just yesterday, I was listening to the first ever piece that I composed from last July, which I don't think I've listened to since then, and I was expecting to cringe. Of course, I heard many things that I'd do differently and more effectively now, but I was struck - shocked even - by how much that music still resonated with me. Like you, I could hear many of the "flaws" (I don't really think of them like that - just as if you see a painting by a small child, you don't see it as flawed compared to Rembrandt, you appreciate it for what the child put into it), but the essence of any music can transcend these. If we can keep this more charitable outlook on our own and others' music, I think we'd be happier overall, as well as improving faster. I like your suggestion that trying to create the next masterpiece is unhealthy, as it's most probably about striving to create something that meets others' expectations or criteria rather than simply looking for the most authentic form of self-expression. I think that if we pursue the latter, it will be a more effective way of driving the search for improvements and expansion in our composing without the self-imposed pressure of feeling the need to prove ourselves.

For me, I like taking breaks where I don't review for a while because I feel the same way most of the time (only @Henry Ng Tsz Kiu is a reviewing super-musician who reviewed 10's of works at a time without a rest! LoL!!) But after a while I do eventually find the energy as I feel like it accrues after long periods of not reviewing. Besides, you can review as deeply or as casually as you feel like at any given time so it's not always an incredible amount of effort necessary. Thanks for your response! I added that option to the poll (although I do have to say that comparing yourself to others this way is not very conducive to improving because regardless of how good you are, there's always likely to be a historical composer, or specific piece which you can consider "leagues ahead of" you and feel discouraged by. Nobody can be leagues ahead of you being you though. And your strengths and weaknesses are unique to you and that's what makes you a unique, individual human being and composer. Did you know that Beethoven considered himself bad at counterpoint in comparison to Bach and Mozart?

Haha you don't have to always provide critiques, sometimes you may just name out spots you like or dislike would be great to the composer! Unless you provide "reviews" like "X-C-Lent" without using any thinking, leaving comments will always be great! Henry

Here is a real performance of the revised version

Is there a culture of toxic masculinity (or in general, toxic superiority) at Young Composers Forum? I think this is a pertinent question given some recent exchanges in the forums. Namely, the insistence that in order to have a valid opinion one must "show your work" or "prove your point using empirical evidence". That kind of reasoning is understandable if one is trying to publish a peer reviewed article in some sort of musicological journal where the scientific method is a must. But here? Whatever happened to just having an opinion based on what you believe to be right and agreeing to disagree? Recent topics seem to degenerate to proving your point right beyond a doubt and if you can't then you're not a man and you're not right. It's a competition where each party resorts to basically yelling at each other "I'm more right than you are!" (metaphorically of course). Thoughts?

Update: Live Performance + Score of this piece:

YOUR DOING IT AGAIN....................LEAVE ME ALONE............................Your the one Spamming ME. Its obvious why theres been a dramatic decrease in forum activity, and people resorting to answer Decade -Old-Posts. As a Moderator your Judgments are Flawed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bachelor_of_Music "FAILING 2 PLAN...is PLANNING 2 FAIL" So Johnathan, where do you go from here ? , have you any future goals,dreams,ambitions ? Where do you see yourself in 5-10 years time ? Executive producers/Film&TV Directors/ Script-Consultants, within the Industry are always looking for Music-Degree-Qualified composers,that Bring Immence value to there Cinematic Film productions. If you play your cards right, Your "Bachelor of Music" Academic-Degree, could lead you to a Very Lucrative Future. Either way i wish you Luck.........................