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Showing content with the highest reputation on 07/11/2025 in all areas

  1. Look in the description of video for performance notes. I also had attached a PDF of the score. Keep note that this is one of my shorter works and has been rushed so not a lot of effort had been put into this
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  2. Hello Here is another piece of the cycle "a la lune" according to Jules Laforgue. I didn't count. I must be at 4 or 5 on the same theme. Here is a kind of little song that looks like a waltz. Sweet bitter, of course, since it is lost love... Translation in the video in subtitles. Thank you for your criticism!
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  3. Hello, I just finished a cinematic Grade 6 piece for concert band and I'd like to share it with everyone! I am very proud of it especially as a 16 year old composer. The story of the piece is a fire god of which has been long forgotten, he then awakes and imposes his wrath on humanity. While this is happening cultists gather to worship this fire god. There is no heroic conclusion, the god wins.
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  4. This piece contrasts an excerpt from Walt Whitman's preface to Leaves of Grass with 1 Peter 1:24 "All flesh is as grass...", otherwise known as the best part of the the thoroughly excellent Brahms Requiem. Whitman's text urges us to think for ourselves and do the right thing, letting our lives speak for our morals. The biblical passage reminds us that our lives are beautiful, but short, lending urgency to Whitman's words. There is only so much time. “…read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body...” -Walt Whitman For all flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass. The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away: 1 Peter 1:24
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  5. Thanks, Henry! Yes, the beginning is a jazz minor scale (melodic minor ascending used for both the scale up and the scale down) with fourths raised for a bit of extra leading tone (leading tone to the fifth). And then we flip around a bit between Mixolydian and eventually a nice bright C Major. One of my bigger challenges with this piece was being sure that Whitman's lovely text would be heard through everything that is going on. It's a long and wordy text and I knew I wanted to work the "all flesh is as grass" in as well as a second idea. The text ends up similar in length to the "credo" section of the big masses, so it presents the same problem of how to fit it all in. I ended up doing a fair amount of homophonic writing in the early parts of the piece to keep the text clear and understandable and using the piano part to keep things lively, as well as having different voices come in and out to add emphasis to certain lines and keep things interesting. But by the second half, the singer may have a disorientingly fragmented experience, since I was often needing a voice part to switch back and forth from the poem to the biblical text in mid-thought to try and keep the lines from becoming too tangled with each other. To avoid some overlapping of people singing different texts simultaneously, I chopped the lines into little pieces and stitched them back together as a quilt to get the important words to punch through. Hopefully it's not too jarring an experience. The Catholic Church's Council on Trent (1545-1563) apparently specifically condemned this kind of polyphonic tomfoolery, feeling that interfering with the understandability of a text was missing the point of singing as a mode of communication. But of course, then what the heck do you do about the credo section of your choral mass to keep it from being boring and ten minutes long if you are composing for the church?
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  6. Hi Maggie! Yeah I love that rest bringing the lightness of the theme as well, which matches the waltz rhythm and light mood of the movement. Yeah I was just trying to be simple and might me a bit too simple here, but I thought reaching F minor (b.74) in a D major local key setting would be quite enough for a surprise! Yeah I hope I can play this in real life with Arjuna, so I'm definitely writing interactions between parts, otherwise I would be bored as freak! Henry
    1 point
  7. I have just watched Wes Anderson's The Phoenician Scheme today and I find the music really matches the film's eccentric style. The film quotes a lot of Stravinsky's Petrushka and Bach's famous Cantata BWV 147, as well as ending with the Firebird. The original music reminds a lot with Stravinsky as well, tho when the piano joins in it's more like Schonberg in a way with its tone and color, tho the rhythm and mood is still Stravinsky, or even in Riley's minimalism
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  8. Hello @NicholasG! I think @Marius_ already got many good points and I'm not going to repeat what s/he said. You should be proud of it. Your orchestration and mood portrayal is very mature as a 16 year old and I like many of them. Your motivic usage is lovely too. I really like the ending starting from b.93, good preparation to it and nice rhythmic variety. Maybe for me you can also add more varieties in the harmony as well, since most of the passages are more diatonic and less modulatory and dissonance. Thx for sharing! Henry
    1 point
  9. Hi! My name is Isen Lark, and I'm happy to share the first composition I decided to publish on Spotify: "Paper Swan". The paper swan sat by the old piano, its wings curled from time and dust. Somewhere, a song played softly—one we used to know. The notes wavered, like the swan might lift off, but never did. MIDI.mid
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  10. Right now, I’m readying my music project workspace in my computer’s hard drive for my eventual migration from Finale to Musescore and Dorico, e.g. creating MusicXML files. Also, even though burned out, I’m trying very hard to finish my Fantasy Reflections 2nd track for violin and piano. Lastly, I have rough piano sketches for some pop ballads right now, being enamored by my really guilty J-pop phase these past 12 months. Although melodies and colorful chords progressions come relatively easily to me for these pop songs, I’m still doing early research and brushing up on drum patterns, lyrics, and pop instrumentation. Some advice for me is appreciated! ~Frank
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