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Wow! Some surprisingly good counterpoint, though it's difficult to see how it will all fit together without the text underlay. Consciously or not, you've taken a cue from Niccolo Jommelli (1714-1774) in scoring your Requiem for voices and strings alone...his Requiem (1756) was the most popular and often requested of its day, until Mozart wrote his in 1791. The sparing orchestration makes it more likely to get played. I agree with ComposaBoi on just about everything he said. Measure 11: The tenor part goes dangerously low, down to B below tenor C; consider a D instead if it won't mess up your counterpoint. Measure 17: Awkward for Violin I - the C on beat 3-1/2 is icky to try to reach down to there, it means shifting a third down the fingerboard for one note, then shifting back up again; consider the G above instead. Measure 31: Odd ending, it seems to me. There is no third in the chord, and while that's not without precedent, I don't feel like it works here. Consider an E-flat as the final note in the Soprano and Violin I. Show us more of this as you have it! Well done!

Howdy y'all! I'm writing an Oboe Quartet (Oboe, Violin, Viola, and 'Cello) and I'm wondering about the upper register of the Oboe. It's not exactly giving me fits, but I'm having trouble believing that the instrument is as limited as it seems to be, realistically. Being a Classicist, I tend to write parts that are intended to be playable on 18th Century instruments. I'm a string player, but have it on fairly good authority (and actual experience) that the Oboe, circa 1790-1800, was not really capable of playing anything above a D6 (D above high-C) reliably; there was a famous exception in the period, a virtuoso player named Friedrich Ramm (1744-1830) in Mannheim who was capable of playing an F6 (F above high-C), and it was for this player that Mozart wrote his celebrated Oboe Quartet in F, K. 370. In my own Sinfonia Concertante in C for Oboe, Bassoon, Fortepiano, Violin, 'Cello, and Orchestra, which was performed by the Austin Baroque Orchestra on period instruments (the oboe soloist's instrument was a copy of an original from 1806), I wrote a couple of E6s (E above High-C) that didn't come out well in performance, despite the excellence of the soloist otherwise, and that has made me hesitant to write anything in my other works for the oboe any higher than D6, even in my Oboe Concerto. Now I'm wondering if that register above D6 is difficult or unreliable on a modern Oboe. What do you guys think? I've had to rethink a couple of passages in this piece I'm working on, and I'd like to know if I'm being a little skittish. For that matter, if you think my experience with my Sinfonia Concertante was not representative of what a really good player should be able to play, I'd like to know that as well. Thanks in advance.

Yes, which I really like...my progression has some of that, but it's not as dramatic as I would've wanted. Yes lol...That was just some material that I had written previously that I harmonized...I tend to write like I'm making a quilt, little sections here and there until it comes together.

To me, the whole point of having a pedal tone over some changes is that at some point or another it becomes a non-harmonic tone in relation to the harmony which brings in some nice dissonant color. But your plan of having AbM-EbM/G-Gbmaj9-Dbm works because the G's and Gb's are dissonant with Ab. Now, the only thing that puzzles me is .. why did you take the trouble of modulating to Db minor if you immediately go back to Ab major? I thought you were going to stay in the Db minor key longer to introduce a contrasting theme or something?

I would second that. I can't really get a good impression of your piece from Noteflight, the playback is too ropey. (That may be why you're not getting many reviews.) MuseScore would give a much better rendition of your score, even with no tweaks whatsoever.

The counterpoint is very impressive, so well done! I would have liked to see how the lyrics align with the notes, but I'm not sure if note flight is capable of that. I would definitely recommend musescore if you can fit it on your computer. It is free after all. The main issue is how you're writing for your forces. Violin octaves are a little unreasonable for a tutti section. It's too difficult without a good justification. I would either NOT have the octaves, or have the violins divisi. And the voice ranges are going into risky registers. There's a good short guide "ranges for choral singers: a guide for composers" by Chris Hutchings that's literally just a page and tells you pretty much all you need for writing for choral voices. You can probably find it online.

@Churchcantor Figured I’d nudge ya regarding your thoughts on this score and what could’ve been done to improve it 🙂 Life gets ahead of all of us, as I’m aware. I’m sure this post went to the back of your mind after some time. No rush! Just didn’t want ya to forget about me!

Hi @bkho I like this short piece! I think to continue an uninterrupted musical narrative throughout the whole piece you could have the piece, instead of repeating back to the very beginning, repeat to bar 3. Likewise, you could repeat from bar 20 to bar 13 instead of to bar 11 like you have. I think it would really help keep the pacing and melodic narrative going. The melody that starts at bar 52 made me expect a fugato passage, but you took it in another direction. Thanks for sharing!

Huge disclaimer: I am not an oboist. But I'd imagine it really depends on what you need the oboe to do. My first immediate thoughts go to the intro in Haydn's oboe concerto which, if I remember correctly, holds onto C6 for quite a while. It does go up to D at the end of the first movement, but only on a non-diatonic chord, so that extra brightness is warranted. Even then, it's really short. I compare that to his contemporaries' concerti, Mozart's, Kozeluch's, and Ferlendis's. On a quick scan, I don't much see anything past C in any of them, though I see some similarities to Haydn's: Kozeluch is also comfortable holding onto C5 for a while and Mozart uses D5 as a brief note in a higher moment. From what I remember for Ferlendis's, it plays it pretty safe, all things considered. I don't have the music, but a quick Google search shows that nothing over C5 is really lingered on. For that reason, my gut tells me to say that C5 is where you edge out for longer, full-bodied sounds and things above it like D5, etc., can be used quickly on occasion, but not in the same way as C5, and certainly not commonly. But that's all conjecture; I don't actually know the ins and outs. Luckily I write modern music, so those suckers have to deal with whatever I give them, hee hee hee!