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Hi everyone! This is a jazz song from my debut EP album called "You are my everything". I wrote the music and lyrics by myself and It's also me singing and playing on the recording. I think it somehow reminds me of Kissing a Fool by George Michael just a little bit. Please let me know how you like it!

Here is a re-upload of my overture to the Battle of Trafalgar, which was also inspired by my recent trip to the United Kingdom and the sight of Trafalgar Square in London. Let me know what you think!

Ken's points are well taken, but since this is for fun without any major prize, I agree that blinding the entries shouldn't be necessary. We should make it as easy on both the entrants and judges as possible.

I think the deal is not really Brahms but the way that musicology itself kind of came into existence in quite a different way than it had been before the 20th century. Schoenberg is one of the figures, along with Hugo Riemann and later Erwin Ratz, to name a few, who kind of began analyzing music in such a way as to find the things that Brahms did actually special. As a side (but relevant) note, Ratz's book "Einführung in die musikalische Formenlehre. Über Formprinzipien in den Inventionen J.S. Bachs und ihre Bedeutung für die Kompositionstechnik Beethovens", as the name implies in German, is one of the first serious attempts to connect the relevance of Bach's formal experiments with what Beethoven later did in his Sonatas and his concept of "motivisch-thematische Arbeit," which is what Guido Adler called the process which motives and themes are developed during the 'development' segment of the Sonata form. In essence, it means division and sequencing of motives derived from an overall larger theme. Now why the hell do I say all this? Because this intricate look at how form is put together through these elements brings attention to what Brahms was doing, such as obfuscating the reprise segments of his forms among many other things. There's much to analyze from Brahms which, if looked at with the right analytical lenses, gives you a rather interesting look at how he subverted many of the tropes that were present in Beethoven's standard Sonata model (which he himself also subverts, of course, but that's another thing.) How about a concrete example? Sonata in F# minor, Op2, first movement. The reprise arguably starts in the FF Furioso mark (my score doesn't have measure numbers, but it's often at the end of page 7) where the theme actually appears but with a variation. Now, normally, if this was Beethoven, this would be a Scheinreprise (false reprise,) since it's not 1:1 what the theme is like at the very start. But if you look later, that is actually the only reprise that follows the rhythm. Later (A Tempo Sempre FF) there is a sequence built on it which has the same model of the original, but by that point it couldn't really be called a reprise either. It's stuff like this that makes Brahms interesting to look at, in my opinion.

I'm with Austenite and Danish. It seems like too much complication to try and make this a perfectly fair perfectly balanced competition. We're all a bunch of not-famous composers just putting out our music for some other not-famous composers who we've never met to get some feedback on it. I don't like to appear dismissive of your concerns Ken, but I don't think we should be so worried about prejudice towards longer works. I'm sure the judges will feel that there are pros, cons, strengths and weaknesses to both long and short works. Gylfi, I can understand you thinking that more constrictions can be healthy and that some of us are hiding from our inadequacies by spurning limitation. I also can't help but feel mildly discomfited at the (somewhat accurate) suggestion. Honestly though, the difficulty of writing under stern requirements is not what seems to me the biggest issue. I'm actually more concerned with trying to find time to write such a work when many of us may have other projects or busy schedules (work, family, volunteering, friends who I only get to see briefly in the summer, self-serving social functions like picnics) that we simply prioritize more highly than an online competition with no real stakes. But that doesn't meant I don't also want to find time and energy for this and make it work or that I don't value the opportunity to write something and set it up against all of your submissions. It just means that it would be easier to get into the swing of things by starting off with an easier challenge. Like Danish said, as we move forward we can start to introduce more of those beloved limitations of yours and see where it takes us.

Will you at least have blind judging?