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A little wordless Christmas carol I wrote yesterday:

It's not a competition! You don't stand to win or lose anything - you just get a badge for participating! It's basically just a fun event for people to share each other's newly composed Christmas music! Your piece is Christmas-themed, therefore you should enter since it will increase the amount participation in the event! Peter

I have never heard such a hammery piano sample! LoL This piece might become much more palatable and musical if you introduced some balance velocity values/dynamics to the different notes. Right now the heaviness of the chords is the most salient/discernable feature of the piece and it's overpowering! The ear can't really hear the melody because of this. Also - ask yourself - if your professor friend (or any other human being) sat down to play this piece, is this how they would play it/interpret it? I don't think they'd just bang the chords into the piano as hard as they could! LoL You should join the Christmas Music Event by pasting a link of this piece into the thread! You'll get a special 2023 Participant badge if you do! Thanks for sharing! Peter

I think this right here is an excellent example of atonality done right. Interestingly, not only is it written with that "creepy" vibe in mind, but the colors you achieved are beautiful, in a velvety, "morbid" sort of way. This is one of those pieces that benefits from being played on the kind of piano you performed on, since it kind of has that slightly honky-tonk piano chorus effect going on. The colors "pop" and become more "flavorful", for lack of a better term. The other performance is also good, but using a "cleaner" piano kind of misses that character. I also think it's neat you incorporated a very clear minor 6th chord both near the beginning of the piece and later on. It contrasts well with the spikier sections of the piece. The near-literal knife stab is a nice touch. It's really cool you managed to make something that's both atonal, but is also still musically appealing and engaging to listen to. Thanks for sharing, and kudos!

Won't help that I can only add to the rant. I'm no expert so I can't pretend to compete with tradespeople who spend their days in front of this equipment. Not yet but I'm getting there. But I think the marketing of this digital music gear is laden with the stuff that comes out of the north end of a southbound bull. I read the bleats of these sample houses. Buy our product and you'll be the greatest composer since forever. The naive and gullible fall for the patter. Firms turn it into a Lego kit: instant orchestration...join a few bits together, press the button and hey presto! You have a masterpiece. They've turned an art into a nursery school plaything. I've heard about these mastering/mixing outfits...but I ask at the outset: how can these commercial geniuses (genii?) know what the composer is trying to achieve without him/her sitting there beside them; and, is it even necessary? Sure, it's a learning curve but if someone's going to dabble with digital music, they've got to learn. It takes time and experience. And intense self-criticism, doesn't matter what genre one's working in. By falling for dependence on these commercial crutches they learn nothing. But I have a jaundiced view of musical education generally aside from technical/digital. (As a hobbyist I work at the electronics end of it.) Degrees in composition are a self-perpetuating cash cow. They can't teach creativity. About 1‰ becomes composers; a few, teachers and the rest get into a different trade/profession. They've turned "theory" into a technical quagmire that doesn't prompt creativity. Analysis is only useful to find out how something is done. I suppose they can promote the musical 'hack' by making people compose to order. As Elfman says, these days film music is corporatised...copy and paste hacks to me. So be it.