PeterthePapercomPoser

Hello @L.S Barros and welcome to the forum! Nice sonata! I assume (you can correct me if I'm wrong) that this is a sonata de camera? I love the constant exchange between major and minor mode that is so characteristic of music in this style, with all its Picardy 3rds (as I learned on your server). I do wonder how it would sound if you tried reversing the pattern - like, what if a phrase in a major mode ended on a minor chord? Or maybe you or some other Baroque-style composer already do this? I get the sense that this is a dance and is a piece that could easily be danced to in real life rather than just being a dance form that evolved out of an actual dance but is meant to be just an instrumental (which is why I'm guessing that this is a sonata de camera). Thanks for sharing and I hope you find this forum to be a good platform to share more of your works and participate by listening to other composers' works and possibly reviewing them! Kind regards,

Hello @develop331 and welcome to the forum! I love this piece's subtlety and how sublime it is! The choral dissonances are very affecting and the orchestra adds just the right touch of ominousness at times. You sound like you know what you're doing harmonically and melodically with a clear leading melodic line and well-fitted harmonies underneath including inversions and open voicings of chords. I'm just giving my first impression on listening without a score btw. I also agree that cantamus could take your rendition to the next level. I also hear that you seem to be using different kinds of harmonic voicings for the choir and different voicings for the orchestra which is (I think) the right approach in this kind of piece. I don't often write for voices though. I played French Horn in college and university and I have to say that it's actually quite common to see bass clef in French Horn literature as it has a huge range! The only confusion about that is whether the particular literature is using old style bass clef notation or new - there's an octave difference between the two. But the 2nd and 4th horns in the orchestra are especially likely to encounter bass clef and there are actually different players that specialize in different ranges of the horn more, often buying different mouthpieces to better accommodate the sound and ease of playing they want to accomplish in the range in which they most often play. The Clarinet on the other hand does stay in treble clef only, opting to only use ledger lines (much like guitar except that Clarinet is a transposing instrument while guitar only transposes at the octave). Thanks for sharing and I hope to see more of your contributions on the forum! You could also listen to other composers' pieces and give us your opinion! Kind regards,

Hello again @kaiyunmusic! What a wonderfully sweet piece! Great job and I'm glad you're finding satisfactory ways to title your music and the ending is alright too! Sometimes a piece can end on a sort of cliffhanger ending or on a question rather than a conclusive finale which is more fitting for this style of music. I have a critique of your meter in this piece - for the majority of the duration of the piece it's actually in 3/4. You can tell it's in 3/4 in the beginning because your melody is stressing the G, A, B ascension with D's in between. So that's 3 primary pulses per bar with 1 note in between each, hence 3/4. In 6/8 you would have two primary pulses per bar with 2 notes in between them. And you do actually have sections in your music that temporarily switch to 6/8 such as measure 25 and measure 53. I also love how the piece actually loops really well like it could be used in a video game or perhaps more appropriately as a lo-fi chill hop track. The harmony is also quite ambiguous. I think the piece is actually in G major rather than in E minor since you have a D major chord at the end in a type of half-cadence, preparing for a recap in G major. But instead the piece starts in E minor creating a kind of deceptive cadence. Very clever writing! Thanks for sharing.

Like I said, I rarely listened to them all the way through for the reasons I cited, so my apologies if my experience of your sounds isn't complete. If you're happy with the progress you're making then by all means continue! I just thought you were posting your pieces here to receive feedback about how others experience what you produce. Nowhere did I say that you didn't know what you're talking about - I'm sure you're an expert on your own program and how you've learned to create sound using it. Do I understand why you would want to try to create music using this method or this particular grating saw-tooth wave sound? No, but maybe you do and as long as you do that's all that matters. But that's my experience of what you've presented.

I wonder if you're aware that today's A.I. tools are already capable of creating contrapuntal works that give imo much better results than what you've presented here. The biggest drawback, as you mentioned is that your program only doubles the given melody in similar motion. Usually, counterpoint involves independent voices and one of the first and most important rules in creating independent voices is that you shouldn't double them for any substantial length of time at the same interval. Even 3rds and 6ths doubled for too long stop being independent and blend together into just one voice. Counterpoint would also involve the different voices moving in different independent rhythmic values and in contrary, oblique and similar motion. There is nothing contrapuntal about what you've presented in my opinion. Another issue is that your renditions are really grating on the ears and hard to listen to. Why do your renditions use sawtooth-wave synthesizer sounds? Even if you subscribe to the moog-synthesizer invention style of music, there are more palatable sounds available to you that you don't seem to use. I honestly haven't listened to any of your recent submissions all the way through because of this. I just can't listen to something that grating for it's full duration - and I don't understand how anyone could find anything about this beautiful. I hope you don't take this as a damning criticism, I'm just trying to describe my listening experience and put my reaction into words. Thanks for sharing though.

Hey @Henry Ng Tsz Kiu! Really great job! My favorite part has to be measure 81 marked "Nihilistically Scherzando" and whenever that reoccurs. It kinda reminds me of the following excerpt from Prokofiev's Piano Concerto No.3 - 1st movement. I know you don't like piano concertos since you think the interaction between the piano and the orchestra is too adversarial, but if there's one thing I wish you tried to compose sometime in the future is a piano concerto. With your piano skills you could even play your own concerto and record your performance and mix it into the orchestral rendition! I'm sure it would be awesome. Btw - did you accidentally include two links to the 2nd movement of this sonata up above? Thanks for sharing! I will listen to the entire thing one of these days and hopefully give it a more thorough review.

Hi @Cafebabe! What a wonderfully delightful Galant piece! I think it could easily be a middle movement in a sonata - a fast minuet or a scherzo. The only thing that I see to critique is that the piece seems to be in 6/8 throughout its duration except for the brief part in 4/4. And you group your notes quite often into 2 groups of 3 rather than 3 groups of 2 as would be customary in 3/4. 6/8 is basically in 2 where each beat is subdivided into 3 notes. Thanks for sharing and I'm stoked for the other movement(s)!

Hi @ferrum.wav! What a delight to hear this arrangement! The orchestration is masterful and dense and complex but retains a simplicity that allows it to be accessible and easily palatable as a song. Speaking of which, did you record the alto singing the words? It sounds like a real singer. I'm thinking you must have extracted just the voice part from the original song and inserted it into your arrangement? Or did you use some kind of software to render the words? That seems unlikely given how easy to understand the words are. Thanks for sharing and I'm glad you completed this wonderful rendition!

You could keep the main line col legno, but switch it to arco sul ponticello or sul tasto (staccato) for the latter part of the melody where the most rapid notes happen. And I don't know if your libraries have these options recorded but there are also different varieties of pizzicato that might also be useful in this situation. @Henry Ng Tsz Kiu would know about that given that he's recently explored Elliot Carter's music which uses different articulations on pizzicato strings to yield different effects. There's also the Bartok pizzicato which is a really strong pizzicato so much so that the string strikes the bridge of the instrument, but that's usually only used in a ff dynamic.

Hey @Layne! Very tense track/cue you've concocted! I noticed that you're using col legno/with the wood of the bow in the melody of the strings. I could be wrong, but it doesn't sound practical/idiomatic for the strings to bounce the wood of their bows off their strings as quickly as you require them to in the melody here. The col legno technique, if I understand correctly, is quite an unwieldy technique on the Violin and is difficult to execute with metronomic precision which is why you'll often hear orchestras struggle with staying together when playing col legno rhythms. But other than that I like the mood/vibe of this piece! Great job and thanks for sharing!

Hi @guy500! Your music is very chromatic and richly tonal! It visits so many different key centers that they're difficult to count. Unfortunately, it's because of this that giving you advice about your score would be very difficult, as the constant changes in key make your chromaticism difficult to navigate. It's hard to give the proper enharmonic spellings of notes specific and unique to each given harmonic situation when the whole system is flawed in the first place. For example, if your tonal center is C# (as in measure 110) then you should use sharps instead of flats to express all your scale degrees (such as the Eb in measure 110 - should be D#). If you're in C# minor then this is easier, with only 4 sharps in the key signature (C#, D#, F# and G#), but if you're in the major mode there's 3 more sharps (E#, A# and B#) which is also why your F in measure 111 should be an E#. This is just a small taste of the meticulousness that it would take to clean up your score and make it readable by an actual choir. Another musical quirk you seem to have (or perhaps it's a result of working in a DAW/Cubase) is that your phrases are rarely connected and song-like/lyrical. They are constantly interrupted by what in my opinion are unnecessary rests that break the flow of the music. Of course, it would also be unusual if the, on the flip side, the choir sang constantly without any room to breathe. Btw - in order to be able to listen to your music on Soundcloud, I had to go through an annoying process of creating an account, which I never had to do before. Has Soundcloud recently changed or something? I think it would be way more convenient if in the future you just uploaded your mp3's here to each post you make. Thanks for sharing this piece!

Hi again @Fugax Contrapunctus! It's quite an interesting idea! I know you're working with strict tone rows to have produced this, but my ear cries out for some 8th note or 16th note motion in this to relieve from the constant barrage of quarter notes. I actually like the piano version a bit more than the string quartet because the tempo is a bit slower and allows the ear to absorb the harmonies more. The ending is also unusual and breaks away from the pattern established in the beginning and is more interesting because of that. Thanks for sharing!

Hey @Fugax Contrapunctus! It's great to hear that some old juvenilia of yours can be rescued from oblivion and made somewhat acceptable after you've now gained some more skill! In my opinion, it does still lack some space and comes across as somewhat robotic and mechanical with the constant barrage of 16th notes, but I don't think I can say that about your more recent works anymore. Thanks for sharing this fugue!

Hey @Henry Ng Tsz Kiu! The middle section in F major is my favorite and probably, the most musically and harmonically interesting part imo. It's great that you manage to satisfy both a sophisticated formal structure while having humor with it. Thanks for sharing!

Hi @Alant! Hi! For some reason, even though this is not a rag, it reminds me of The Spinach Rag from Final Fantasy VI. This has a very unique approach to both harmony and rhythm which gives it a very individualized, custom feel that's not found in many others works. But in it's current form, I think it is more like an experiment/idea rather than a finished piece. Have you thought of adding a slow section in the middle to create a ternary form? It would be interesting what kind of fun meters and rhythms you could come up with in a slow, lyrical contrasting section! Thanks for sharing!