mercurypickles

Here are two songs for voice I wrote back in February. These are pieces I wrote shortly after a break to composition, I was too busy to write anything for most of last semester. They are a setting of Goethe's two "Wandreres Nachtlied" poems, famously set by Schubert and Liszt among others. I wrote this pair of songs on/around Valentine's Day, I had a lot on my mind and these were the output of that. I'll be performing them myself relatively soon, as will a friend of mine, and I will post a real recording soon. In the mean time, enjoy the MIDI 😝 Let me know your thoughts!

Hi all! Been a while since I posted again as I've been extremely busy with both school and my writing. I'll be slowly uploading some of the pieces I've been working on over the last few months as we head on toward the summer. I hope to be much more active here over the coming months, as I'll have more time to engage with a community such as this. Anyway, this is a sonata I more or less began on a whim back in March. It is dedicated to my childhood piano and voice teacher, a close personal friend as well as someone who shaped my musicianship. She is the person that encouraged my earliest efforts at composition, so it only seems right that my first keyboard piece in a few years (and by far my largest-scale keyboard piece) should acknowledge her influence and friendship. Eventually I do hope to get an actual recording of this piece made because I'm really proud of it, and if that comes to fruition I will gladly share it here. The piece is cast in a single movement. While I have written single movement freestanding pieces, this is my first completed attempt at a fully functional sonata form movement. Additionally, this piece is also my longest single piece of continuous music (my symphony is longer but it is in three movements). I decided to write the piece after an intensive study of Beethoven's sonata forms in my first year of conservatory, using the sonata theory developed by Hepokoski and Darcy. I will not get into a full analysis of my own piece as I generally try to avoid picking apart my own works, but the general outline (including the tonal structure) is as follows: Exposition: Off-tonic (B major) introductury passage Split into a few sub-sections First subject (E major) - cheery march with some crunchy dissonance Split in two parts - first in E major, second in A-flat Transition Second subject (c-sharp minor) - lilting theme, pastoral and gently sighing Closing material (c-sharp minor) - a few ostinati form the backbone of this passage Development: Restatement of opening transposed (D-flat major) Fragments of first subject mixed with motive from introduction (B major at first) Central episode (pantonal) - this part of the piece uses a technique called tempo fugue. The term was invented by György Ligeti to describe multiple simultaneous rhythmic consisting of statements of a fixed amount of musical material. Essentially, a fugue that takes place in rhythm and time instead of tonal harmony. My implementation here is personal, and the "fugue subject" is based on the second subject. Episode based on transitional material (B-flat major, furthest point of tonal distance from the root of the piece) - primarily serves as a segue from the tempo fugue and the following march music March passage (B-flat major) - taking advantage of the expressive and structural effect of being as far from the tonic of the piece without going fully atonal/pantonal, a new theme emerges out of texture from the exposition's closing material Grand build-up to recapitulation (modulatory) - pulls on a somewhat hidden tune that was stated much earlier in the piece (bonus points to whoever finds it!). Features substantially flashier keyboard writing, which I am now struggling to learn (lol) Recapitulation: First subject (just first part, E major - e minor) Transition (e minor) - more bonus points to whoever figures out what the new material here is Second subject (e minor) Closing material/first subject pt.2 (E major) - the second half of the first subject is worked together with the closing material from the exposition, leading to a lush half cadence Coda (E major): Order of sub-sections changed to reflect more effective pacing for this part of the piece. There are a few critical motives that undergird the whole of this really almost over-wrought structure, but they will go unmentioned and I would discourage any serious attempts to try and find connections that may or may not exist. Happy listening!

Thank you for listening! The reason why I switched it to piano was because the choral sounds in musescore couldn’t play back the music. I’d post a sample here, but I don’t want to make your ears bleed. 😂

Hello! Here's my entry for this year.

Hi all! This is my entry for the christmas event, though it is a bit late. I figured since it's not the new year yet that it wasn't quite too late! Notes on the piece are in the pdf. Apologies, as always, for the midi playback. This time, particularly, in the final movement, which I had to change the midi instruments to piano in the middle section. Regardless, let me know what you think!

Hi all! This is my setting of the Heine poem, "Der Tod, das ist die kühle Nacht." This poem was set by Johannes Brahms in 1884, included in his Op.96. I decided to set this poem during my first semester of college, studying vocal performance, because I was assigned Brahms' setting of the text but wasn't satisfied with his take on it (sacrilegious as that is). The playback isn't the best, seeing as it's just a MIDI export from musescore, but I'm going to try and record it myself when I get a chance. I hope you enjoy! Der Tod, das ist die kühle Nacht.mp3

This piece is very nice, it is very dramatic and expressive, but the engraving needs some work. Make sure you do not beam over beat groupings unnecessarily, like in the attached screenshot. You would also do well to avoid putting tempo indications at the ends of systems, which occurs repeatedly.

I've made some revisions to the first movement, clarifying the orchestration and form to hopefully make what the movement is striving for a bit clearer. @PeterthePapercomPoser let me know what you think!

Please forgive me for being a bit defensive! It can be difficult not to leap to die for my choices when I feel I’ve done something right, but like I said, there is different art for different people, and I greatly respect and appreciate your following up. This is my favorite movement in the piece! I’m so glad it came across well for you, I’ve had some very mixed reactions to that movement because of the rather unusual form. (Ternary and sonata form superimposed with the sonata form layer have a reversed recapitulation.) Yes they are! I’m aware and I need to fix them but I haven’t quite figured it out yet - if you have any suggestions I’d love to hear them.

Thank you for taking the time to listen and leave a comment! All I have to say about this is that I feel you’ve missed the point of the movement. Yes, it is rather abstract, and that is by design. This movement was originally written as a contrapuntal exercise which simply grew into something more. As such, it simply doesn’t rely on traditional melodic mechanisms or standard-fare romantic period harmonic structures. In many ways this piece has much more in common with renaissance counterpoint than most other symphonic music I’ve come across. If you’re looking for a “big tune” try listening to the finale, though if you consider this first movement incomprehensible then you may have a difficult time understanding the form of the finale. As for the accusation of, “indiscriminately entering notes into the sequencer,” I take some frustration. You do not know my process, so why insist on saying something so blatantly polemical? I fail to see the value in repeatedly saying things like that, as well as calling the music “a-thematic.” For your information, this movement took me nearly 8 months to complete, it was a tremendous amount of work, and I don’t take what seems to be largely unjustified criticism lightly. If you don’t like a piece of music, that’s fine! There’s plenty of music by very famous composers that simply doesn’t speak to me that I largely find no value in. Not all art is for everyone, we all have different things we prefer over others and I would hate to be someone that would force you to listen to something you don’t enjoy! But with that said, find something more grounded in the score to criticize than something along the lines of, ‘well, it’s not Tchaikovsky and there’s not a big obvious melodic gesture so the composer must not know what they’re doing.” (Yes I realize that’s not word for word what you said, but it’s not exactly far off either.) Again, thank you for taking the time to listen, as well as giving me the opportunity to spell out my feelings toward critics. 😉

It’s interesting you brought this up. In the original quartet version of this piece they are half notes (or semibreves) at half the tempo, but they were too difficult to count and always sounded rushed. One of the fascinating things I’ve started to notice now that I’ve had performances of some of my music is that notation can have a profound effect on how performers interpret sheet music. As such, I chose to put it in breves for a more expansive quality. As for the string tutti/unis. issue, I’ve heard it go either way and honestly don’t care terribly about that detail. It’s easy enough to fix, so if someone convinces me strongly enough in the future I may change it. What did you think of the music in and of itself?

Thank you for taking the time to listen and leave a comment! :-)

After a lot of going back and forth on whether or not to post this here, I’ve finally decided that my true first symphony is ready to have other people’s ears on it! (As opposed to the “symphony” in e minor that I posted here a number of years ago, which I now regard as number zero and don’t allow anyone to look at. 😉) This piece originated last october as a string quartet, and as I worked on the finale of the piece, I realized that rather than writing a chamber piece I was actually writing a large scale orchestral work. I finished it toward the end of this past July. I hope you enjoy!

This is really very lovely! Something about the way your phrases are constructed very much reminds me of Poulenc. He tended to write things in these little 2 to 4 bar phrases and then assemble them in sort of a mosaic-like way, you do something similar here. I love the transition into the more rhythmic passage at around 2:00, though I think you should take a look at the piece as a whole and consider adding some more unexpected harmonic motion. Almost all of your phrases end with either some kind of a dominant functioning chord or they end on your tonic (almost always e minor/E major). This can be very harmful to the flow of your piece, and it starts to sound predictable, especially when it’s stretched out to five minutes in length. That isn’t to say this specific piece is predictable in its entirety, but it’s something to keep an eye on for sure. Thank you for sharing!

Yes, it will be recorded! I’ll probably end up making some kind of synchronized video once the premiere happens. Thank you for your interest! It’s funny you mention b.6, that was one of the spots my violinist friend mentioned as a potential issue. We’re going to have a call sometime soon and go through and fix a bunch of stuff.