mercurypickles

Hi! This is the third movement of a song cycle that I wrote from January to April of last year (2025). Each of the five movements is a setting of a different poem by Sara Teasdale, and together create a suite of nocturnes. This is my personal favorite of the set, if there is some interest I may upload some of the others, as there are strong connections between each of the movements. This song is in a three part form, where the second and third parts develop material initially heard in the first. In this piece, the primary material being developed is the piano ostinato heard right at the beginning. Please let me know what you think!

I realize I'm quite late to the party on this piece, but I wrote up a running log of my thoughts as I listened to this. Henry, this is the best piece I've come across on this forum. First of all, kudos to you for taking on a piece like Mahler's Eighth for formal inspiration - I've attempted such a thing myself and have nothing to show for it. The first movement's unification of pentatonic and chromatic harmony is quite unusual in sound, it strikes me as being somewhat similar to Dvorak's "Wagnerian" period - around the time of his third string quartet's composition. Anyway, there are many striking aspects to this movement; one thing I can't help but notice is your use of recurring textures. Even when motivic material itself may not recur necessarily, the settings that those motives were heard in are recast and developed in increasingly colourful ways so the whole thing hangs together anyway. The pizzicato passage at about 8:00 is one such example. That said, I would be curious to see the result of potentially stripping back just some of the figuration around the end of the first movement - I wonder if it might help clarify the polyphony in the final triple fugue. It is very beautiful as written though! Okay, second mvoement: This introduction is suitably mysterious, and at the Agitato the music takes on a nicely turbulent affect. The counterpoint here is quite rich, and I almost wonder if perhaps a little more time could've been taken before the lines came into full effect. I wonder, have you listened to the 0th and 2nd string quartets by Arnold Schoenberg? You may find some interesting common ground with him. As you noted, the passage beginning at 23:38 is extremely special, I can hear the intensity of the feeling behind it quite clearly. You communicate your thoughts very well in this piece - it is perfectly followable from beginning to end and never wastes a moment. One final thought, have you considered orchestrating this? I think some of my little things about the density of the texture could be greatly improved with a little more breathing room in the ensemble. Not to mention it would bring out many of the fabulous colours of the piece in even more vivid detail. In short, thank you, Henry, for sharing this with us. This is a wonderful work that deserves to be performed. I would like to also thank you for all of the feedback you have offered on my music over the last few years - you've been a real voice of encouragement. (P.S. I see you also cited David Goza as an important influence in your initial post, his videos have been massively helpful to me as well!)

Hi everyone! This is my sonata for piano and alto saxophone, which I composed over this summer as a birthday gift for my mom (born on Halloween!) Below you'll find my own formal analysis of the work to help parse a piece that even I find a little bit dense. The analysis will focus on the most complex movement, the third, so if a more thorough explanation of the first two movements is wanted I'll edit this post to include theme here. Please bear in mind that there are passages in this piece which are meant to be played completely freely from a rhythmic standpoint, and MIDI simply can't simulate that. Thank you for listening and providing your thoughts on this piece, it's something I spent a lot of time and energy on. Analysis: My Sonata for Piano and Saxophone in Eb major is cast in three movements. The last two are played without a break. The first movement is in a free form based on tempo transformation. (It’s essentially the form of the third movement of Brahms’ second symphony). The second movement, Romanza, is a simple, ternary form in Bb with an F minor middle section. It’s very beautiful but harmonically slightly troubled, somewhat unstable. The movement plays without a break into the third. The third movement is in a freely reworked version of sonata form. There is a slow, dramatic introduction for the piano alone which moves through various keys from F# minor to Eb major. Then follows “Cavatina I” a ternary form subsection. The A section of this is a pastoral tune in Ab minor over a pedal Ab. This then gives way to the B section, a modally ambiguous march. Then the A section returns. This gives way to “Fuga I” which is a fugue in Gb major over a Db pedal point (lasting almost the entire three and a half minute long fugue). This fugue is more dramatic than rhetorical, climaxing with an episode in Gb minor which is subverted into “Cavatina II”. This is the same music as Cavatina I, but formally inverted (the A section becomes the B section and vice versa). The march is heard in a more ornamental form for the piano alone. Then the pastoral tune, this time in Gb major over a pedal fifth in the bass of the piano. The march returns and leads directly into “Fuga II” This fugue uses as its subject a transformed version of the subject of Fuga I, itself a transformation and combination of the first movement’s “seed motive” (Eb - C - G - Bb - F - Eb) and the pastoral tune. This fugue is highly metrically complex, representing a transition and conflict between the considerable amount of 6/8 music, and the common time of the section that follows. The final passage of the finale is a chorale. The chorale introduces new melodic material (actually built from intervalic material from the introduction, which is a transformation of the first movement seed motive), but the harmony under it was carefully constructed: the entire finale is an elaboration on the harmonic progression (F# minor - D# diminished - Ab minor - Eb minor - Gb major - Bb minor - Eb major) heard in the introduction of the movement. The chorale is just another restatement of that harmonic progression, reaffirming the journey back to Eb major for the third time in the movement. The chorale-coda also gradually introduces a new rhythmic cell which crystallizes over the course of the passage, resulting in the final Eb major chords of the movement being sounded in the following rhythm: eighth note - dotted quarter - half note - dotted quarter - eighth note (- half note). This is a rhythmic palindrome, mirroring the harmonic palindrome which comprises the structure of the sonata as a whole.

Hi @Henry Ng Tsz Kiu! Thank you for taking the time to listen to and respond to my piece, it always means a lot. Yes, the violinist here is the wonderful @Irene Huang, a classmate of mine at school. There is a second movement to this piece but not a fourth, the whole thing has a runtime of only about ten minutes. It’s funny to me that you mentioned Shostakovich, I wrote the third movement right after attending our school’s Shostakovich festival back in October. I began sketching it after a performance of the 1st, 7th and 8th string quartets and 2nd piano trio. The 7th quartet is one of my favorite pieces of chamber music and I think you can hear bits of it in the third movement here. If I can get a recording of the whole thing I would gladly share it, as the second movement forms an important structural (rhythmic and tonal) hinge between the outer movements.

Here is my submission:

Here is my submission for this year's Christmas event, a through composed setting of the coventry carol. Enjoy, and let me know your thoughts! Coventry Carol.mp3

Hello! Here is the recording of two movements from my Sonatine in C. This piece was composed for two friends of mine in my theory class at conservatory, and we had a lot of fun putting the thing together. While not my largest or most important piece, it was an exercise in a kind of neoclassicist compositional style I've otherwise left behind. The middle movement of the piece wasn't performed due to time constraints on this recital, which is unfortunate because it forms the harmonic and metric hinge between the outer movements. Hopefully I will have a complete recording of the piece soon! In the mean time, I would love anyone's thoughts on the piece if y'all are willing to share! Score video

Hi! Here are my Two Lullabies for voice and piano. I finished them a couple of days ago for a high school friend of mine. The audio is a MIDI mockup -- I'm just looking for some feedback on the emotional affect of the pieces. Does the trajectory from the first (poem by Dunbar) to the second (poem by Blake) read on its own, or does it require an explanation? I would also love some thoughts on the harmony in this little set...

Seems not to be anymore! I may reupload if I get a chance 🙂

Hi! Yes the piano switch in the final number was due to rendering issues. For whatever reason the MIDI began cutting random bits of the music out despite all voices in the mixture showing activity - for this reason, I changed the instrument being used for that moment so the music remained intelligible. Thank you for taking a look at this piece despite it being posted so long ago!

Hello! I’ve sent a message your way

@PeterthePapercomPoser Thank you so much for your reply! If I can get better recordings of these pieces I’ll send them, that aside: - I think you’re right about the “wacky/quirky” quality to this “Danse.” I certainly don’t think it could be called anything else. It was actually meant as an homage to Poulenc, something shared throughout the set. This whole partita is more or less a tribute to Les Six (and to a lesser extent, Ravel). When I hear this piece, though, I start to imagine one of the evil muppets (like Animal, or the bomb guy) just staring at you. Bare eye contact. No looking away. Just that muppet, and this music is the illustration of that moment. (The italian tempo/expressive indication literally translates to “Fast and a little bit evil.”) - This truly is the fault of poor audio rendering. When played on an actual instrument, even my fairly poor keyboard skills yielded interesting results. This is a very personal piece. There have been some difficult things going on around me and I needed an outlet. For a long time I’ve had something of a block when it comes to just creating music out of emotion; I always create in abstraction, or at least, tend to. That’s been breaking down a little bit recently, and this was the product of it. It was the first piece completed in the set. - This Pavane is a revision of a much earlier piece. It was in my first year of composing, I joined this forum and this was one of my “Nocturnes” (I have not written any nocturnes I would consider part of my works, aside from a secret project I may reveal later). Anyway, it was very repetitive, and dull. The former quality was kept in this piece, but reworked with a more mature understanding of counterpoint and rhythmic theory. Honestly, I consider this to be nothing more than a real, true-to-vision version of that little piano piece. I just didn’t have the technique to write it the way I wanted to back then.

Hi all! These are the three inner movements of my new piano partita. There is also an introductory movement and a final, stylized gigue. I had some difficulties in exporting a MIDI rendering for those two movements, so they are not included here. There are strong thematic and sectional connections across each movement, so they do make a little less sense this way than they would in full context. Just bear that in mind while listening. I'd love any thoughts on the music, the piece is for a good friend of mine and I'd like to give it to them in tip-top shape! PARTITA 2-4.pdf

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 "Wandrers 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 layers 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 transitional 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!