John Carey

Thank you very much; I glad you enjoyed it! I found that it was definitely one of the most difficult pieces to write, simply because of the amount of considerations one has to make when writing for harp, but it's great to know that the hard work paid off!

I realize it's been a while since I posted this, but I noticed that a fair amount of people listened to it and yet there are no replies. Any thoughts at all...? All comments are greatly appreciated.

Not a finale per se, but the end of the 5th movement of Havergal Brian's Gothic Symphony is the most apocalyptic section of music I've ever heard:

My favorite is the Busoni concerto; it's just such an incredibly unique piece on so many levels. Busoni's style is rather unusual, which makes it a somewhat difficult work to digest at first. However, after a few listens the genius of the writing becomes apparent. His use of thematic material in particular is mind-blowing... the work has a rather operatic character, and it ends appropriately with a male chorus singing the main themes of the first four movements. Truly a remarkable work -- I highly recommend checking it out!

The first pieces that come to mind are Shostakovich's String Quartet No. 8 (particularly the 2nd movement) and Symphony No. 5. As mentioned previously, Penderecki and Ornstein both have plenty of pieces that would fit the bill. George Flynn's Wound also portrays similar emotional qualities.

Augmented 4th/diminished 5th, augmented 5th, major 9th, augmented 11th. As you can probably tell, I tend to gravitate toward "jazz" harmonies, though my music doesn't really sound much at all like jazz; I just love the lush, misty tonal ambiguity that one can create with such harmonies.

Does anyone have any feedback?

I thoroughly enjoyed them. They had some good tunes and the harmonic content was nice (and did some unexpected things, which was refreshing). Also, the writing was pretty pianistic in general, which is also a nice change compared to a lot of contemporary music I've heard/played recently. I think some of them might be improved slightly by adding a few runs here and there (in a Chopin-esque sort of way), but I'm not saying that the piece needs that necessarily... just something to consider. I'm not always convinced that certain sections fit in as well as others; I would suggest listening to them all really carefully and seeing if every part is relevant to what comes before/after. Great work, these seem like they would be enjoyable to play.

Neither the MP3 nor the score work for me.

Good job on this. The melodic content was unified throughout the movements, and the form worked nicely. My main critique would be that your harmonic language is a bit bipolar -- your tonal sections are quite tonal and your "atonal" sections seem to come out of nowhere and have very little to do with what preceded them. I would strongly suggest "spicing up" your tonal sections with some added dissonances and chromaticism... not constantly, just often enough so that the less tonal sections don't seem so wildly out of place. Also, you could do a lot more with the instruments (especially the piano). If you're not a pianist, I'd recommend studying some chamber music scores with piano by great composers; perhaps you'll get some ideas as to how to make the piano part more elaborate. And, as mentioned previously by another poster, conversational interplay between the instruments will make your piece a lot more varied and interesting. Nice work!

I've written quite a bit of techno on a keyboard. I've used a Korg Triton workstation as a stand-alone instrument/sequencer, and I've done quite a bit with Logic and any keyboard I happen to have sitting around. Both Logic and the Korg Triton are rather expensive, so you should probably hold off on getting those until you know you'll be able to put them to good use. But to answer your question, yes, to my knowledge techno is generally always played on keyboards. But, if your keyboard doesn't double as a sequencer then you'll need some other software to record your music.

How contemporary? The first thing that came to mind for me was:

It looks like it has potential to be useful. I feel like composers with more "contemporary" harmonic languages will be less likely to need something like this, however. Probably the simplest solution to avoiding writing melodies that sound too much like Mozart would be to... well, not compose like Mozart! ;) And even so, according to Stravinsky: "Good composers borrow, great composers steal."

Back when I was considerably less experienced, I would probably trash the majority of what I wrote. Well, not "trash" exactly -- I had a folder specifically designated for works I thought were too bad to finish. I never wanted to throw my music away though, because I figured a lot of these "pieces" had elements that were salvageable (possibly even just one phrase or chord). I find nowadays that I practically never do this anymore, which has a lot to do with the fact that I often have deadlines to finish my pieces by, which certainly helps me focus my attention on the compositions I'm working on enough to force myself to work with the ideas I have, even if they don't appeal to me immediately. If you don't like something you wrote, I think it's good to challenge yourself to make it work anyway... who knows, maybe you'll end up writing a much better piece than you imagined? As for sections of music within a single piece... A LOT ends up in the trash before I consider the piece complete.

Here is my most recent composition. Being my first extended work featuring harp, it proved to be a challenging but rewarding experience. My aim with this work was to further develop the harmonic language in my String Quartet, which was quite a task considering the harp is often thought to be a rather harmonically limited instrument. However, despite my initial concern about these "limitations," I discovered that one can write harp music that is *very* chromatic and pushes tonal boundaries. My harmonic language is based primarily on polytonality, which I used extensively in this work. The main "key" of the work is E, which is juxtaposed rather constantly with the key of Eb throughout the piece (particularly in the fourth movement). The first movement ("Rubato") begins by introducing the main theme of the work, which appears both directly and subtly in all of the movements. The movement continues to develop freely, moving the theme through an assortment of variations before reaching a climax. The intensity of the music quickly drops, leading to a transitional section where rhythmic and thematic motives from the second movement are introduced quietly. The movement ends unresolved and the second movement begins abruptly, a dance-like scherzo characterized by a motive based on alternating 5/8 and 6/8 meters. The third movement ("Adagio") features the harp extensively and places a greater emphasis on textural experimentation. Building up to a dramatically virtuosic section for the harp, the music fades to nothing and is followed by another transitional section which emphasizes the polychords that are featured prominently in the fourth movement (the aforementioned E-Eb, and also Eb-G). The fourth movement ("Presto") moves perpetually, eventually reaching a climax where the cello plays the main theme of the work adorned by polytonal harp flourishes. After falling back down to pianissimo, the beginning section of the "Presto" returns. The music builds once more and then ends quietly, with the cello resolving in E and the harp in Eb. Sonata for Cello and Harp