pbent101

I figure that there's already been some critique in the posts above mine, so I'll leave a compliment. :) Despite repetitiveness or range issues or whatever, I really like your harmonic ideas. It's already really nice. Your choices of chords are pretty powerful, in my opinion. With some cleaning up, you'll have an extremely powerful piece on your hands! :)

I like it. :) It's simple harmonically, but it makes a lot of sense, and it's really pleasing to the ear. (The way I worded that, it sounded like I was using euphamisms, but that's not how I meant it. I liked it!) My only complaint is the quality of the midi recording. It was a little bit hard to understand the style of the piece with such a bland midi recording, but that's not your fault. I'd love to hear a live recording.

This is a cool piece. I like the use of a lot of open intervals. The fifths give the piece that edgy sound. I'm not a big fan of atonality, but this piece seemed to have just enough to give it some character, and I think it worked really well.

I'm new to this website, so I hope I'm doing this correctly. :blush: I'm Patrick, and I've been taking private piano lessons for 9 years, and I've been playing trumpet for 6 years. My piano teacher encouraged me to compose often, but as a kid, I never took it very seriously. I started taking composition more seriously within the last few years. This is my first piece for orchestra. It's about 6 1/2 minutes. This was intended to be a tone poem, of sorts. The idea I had in my head while composing this was a collection of episodic moments about a rainstorm and the things occuring within it. The first half is in Bb Major, and is meant to sound rather frantic, starting with some pizzicato strings on a seventh chord. It builds up to a quiet climax, before fading into the second half in g minor. The second half is meant to have a more solemn and contemplative tone, building up to a thunderous climax, before ending abuptly with a recapitulation of the beginning. When I compose, I generally get the bulk of it written down in about a week, and then spend months reworking sections and working on details. I'm pretty happy with most of it, but I think a few parts still have a rather amateur sound to them, mainly in the major section. Any thoughtful critique would be much appreciated! Title ideas would also be appreciated! [Note: I notated the score in Finale Printmusic, so the recording is nowhere near perfect. The strings sound really synthesized, as does the bass drum. There were some percussion sounds I could not achieve accurately, so I left them out, but wrote them manually into the score. It also chose to ignore a few of my dynamics in the percussion section, especially on cymbal swells. Take this into account when listening to it. :blush:] [Note #2: I could not get YC to upload my file, so I posted it onto Webs.com. I suppose that is rather sketchy. Sorry!] http://www.pbent101music.webs.com/rain,%20orch.mp3

The harmonic stucture is so effective. There was just a little bit of dissonance to make the harmonies interesting, and it definitely helped some sections resolve smoothly into the next. I also like how you incorperated a bunch of different styles; it works extremly well with this piece. This is awesome!