Piano Quartet in C minor - COMPLETE!

Yes, it's finally done, after four years and two months.

The form is fairly traditional, though this quartet is written in three movements rather than four. The third movement begins in G major (the dominant) and eventually ends in the tonic.

I've tried to keep some common threads running throughout - thus the episodes in the third movement refer back to the first two movements, and the first theme in the first movement is found in all three movements.

The first movement was recorded back in March, by myself and other medical students; that recording can be found here.

EDIT: Scores have been attached. These scores should be considered drafts as articulations, bowings, and other performance instructions may be incomplete.

pianoquartet-mvmt1.mid

pianoquartet-mvmt1.sib

pianoquartet-mvmt2.mid

pianoquartet-mvmt2.sib

pianoquartet-mvmt3.mid

pianoquartet-mvmt3.sib

pianoquartet-mvmt1-score.pdf

pianoquartet-mvmt2-score.pdf

pianoquartet-mvmt3-score.pdf

Well, congratulations on completing such a work after such a long time.

Listening to the first movement...

This seems to have a lot of potential. Indeed, quite traditionally done.

The performance is very poor, unfortunately. Also, the score is, indeed, quite draft-y. They don't do your work justice.

I hope there will be more soon.

1st Movement.

The beginning is full of tension, and I believe it creates the mood you were aiming for.

The contrast with the piano(cantabile) makes the piece quite interesting, and adds a little variation(something I feel is very neccesary, especially in longer pieces)

The recapitulation of the first theme was well done and rounds of the piece nicely.

2nd Movement.

I don't love the part in m.14 where everything drops away(ok except the sustained note on the violin) to leave the cello, and only for one measure?

The piano entry is nice!

The piece is quite peaceful with some "glorious" moments.

The ending is good, but I would personally write the notes as whole notes with pauses on.

I think some of the violin parts can easily get a bit... screechy, but if the player is good enough this probably won't be a problem.

3rd Movement.

Energetic, with a noble part, and a bit of melancholy.

It get's a bit chaotic in places, but I guess that can also count as a tecnique.

The ending is very nice.

As a whole.

I can see that you put a lot of work into this piece, and with a cleaned up score it ought to look very nice.

I think the length scares people off. Try posting the three seperately and I'm sure you'll get more reviews!

Keep up the good work!

Mostly I enjoyed this. Heard the first two movements previously, so I won't comment, but in seeing all three, I think the first movement is the strongest.

Perhaps it is the development in style, as you took so long to finish the piece, but the third movement is certainly different in style to the first.

There are some things about the third movement which I find just somewhat unconvincing. Overall the movement is rather enjoyable, and good -very cleverly worked out, but there are places here and there where the effect is weakened by something.

I can't really explain this any better, but I will point out a couple of things which I think detract from the movement as a whole.

Weak cadences, or cadences which seem contradictory with the phrase structure. Hard to point out any specific examples, but noticeably in the first 20 or so bars.

Along the same lines, I find the transition from bar 4 to 5 rather weak.

Voice leading also seems to weaken the music in some places. Again, just an example:

bar 61 - look at just the violin and the piano left hand (i.e., soprano and bass). Why did you use a Db in the violin? It causes a succession of two tritones between soprano and bass. Then there is a direct fifth between the last note of b.61 and the first note of the next one. These pass along almost unnoticed, due to the speed of the notes, but they are awkward to my ears, and definitely have a deleterious effect on the music.

In any case, the spirit of the music is good - it's thematically very clever, and effective; the problems lie in having too many weak/contradictory cadences, and too much displacement of accents (which is in some places superbly done, but in other cases doesn't work so well).

Most of this could be explained by the fact that your style has progressed since the first movement, and I am perhaps using it as a yardstick, but some things just aren't quite as convincing as they could be.

By the way, there's great economy of part writing here - impressive writing for the instruments.

I can't listen to it at the moment, but judging from the score I can tell the piece has depth and potential.

My chief complaint is the lack of breathing room in the texture. At most, individual instruments get about 8 bars to themselves and then it's back to a tutti passage. I would like to see you change some passages to be more soloistic and eschew the tutti - such as a longer passage for piano solo, or one of the strings plus piano as accompaniment.

The score is okay, but you'll definitely need a pianist to go over the piano part and clean it up.

Please, please, please, fix the score... there is so little space between the staves that it feels positively claustrophobic, with dynamics and expressions squished in between staves and narrowly avoiding notes. Also, there are portions of the score (I believe second movement) where an individual bar takes up an entire system. That's simply unacceptable. Whether you resize the pages or resize the music itself, please do something to make the score more readable and beautiful. I realize that Sibelius for some unfathomable reason defaults to a Grade 1 Piano Big Note Five Finger style font size, but I know that that can (and should be) changed somehow in the program.

Bravo! I can't wait to listen to this tonight! :)

Voice leading also seems to weaken the music in some places. Again, just an example:

bar 61 - look at just the violin and the piano left hand (i.e., soprano and bass). Why did you use a Db in the violin? It causes a succession of two tritones between soprano and bass. Then there is a direct fifth between the last note of b.61 and the first note of the next one. These pass along almost unnoticed, due to the speed of the notes, but they are awkward to my ears, and definitely have a deleterious effect on the music.

I think here, with the violin and cello, I was aiming to emphasize a sequence moving upward in a diminished 7th, while the piano was playing motivic material in the background. I think the Db in the violin/cello is necessary to preserve the sequence; however you do bring up a good point about the voice-leading, and I am considering giving the piano a G# there instead. Unfortunately, this seems only marginally if at all stronger, because the tritone then resolves to a rather unstable perfect 5th. Thoughts on that change?

As for the direct 5th, it's really a tough call, because of the conflict between horizontal motivic integrity and vertical voice-leading rules. I realize it's especially exposed in a passage that has just two voices, but hoped that the stepwise movement of one of the voices (even if it was the lower voice, it was arguably of equal importance as both voices are doubled at the octave and have different timbres) would mitigate the effect some.

To be honest, the direct 5th was not too objectionable. The stepwise motion of the lower voice by itself isn't enough to rid the bad effect, but at speed, and with the octave doublings, and because of the harmony before and after it, it's not too bad.

Do you mean make the last G in bar 61 a G#? Because then you get a parallel 5th. Again, it's somewhat disguised, but it still won't sound the best it could. I think D natural in violin, and a G natural in the bass parts works best, but as you say, that means distorting your sequence.

You've certainly done a wonderful job and I'm sure this took a lot of effort and you got quite a result. I think the main problem with the 1st movement is a lack of contrast especially within the first 100 bars. Nothing changes, you have the same mood and almost the same material for a very long time which gets a little boring. The development section is much better, you explore the material, develop it, modulate much more and the music seems more interesting. I think that instead of modulating to G minor for your "second subject" I would move to Eb major, C major or Ab major and come up with a contrasting section that relaxes the rhapsodic material that precedes it.

The third movement seems a little strange to me - you start in G major and go through a couple different keys to end in c minor? I think you want a triumphant ending, the music sounds joyous. So my two suggestions are: beginning the movement in c minor ending in C major or Eb or something or adding in a third movement (most likely in c minor or g minor) and attaca-ing into the fourth movement and then possibly ending in c minor. It's not weird that you end in a minor key, look at Brahms' rhapsody from Op. 119 (it begins in Eb and ends in eb minor), but it has to have context. I think a scherzo or a lively movement preceding the finale would be beneficial.

In any case, you display a strong understanding of chamber writing, your music is musical and this is a strong piece of music. I've always thought that writing chamber music with the piano is next to impossible - the piano doesn't really mesh well in chamber music, at least I thought, but yours seems to work quite well. Usually what happens is the piano just plays passage work and sometimes plays the theme (although Mendelssohn's Piano trio in d minor is fantastic). Still, good job and get to work on your next piece!

Greetings!

I have already critiqued the first and second movements to your Piano Quartet, and in hearing them again, I am reminded how well put together they are. The restrained drama of the first movement leads to the subtle emotion of the second. And now we see it brought to a conclusion with the fierce nobility of the finale.

First off, the thematic material for your finale, after listening a few times, becomes apparent how it descends from the earlier movements. The quarter note followed by two eighth notes is reminiscent of certain passages in both movements. But it forms a unifying whole for your last movement, all of whose themes seems to be based on this idea. This kind of cohesive whole makes for a more convincing argument, and you have definitely done a good job here.

The String writing is interesting if not terribly difficult. Is this piece meant for an amateur group? Apart from a few pizzicato sections that move with remarkable celerity, nothing seems like it would be beyond the abilities of a good High School section.

The piano line was far more interesting in the first two movements. Here we find a slavish dependence on block chords and parallel octaves. While both can be used to great effect (for instance, Rachmaninoff's Prelude in C#-Minor), here they just sound clunky after a while. I recommend using them sparingly, and breaking up these block chords with either arpeggios or other figurations. Obviously you need them in a few places, but in the central sections and closing sections of the piece you might benefit from more variety.

Now, keep in mind, I like this piece! You have sections of soft tenderness, and others of dramatic insistence. The thematic material is interesting and the multiple variations keep my ear guessing what you will present next. I even thought I heard a quasi-fugue in there at one point. But I think compared to the first movement the piano writing is lackluster and does not make for as compelling a close to the Quartet as you would like.

Good luck with this work!

To be honest I did not really listen to all of it. But I like the last movement. It's pretty different from the first and second in a way that it started with G major then ends in C minor! but maybe it would be better if it ends in C major (but it's your work, so you have your own ideas).

But yes, there are some awkwardness in the piano writing at some places. And I think the strings writing can be slightly more adventurous. And the harmony in the first movement, sounds a bit pop-ish.

What is happening at bar 14? In the second movement? Nice piano entry btw. Nice cello melody and writing at bar 37. And nice surprise too at bar 52.

Btw I think you like to write in the style of a hymn. Because you have hymns all over this quartet. I think it's cool. :thumbsup:

Update: there may (or may not) be a live performance of the entire quartet in mid-May. More on that later, but I am definitely preparing parts right now!

So, I listened to the thing. It's long, and while I actually listened to a good deal of each movement, I only finished the first one actually hearing it through.

Why? Well, once I saw that it pretty much was more of a harmony exercise than something I'd actually sit through and listen I started to skip around and see if maybe stuff got more interesting for me later, they didn't. I'm sorry to be so harsh and blunt, I seriously am, but I was paying more attention to how you wrote some things technically than the music itself.

Not to be one of those "Unless you smash your violin on stage while singing 12 tone rows it's not good enough" guys, in this case I'm really sorry to say that it's simply way too much like an exercise to me.

As far as how you handled the instruments, I don't know. The scores weren't finished apparently? I don't know but there's a lot of room for improvement when it comes to actually defining phrases and writing down technical indications, unless it doesn't matter to you how stuff is played beyond the typical things.

For a recreation of style I suppose is sort of OK, if I were to look at it like that. But I'm not really sure what exactly are you going for either, this by itself doesn't say anything to me other than you learned some harmony and studied classical forms.

Again sorry for being so harsh, but to me it doesn't matter if you spent 2 hours or 5 years writing something in the end. The end product is all that matters to me, and in this case I find it pretty much like reading out of a classical harmony/theory book. If the intention was that, and that this is a recreation of style, please do say so.

As far as the presentation of the piece goes, your initial post, I found it quite lacking. You could've written at least two pages from just the first movement when it came to harmonic and motive/thematic development. Come on, if you're going this far, give something to work with from the point of view of the composer, yea?

Who is your audience? If you are writing to please other composers, you'll never be satisfied, unless you're Beethoven. I think an audience of average joe classical musicians would like the piece very much.