The Pale Horse of Death in F Minor

an incidental piece in romantic style. hope you enjoy it!

Before I come to the details I'd like to make a bold guess, which I hope you don't find offensive: It sounds very much like something written directly on the computer, without a real idea about how it should sound as a whole before starting to type. I'm not saying that's a bad thing. It's definitely an acceptable way of composing. The problem is that it may end up a bit unidiomatic for the piano and that there's a clearly audible and visible hierarchy between elements that seem to have been written first, with a musical intention, and other elements that have probably been added afterwards to "juice up" the melody and accompaniment by adding some harmony, but without really being musically cogent and often with rather "random" voice leading.

But before I go into this in greater detail I'd like to say that I don't find it a bad piece in the least. I think it contains some awesome ideas: The rising line that somehow reminds of the harmonic series for example that appears in the first bar and again in bars 30 and 35, interesting rhythms, and the way you structured the piece with different figurations and rhythmical ideas. It certainly works well as a piece and I enjoyed listening to it.

But now back to my criticism: My assumption about your work process starts of course with the very unique notation in four staves. I realize that there is piano music written on three staves (relatively rarely) and sometimes even four staves (very rarely), but this is usually only done if otherwise a stave would become so cluttered that it would be unreadable. This isn't the case with your piece. You could perfectly well write everything on two staves, which would make it a lot easier to read and would allow you to see your own score in a more "normal" pianistic form that might faciliate a truly idiomatic writing. I really suggest doing that.

Concerning idiomatic writing: I don't mean with it that your piece is impossible or overly awkward to play. I haven't tried it, but it generally seems unproblematic. I mean more that you're not really using the possibilities a piano gives you. This isn't necessary of course and I have nothing against, for instance, writing a piano piece consisting of a single voice (I've done so myself), but in this case I think you could actually bring out your musical ideas better with a more pianistic writing. This especially includes more change in register. Most of your piece seems to be "stuck" in two bands, one melody band and one accompaniment band which are almost always on the same position (especially the melody), together with their secondary voices. With time this makes your piece feel a bit obtrusive and constricted. Try moving your voices around the keyboard a bit more, have them close together at times, or far apart another time, or maybe once all in a relatively low register, or all in a high one, etc. Staying in the same register with your voices for a whole piece can get very tiring for the listener, especially in a fast and often loud piece.

Even though you change figuration often, which is great, the general density of notes always stays about the same. You have very often three notes played at the same time, sometimes two, sometimes four and even though you use many different rhythms, the speed at which notes follow each other doesn't vary a lot (generally between 8th and 32nd notes, centering around 16th notes). In combination that means that the number of notes per bar is always quite similar, which (in addition to the uniformity in register) gives the piece a somewhat static sound, despite your variation of other parameters.

This wouldn't be a bad thing per se, especially if your harmony was strong and directed enough to keep your music striving forward, but your harmonies aren't very directed and seem more like a "nice addition" to the melody and rhythm than the actual fundament of your piece. This is partly because most of your harmonies are very thin. Very often you only have two different notes at one time, the rest are merely octavations. And the different notes are often "empty intervals" like fifths and fourths, which are rather open and don't have a very distinct colour, so harmonically it feels very loose, not to say arbitrary. This alone is perfectly fine too. Harmonies don't need to be functional and follow each other logically. But in this case it adds to the elements that give the somewhat static feeling. And while there's also nothing wrong with static music, the strong theme and your rhythmic/figurative changes suggest that you actually want a music that moves forward and has a certain "dramatic tension". Correct me if I'm wrong.

Yet another thing that may become a bit tiresome for the listener with time is the lack of phrasing, which is of course a direct result of the lack of change in density. If you separated your (melodic) phrases a bit more the structure of your piece would come out much clearer (you can do this rhythmically, with getting "slower" at the end of phases, or by having more notes play at once at the center of a phrase and less at their ends, or harmonically with consonances and dissonances, or dynamically, or whatever. There are lots of possibilities).

May I finally ask why you call it incidental music? Is it intended/thought for something specific? What did you have in mind when writing it? The title sounds interesting.

P.S. And I hope you don't mind all that criticism. I only wrote all this because I think there's quite some potential in this piece. Pieces I don't like I generally don't review at all. I did like this piece (or lets say, many things about this piece).

it is really a quartet that didn make it haha. incidental because the rhythms suggest the gallop of a horse, and the variations reflect the introspection of the horse. i meant to make it dramatic and show that theres a lot of guilt (open to interpretation, which may be inferiority guilt or moral scruple) being Death's horse. thank you for being honest! don be afraid to offend me because im still learning to write properly. and you are very nice to review it for me!