Lessons with Sergio G. Serrano

Cheers!

Send me on over that piano piece.

I post here three sections of the piano piece. I think they are the most polished ones.. I still have a mess with the others though because I had previously written a sort of sonata but I ended up destroying it and I will use some of the material there to finish it.

Included here a midi and the score.

Thanks! Sergio.

:thumbsup:

II - In der Traumform I.pdf

II - In der Traumform I.mid

VI -

VI -

VII - Postlude und Ruhe.mid

VII - Postlude und Ruhe.pdf

Well, it's hard to tell without seeing the whole thing - but it seems very unfocused. Why is there a cell-phone in the final movement? Why do you go into sections of triadic quasi-functional harmony there, and at the beginning of II, but nowhere else?

I'd like to know what the compositional idea behind the piece as a whole is, as well as the ideas behind the individual parts.

Thanks for the comments Christopher! Yeah it is definitely hard to understand the whole picture with such incomplete parts, the primary purpose was more of an aesthetic and harmonic appreciation. Sorry for not even putting the name of the piece :S! The piece itself is called Nachtklaviermusik (Night piano music) and it is based strongly in surrealist aesthetics. The pieces are not totally connected per se, formally. As based on my understanding and conceptualization of dreams, seldom parts of a dream seem to connect, yet.. it is the same dream. Not necessarily there is a sequence or strong sense of coherence, in this case translated in the spare use of the harmony you mentioned.

The structure of the piece goes like this:

I. Praeludium

II. In der Traumform I (In dream-form I)

III. In der Traumform II (In dream-form II)

IV. Ohne Form (Without Form)

V. ...

I forgot to say, VI has only 21 measures, a number Schoenberg was particularily fond of and also the use of seven is important, as he does in Pierrot Lunaire for example, even in the title.. Three times seven poems from Albert Giraud's Pierrot lunaire.

Again hahaha, I totally forgot... but the Praeludium is actually electronic music, a very dreamy sound collage I created, I try to make a sort of counterpoint, between several voices.. sounds and samples. It's a mood setter. The voice is saying I-N-H-A-L-A, which means inhale in Spanish. The piano is only supposed to play a drone, like a trance state, starting fast and getting slower and slower. I'm working on that.

I have it recordad in m4a, so I can't upload it, if you can, I uploaded to my Myspace account..

MySpace.com - Sergio Guillermo Serrano Rodr

Thanks. I understand a bit better now -

however, I think that it still might behoove the piece to integrate the elements a little tighter together. Right now, the triadic harmony still seems unrelated to the rest of the material. Even something as simple as creating common tone relationships between it and the rest of your material would be effective.

I don't want you to change your concept or anything - just to consider weaving the elements a little tighter.

Thanks Christopher! I'm really trying to figure out how to weave the elements in a more coherent way. I was even thinking that I should leave the last section as a piece in itself because I might find it hard to transform it without taking out its esence. I have been working on the other sections as well. I might have a general draft by next week so I'll post everything.

Sure, that'd be great. Is there anything you'd like to work on in the meantime?

Hmm, you make your suggestions man. How about some deeper knowledge on non-functional triadic chords? Like.. more on the understaning of how they work between them and how to connnect them properly. I think that'd be a good starting point!