Quick Flute Duet (Spring Shower)

For the record, I know virtually nothing about composition and only recently started learning to read music and play the flute. So criticism and advice are most welcome.

My teacher likes duets and has started encouraging me to write to solidify what he's teaching me about theory. I came up with this as my third composition and would like to know what I did wrong. ;)

Attached are the sheet music in PDF format and a MIDI from my notation software that I'm sure will sound much better when I'm able to play it on a real instrument.

Thanks for your time!

spring shower.pdf

spring shower.mid

I just took a glance at the score, so I can only remark on a couple basic things. For a beginning composer, it's quite impressive! I like your sense of "conversation" between the two instruments. However, for flute you may want to take consideration of articulation: slurs! Not sure if you intended any, but I'm just saying that's a major problem I see alot in this forum. But seeing as you play flute I'm sure you know what you're doing. Nice job!

Wow, thanks for the kind words.

I did consider slurs at first, but as I settled on the imagery of rain drops for each note they seemed to detract from the feel of the piece. Then again, all I'm going on is the MIDI playback since I'm not quite up to playing it myself yet, and with that there's no difference in how slur/no slur sounds. I'll definitely try to see how different articulation affects the result.

not just slurs, then:

1. dynamic markings

2. staccato

3. accents

4. tenuto

All these things add specificity, and make (in the long run) for a better performance. It's hard, because those things don't usually show up in midi, but trust me, they will make your music more "alive."

Hi, I don't know much about the flute, but it looks like both the high and low part have a fairly narrow range.

To my novice ear, the high part stays high for too long, but maybe it's just a matter of taste.

I enjoyed listening to this, other than that... I don't know what else to say.