Impromptu for Cello

My first composition, A simple Cello prelude with baroque and contemporary elements.

Impromptu for Cello

The music file gives a 403 Forbidden Error when I try to open it and I can't open your score file in .mus format as I don't own Finale. Please put up a pdf instead otherwise I won't be able to review the piece!

Yea, the same happened to me too...

Please upload a pdf, and is this a WAV or an MP3 or a MIDI?

Heklaphone

Ok! Sorry about that guys, the score is now in PDF, and the sound itself is a midi. Thanks!

I'm going to address mostly technical issues. Let's say some good stuff first though - nice neat score (amazing how many people forget to put in tempo, clefs or even their own name!). Piece is all within the range of the instrument (again there are a suprisingly numerous amount of professional arrangements where the idiot arranger assumed the cello had the same range as the bass guitar and wrote pitches way off the bottom end!) and is reasonably idiomatic, especially the use of chords which are all very easily playable.

- Eb is not the most straightforward key for the instrument. It's not at all wrong to write in this key for cello, of course, and there's an unaccompanied Bach suite in this key, but it risks accuracy of intonation because we have to play in half positions and shift around so much more. This is particularly so in this piece which features a great deal of relatively wide intervallic leaps. To give an example; in the twelfth bar, playing D-Ab-D requires at least a leap up to the Ab, if not one back down as well. I personally can easily find a finguring which would involve only the initial leap of a fifth up, but whatever I do it's less secure than leaping D-A-D (or even, transposing the original, Db-A-Db) because the high Ab is so much more risky to find than an A natural. (In this case the A natural would be available as a harmonic in the same position and I would be able to 'flick' the note very easily and accurately even though it's quite a big leap). Here Bach is not actually a very good model despite the otherwise outstanding quality of his music - all six of the unaccompanied suite have awkward moments!

- Repeated wide leaps are also less secure and practical the higher up the instrument's range you go because there are fewer 'anchor points' for the left hand to check its accuracy against. The number of places in which a particular note can practically be sounded diminishes and more hand movements are required for a sequence of pitches than if it were an octave lower, between the lines in bas clef. The danger is that eventually the only way the passage can be played is to leap up and down the A string, which is not practical.

- Use tenor or treble clef when the music gets higher than two ledger-lines. Some instruments don't mind lots of lines but cellists can read three clefs and so prefer not to do this!

- There's a hanging tie in the last bar of the fifth system (it would be great if your score had bar numbers...) which is ambiguous - does this imply that the A is to be held on whilst playing the G above, or was it meant to be a slur? In any case, the way the rhythm in this bar is notated is actually quite confusing - you should put the tied minim and the quaver the other way round. One should always try to match the note values in any rhythm to the beats of the bar as closely as possible, even if this means lots of ties.

- Bit of a dearth of dynamics on the first page. The baroque-like figurations in the music would lead most players to perform it with the same licence as a Bach suite and add their own interpretative dynamics, but you should make this clear in the score. Similarly for phrasing.

- You have adjacent repeated pitches with slurs. It is impossible to play these truly legato, because obviously the note must be repeated which involves re-sounding the note which will cause a gap, however small. So either you can change one of the pitches, make them tenuto within the same bow (add little lines above the notes), or put in a bow change between the notes to solve this.

Musically, the piece doesn't modulate (the absence of accidentals is a dead giveaway even before one hears it) making it very difficult to sustain the listener's interest (even in minimalism!). Even a simple move to the dominant and back will be better than staying in the same tonic area of the key/mode for the entire piece. Better still to devise a satisfying overall chord sequence, however simple, and then base the piece on it. Rhythmically, there was just about enough variety.

Would you care for me to post a recording of myself playing this piece to demonstrate some of the above points? Ideally I'd make a video but you'll understand if I don't due to the gigantic file size upon upload.

That would be fantastic! I really can't believe I forgot to modulate at all, and will be working on your advice during this week, and of course I understand about the video. Thanks so much,

L'autremec

Cool cool, with probably not be up until after the weekend though as I have quite an extraordinarily packed schedule for the next few days.

That's fine, sorry I could not get back to you sooner, I was visiting some family.

The last row of the score is nice Try to write a piece with the theme of the last row!

I would just like comment on the form. An Impromptu is a very whimsical piece, this wasn't. However, very nice first composition.

Yeah, I wasn't quite sure what to call it... what would you have said?

Nice piece for a first composition although it would have been nice to hear a bit more of the impromptu essence.

Lautremec said on October 13, 2010, 9:52 pm:

Yeah, I wasn't quite sure what to call it... what would you have said?

Maybe a Prelude? You could compose something to go along with it.