Questions and Answers of Dasein

These are my Program notes for the piece:Questions and Answers of Dasein is a piece about the emotional struggle of dealing with a new and painful experience, but learning and growing from it. The beginning is a representation of the innocent and sweet, but naïve nature of the soul portrayed. Rehearsal markings A and B represent a search for answers to the questions that arise from the obstacles of life. Rehearsal marking C is a representation of the acceptance, understanding, internalization and true peace that comes from learning how to grow.

Questions and Answers of Dasein

Without posting a score it's very hard to review a work. That said, the audio isn't the best and really doesn't assist in analyzing this work. I like your use of resonant tones and feel that it really helps create a sense of 'texture'. I can hear a lot of canonic imitation and some 'light' contrapuntal instances. Again, though, without a score I can't offer much. Thanks for sharing!

The score has now been posted, for those interested.

Ok, after reviewing the score in depth. Here are a few of my comments: First, you are to be commended on the brevity used here. It's nice to see a piece that doesn't have 9000 different ideas presented one after the other. That said, however, I feel you need some sort of contrast here. I noticed that you tried to transform your theme to accomplish that but, I'm not sure that was really successful. I still could aurally (and visually) tell that was the theme! Second, I felt that your pacing in this piece was rather slow and relied on slightly varied repeats of your material. That can work but it's not altogether an interesting thing - unless your outright going for a theme and variations piece (which this work is not.) Finally, I felt that the overall architectonic structure of this work was lacking a little bit. Again, you have great material. So with all that said, what can be learned from this piece. Well, to address my first comment: the brevity, is perfect. If your wanting to utilize your material in a manner that contrasts what you have here... speed it up, change the meter, add a fugal texture, etc. are all good ways to do this. Even changing your harmonic usage can take this material and transform it into another beast all together. In reference to the second, think about what you want your material to say/evoke. If you want it to be, as this piece currently is, then no problem. However, if you want to do the most with your material, I would recommend thinking of events in your music. How will you get to those? How will your build be? How will you prepare the listener? Finally, in regards to my last comment on the structure. I feel that you have good material here - but I don't really see that your doing much with it but repeated it in variated guises. I would recommend breaking the material down. Working with each constituent part and seeing what you can come up. Develop it! You have a lot of possibilities with this material, what can you do with it?