Prelude no. 5

Prelude no. 5

Length: 3:47

Time to compose: 3 days

Key: E Flat Minor

Impressionistic/Romantic

Prelude no. 5 - MP3

Comments/criticism welcome.

Thanks for listening :)

How many hours did you work on this? It's pretty extensive for three days time - I'm impressed. What I liked about this piano solo was the fact that the transitions were natural and well composed - good form and good style. It feels improvised - if it was then great improvision - it shows how quickly you can form concepts from your head and out of your fingertips into the piano. If this wasn't improvised - if it was made using notation software then I think you didn't spend enough time concluding the piece. It seemed to end abruptly and I just couldn't see it comming - not enough to appreciate it anyway. Either way, I liked the light overture the strings give near the middle/end of the piece. Very emotional. This piano piece has a lot of emotion in it - Me likes.

This is one of the more emotional pieces I've heard in my time as a member here

Very soulful around 1:18 very nicely done. Improvisation? If you did do improv on this, you did a good job of not making sound random. Nice

Encore!

:huh:

Thanks for the reviews :D

In those 3 days, I would guess I spent 8 or so hours on this.

Nope, that is not an improvisation. I am not very good at playing piano anymore, both of my wrists are bad (probably from practicing so much when I was in high school :P lol).

My other computer crashed about 2 months ago and I was without notation software, so I pretty much had this song in my head for those 2 months. I know the ending needs to be worked a little more. I am pretty bad with endings in general :P I just went through a pretty emotional period in my life, so I took out all of my frustration and sadness on this piece.

Thanks again! :happy:

Jen, the midi itself is too robotic, and if you are going to submit this to Juilliard, you should probably fix this robotic feel. Also, consider revising some of your fast passages. Some of your fast passages should contain some style, instead of just one continuous tempo. Flying through an arpeggio with 20 notes in one second is, besides humorous...impossible :sleeping:

69-75 seems really strenuous to me, and maybe a little random.

Other than these minor criticisms, you seemed to have improved greatly from the start. There were great parts of your piece that seriously amaze me. You should really consider programming your midis, to have more of a realistic feel to them, since piano midis can never get away with a single tempo. Orchestral music, sure can...piano is different.

20 notes in one second? That is a bit of an exaggeration. ;) They are 32nd notes, and I don't have 20 of them in a row anywhere in there. Besides, I did not write this for just anyone to play. This is really no more impossible to play than the Rach 3 (not that I would ever compare myself to Rach, I'm just comparing difficulty). I knew a girl in high school who could play anything...literally. She is a master pianist. I bet she could play this. I should track her down :thumbsup:

I don't even know if I am going to apply for any music schools. It would probably be a waste of time and money because I am so new to this. If I do, the Royal College of Music would actually be my first choice, since I have always wanted to stay in England.

Since I am stuck with only Finale Songwriter, I cannot change tempos in a piece, I would need Finale 2006 for that, which I plan on buying eventually. Did you listen to the mp3? It is far better. MIDIs suck, the only reason I posted it was for the people who would rather not go off site.

How old are you? The Royal College of Music is very high standard. Some of the best composers go there i've heard

I'm 23. I know that, but it is worth a try.

Hey Jen!

You keep impressing me with your progress! This piece is another good showcase of your improvement so it was an interesting listen. Here's my review of it; bitter and blunt as usual:

The beginning was fine but that weird little glissando thingy near 0:10 really threw me off. It made me invision the performer playing and then being startled by his wife who had come to announce that dinner was ready. Moving along from there, you keep the mood going well and I can see an interesting blend of your style and some influences that are almost Chopinesque. Things start to drop off in terms of quality though because then from around 0:40 to 1:00, it gets really twitchy and jarring; I didn't like that.

The lyrical section following the pause, around 1:20, is very nice and has a neat watery feel to it. You keep that up well and continue to present that same mood until about a minute later at 2:25 or so where things are sounding more frustrated. I have some qualms about the pause at 2:46; it's really random and seems out of place. I guess the wife is back with some frustrated reminder that dinner will get cold if our performer doesn't get his pudgy donkey off the piano bench and into the kitchen.

The following bit is nice again; flowing and pleasant. Almost Japanese-sounding. That carries on until the end and that's fine. The ending itself was very unsatisfying as far as I was concerned, so you may want to consider editing that as well.

Overall, this piece is nice but it brings up the same complaints I always have about your music. You have a bunch of different melodic ideas and you combine them into a single piece as different "sections". The problem is that you tend to do it poorly with weak transitions and some lack of coherence among the sections as a result. Try to work on developing all of them first into individual pieces instead of just squishing them together to make things seem longer. It's almost like we can tell exactly when you paused your composing and then came back and continued. Other than that though, very nice work and definately shows your growing talents.

Thanks for sharing, Jen. ;)

*nods* A very, very good piece. You have some very good parts. It sounds a bit complicated to play, but I might check it out... it sounds really cool.

I'll check the midi file in finale later, and if it doesn't look TOO complicated (and if I get ink in my printer), I might try to practice it.

It does end rather... suddenly. But then again, I can't do endings either, so, I'm not really gonna harp too much on that.

Cool :) If you can play it, please make a recording! I think it would be cool to hear it on a real piano. The midi version comes out weird when I make a notation file out of it, the original is probably easier to read. I can send it to you if you want, I had it posted for a day or two but deleted it.

That's ok, I don't expect everyone to like everything I write. I made it to the first page of the soundclick classical charts with this one at one point this week, not bad for a beginner :P

All in all, I give it a 5/10.

Ugh. Stop that. Please, just stop that.