A (brief?) return to music composition

Today I composed two short pieces that I'm reasonably satisfied with. It was the first time I sat down to hammer out music in quite awhile. Hopefully more will follow in the near future. Anyway, here they are (more will be posted if I manage to compose additional music soon):

I noticed that the second one gets a little repetitive after about the midpoint, but by the time I realized that, it was too late to fix the problem.

The first one sounds like a superb prelude.

10 minutes ago, Luis Hernández said:

The first one sounds like a superb prelude.

 

Thank you for your reply. I'll take your words as a nice compliment.

I adjusted the volume of the instruments for the second one so that it sounds clearer:

Fixed several errors in the second piece in the first post:

Hello @Polaris,

The first one for, as Luis noted, is fit for a prelude to set for the tonic of the piece following it, by having the circle of fifths here, and the organ reminds me the prelude feeling as well.

The second one has interesting sound effects and more interesting harmonic progression. I like it more since it's in my favourite C# minor haha.

Thx for sharing and hopefully you will compose more!

Henry

9 hours ago, Henry Ng Tsz Kiu said:

Hello @Polaris,

The first one for, as Luis noted, is fit for a prelude to set for the tonic of the piece following it, by having the circle of fifths here, and the organ reminds me the prelude feeling as well.

The second one has interesting sound effects and more interesting harmonic progression. I like it more since it's in my favourite C# minor haha.

Thx for sharing and hopefully you will compose more!

Henry

 

Thank you for your reply.

I actually like the first one more than the second because the second sounds a bit disjointed to me. It was a failed experiment.

C# minor is one of my favorite keys, as well. I think I might like B minor a bit more, though. B minor is one of the darker-sounding keys but is also relatively whimsical and imaginative in quality. C# minor reminds me of the sunset.

Two more short pieces:

A two minute long music composition that I started and finished today:

Revised the composition above:

Dear @Polaris,

Well the dynamic for this is too loud......

I think you can have more contrast of texture and rhythm here, since the phrase structure and rhythm of the passages are quite similar all the piece. The texture is always homophonic or in unison, and maybe you can deploy some countermelody or different accompaniment other than the chordal one!

Thx for sharing!

Henry

2 hours ago, Henry Ng Tsz Kiu said:

Dear @Polaris,

Well the dynamic for this is too loud......

I think you can have more contrast of texture and rhythm here, since the phrase structure and rhythm of the passages are quite similar all the piece. The texture is always homophonic or in unison, and maybe you can deploy some countermelody or different accompaniment other than the chordal one!

Thx for sharing!

Henry

 

Thank you for your post!

I listen to music with the volume turned up to the thirties (out of a hundred), so I forget that most people will hear the music I compose at a much higher volume than intended. The only way I could fix that is if I reupload the composition with it set to a lower volume.

The main melody moves by three neighboring rhythmic values. I find that having it move faster or slower than that leads to either an excessively long or a far too short duration. I could use dotted notes, though.

The texture would probably count, like you say, as homophonic, although I did try to instill a certain amount of contrapuntal interest in the secondary melodies. When you recommend the use of countermelody or a different accompaniment than the chordal one, I assume what you're getting at is that there is a lack of multiple simultaneous rhythms and so-called non-harmonic tones used in passing, because in other respects there is some counterpoint going on in the composition. The truth is that while rhythmic layering is possible, it is very difficult, more difficult than most composers imagine, to use so-called non-harmonic tones appropriately. Used inappropriately, they will destroy the clarity of the musical texture. Clarity is foremost in my mind as a composer. It took me a long time to learn how to create a texture as smooth and yet harmonic as the one in the composition I posted. In the future, I will follow the slant of your advice and try to introduce more dissonance (which adds to the music's contrapuntal value) used in a judicious fashion.

Actually, the main problem with that composition was probably that the foreground melody, the melody that every harmony hinged on, was poorly written. Since realizing that, I've been trying to figure out how to write good melodies more consistently. One of the methods I tried was writing a strand of notes and then stretching them out and filling in the gaps between them. That doesn't seem to work very well. I've had more luck deciding on a rhythm first and then assigning notes to the rhythmic values. I'm still trying, though, to think of something better. Ironically, I find it much easier to harmonize a well-constructed melody than to write one myself.

I composed this in the middle of the night. It's pretty simple--a two-voice canon in 1:1 counterpoint, with a third voice moving freely--but I put every bit of ingenuity into it that I'm capable of at this point. Its main flaw is that near the end it gets too repetitive--an easy trap to fall into with a canon. Other than that, I think it shows that I'm on the right track with my theories regarding melody and harmonic progression. I'll just have to be careful in the future to inject more variety more consistently into the canons I write.

Canon in F# Minor:

Changed the instrumentation:

A recent composition of mine. PDF of the score included:

After composing a great deal of music without the benefit of the knowledge, it came to my attention that several pieces I had written contained instruments that were slightly out of tune with each other due to a failure on the part of the creators of the soundfonts I used. I therefore collected some musical instruments, carefully tuned them, and placed them in some soundfonts of my own making before using them to remix a number of my old compositions. Here are four pieces of mine subjected to this correction:

Composed today:

I composed the simple piece below earlier this morning. In making it, I utilized a certain method that I have used before to largely good effect. I won't give away the secret--I don't think anyone else has thought of this approach to composition--but I will say that it involves autocorrelation and the careful adjustment of the loudness of each note in every harmony that appears in the music. 

Here's an older piece using the same technique. It's a harmonization of a melody I found, so it's not entirely original, but I quite like how it sounds:

Another short harmonization: