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An Old Piece...


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Posted (edited)

So, I composed this piece a few years ago, and never published it. But I'm still posting it here just for the comments! (Note that "3 Piano Sonatas" is the title although i only wrote 1...) Sadly, I didn't add dynamics...

Edited by latebeethoven_addict
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Hello @latebeethoven_addict!

1st movement - this actually manages to be a good sonata form structurally.  The problem I perceive with it is that the transitions and modulations sound very forced (on account I guess of this being an old work of yours).  Another problem is that the ideas/themes have no unity and don't seem to be related to each other at all.  Very often you default to writing various arpeggios and scalar passages that have no point or substance (because they're not guided by a melodic sense or thematic significance).  Writing scales and arpeggios for their own sake is just about the most boring and pedantic thing a composer can do.  The fugato passages are also very poor on account of being short and based on unrelated musical subjects.  They also break down quickly as if you weren't able to sustain the fugal process for very long, so you just resort to adding voices which aren't related to any of the subjects or themes.

2nd movement - many of the same remarks from the 1st movement apply here.  There's lots of forced modulations and transitions.  The music doesn't breathe - there's scarcely any resting time for the listener to relax and feel like a phrase has finished before another one begins.  Also again there's lots of arpeggios and scalar passages just to fill up space.  It doesn't sound very dance-like or like a minuet and the rendering is very mechanical with no tempo changes to add any kind of humanization or ebb and flow to the piece.  There's no space between one movement and the next so unless you're following along with the score it's very hard to tell that one movement has ended and another has begun.  Usually we advise members to save their movements as separate files so that the listeners can freely choose which movement to listen to making it easy to start listening to the piece where they last left off if the piece is as long as this one is.  It's not very reasonable to expect members to listen to a piece that's this long in one sitting.

3rd movement - this one also suffers from many of the same problems as the previous two movements.  But it introduces consecutive repeated chords that change chromatically in ways that don't make any musical sense.  Another thing I haven't yet mentioned is that you often introduce very random sounding tuplets into your scalar passages.  To me, they don't make any musical sense.  If you were in some kind of Chopinistic rubato type of section where the tempo was controlled by a steady pulse in the left hand with a tuplet being played over it so that the ear can conceive of it as a type of rhythmic ornament then that would be fine.  But there doesn't seem to be a reason for your tuplets - they're another one of those things that you seem to do for their own sake or to try to introduce some musical interest.  Imo that's not a good way to do that.

If I had to choose I'd say my favorite movement would be the 3rd.  Thanks for sharing!  I'm assuming you've progressed and compose a bit differently today on account of this being an old piece, but I hope that you will still find something useful in this review.

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