Meditation on the Fragility of Life

This is a composition I wrote for my composition class for an assignment. We were to write a piano piece in simple ABA form. This is what I ended up with. The first few measures were written minutes after I had heard about the death of a friend in a car accident. All critiques on the piece are greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance!

-Adam

Meditation.MID

Meditation.MUS

Meditation on the Fragility of Life.pdf

Interesting just at the beginning. The agitato was out of place. I would have composed a simple Requiem instead of a Sad-Climatic-Sad piece.

Beautiful, yet pointless to me. I think you are kind of happy because of your friend's death by looking at the agitato part.

Anyway, take into account your feelings about a specific problem, don't mumble with contrasts when you don't need them.

It wasn't bad. I actually liked the middle section more than the first section. I think that's because the first section didn't have much of a melody. It just had a baseline that followed the chords. The chords weren't very interesting either, because a lot of times (an example being on bar 15), you're not resolving the chords properly. In bar 14 you have vi7, V, IV, V, IV and after all that it REALLY wants to go to G major even if just for a short while to relieve the tension you've created but instead you go to V again, then IV again and then iii! It just doesn't sound right. My friend used to do a similar thing when we jammed. He would write out a chord progression and every time he got to the V chord he would make sure then next one wasn't the I.

Anyhow, the middle section was a lot better. It was more alive, it sounded more pianistic, it had more melody and it was interesting to listen to.

I actually found a melody to it, but it doesn't repeat so you cannot think about a "defined" one. It's not very memorable, too.

I liked the second part, but it was out of context. If you hear it apart from the main idea (death of an old friend) it's wonderful.

Well, I know that if the context of the piece were ONLY my feelings directly after I found out about someone's death, the B section would certainly be out of place. The piece wasn't specifically about the death of my friend, or I would have titled it "On the Death of a Friend". Only the first few measures (basically, the majority of the A section) were written after I found out about his death. I composed the remainder of it over a period of the next two or three weeks. I had already defined my original material. I just had to develop it and give it a contrasting section somehow. I felt like I needed a fast section that built up to a thundering emotional climax to contrast the A section's rather dreary material. A whole piece written with one texture and one tempo is rather boring, don't you think? Not only did I have to think about what the original idea needed; I had to think about what the music itself needed to keep from becoming repetitive and dull. It's a difficult balance sometimes.