Prelude No.16 in Bb Minor 'Masquerade'

Hey everyone 🙂 I've been slowly plugging away at a cycle of 24 preludes. I got pretty slow with this (ending up only writing like one prelude per year for the past couple of years) so hopefully I'll pick up the pace now that I'm pretty close to the end (8 left to go!)

Bb Minor is maybe my favourite key signature, so it was pretty hard to decide what this prelude would be like. The theme is 'Masquerade', and I think the personality of the piece is quite hard to pin down, a mix of sarcasm and earnestness. Hope you enjoy! 🙂 this is my first piece I'm posting on this forum, but obviously feel free to check out anything else on my channel + especially the first fifteen preludes in the cycle so far, haha

Hello @TheGreatEscaper and welcome to the forum!

I love this Mazurka-like prelude you've written!  It has so much individuality and character!  It reminds me at different points of both Chopin and Prokofiev.  The chromaticism is very dark and ominous.  The fact that you play your own works is great as well (and apparently you've already played @ComposaBoi's sonata as well!  Great job and it's great to see this kind of interaction!  You're an asset to the forum!)  Formally the piece is a perfect little miniature.  The melody sounds like something out of another world when it comes in on the 7th and 11th of the tonality - it's very subversive and surprising harmonically and anything but ordinary.  And the accompaniment is like its own melody too that sets the stage for a very ghastly piece that would've been appropriate as a Halloween-themed piece.  Thank you for joining us and for sharing this prelude and I look forward to listening to the others!

P.S.:  Thank you for posting just one piece into the forum to let the reviewers get just a taste of perhaps one of your better pieces instead of suddenly bombarding the forum with a bunch of music indiscriminately!  You don't know how many composers do this and it really annoys the people who commonly review others' works here because we don't know which piece to listen to and it turns the forum into a dumping ground for works.