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.

@TheGreatEscaper: 

This prelude highly reminds me of Rachmaninov piano writings.  He often uses writes in a manner that colorful and chiromantic.  He loves to use his free forms pieces to either as program pieces "Little red riddle hood" or collection preludes "Prelude in C# minor". Either way, he loves to create stories through music.  Even Debussy and Ravel noticed and wrote preludes were full of colorful harmonies and rich melodic materials.  One does not have to same amount as Bach! He wrote two sets of 24 in every key followed by fugues.  After that, every composer followed him. Bach must be the role model for us (there were others, but Bach started it).  I disagrees.  I loved how the dancer in this prelude enters and creates her musical moment while she dances to court musicians playing. Again, that is something that Rachmaninov would do. He wrote musical moments, too.  As @PeterthePapercomPoser , it does feel like Mazurka. Chopin wrote many of them!  

P.s. I hope I do see more of your works. Please take your time. No rush. 

Thankful for sharing,

Kvothe.