Contemplation No.5

This original piano piece has very simple chords and melody, with the goal to create a soft, intimate and peaceful mood.  Yet also with some underlying uplifting feeling and emotion.  Simple, with 'stirring' quality if you know what I mean.  Hope I achieved that.  Let me know.

2019:
This is an improvisation I made in 2019, recording live into my DAW without following the DAW metronome.  So I had it in midi but measures do not follow a metronome beat.  I couldn't record to a metronome anyway because there is much intentional rubato in this piece.   

2026:
Now I wanted to use a better piano sound and that was easy- just play the midi file with a good piano vst.  The piano you hear is the UVI Model D Piano vst playing the original midi file I improvised in 2019 (with some minor note improvements) 

However what was not easy is creating the score!  Which requires quantized notes.  So I had a lot of work remaking every measure to have midi notes quantized, not for playing, but for the score.  So the score does not play the piano but does show the accurate notes of the midi file that is playing the piano.

Comments and suggestions welcome!

score available for purchase at:

https://www.sheetmusicdirect.com/se/ID_No/1956655/Product.aspx

Follow score pdf:

A beautiful piece.
It doesn't seem very complex, but it's very well structured (which, for me, is one of the biggest challenges). And the dynamic control is exquisite.

Hey @MichaelJohn !

What a harmonically rich, bittersweet piece! It's full of longing and emotion and full of tons of creative harmonic choices. The harmonic identity also seems kind of ambiguous to me. The piece clearly starts in D minor and that's corroborated by the key signature, but you end in F major which is a nice hopeful ending! But I actually feel that most of the piece is in G Dorian. Very interesting - and you use plenty of F add4 chords which I really love the flavor of as a kind of backdoor cadence into G minor. Thanks for sharing this gem and I am grateful that you managed to create a good looking score as I really was able to appreciate the piece much more and deeply with the score. Thanks again!

Hello @MichaelJohn

A beautiful piece with a calm, serene mood which I very enjoyed to listen!

I must say that I did not spend many attention – when reading the score – to the harmonic structure of the piece (as Peter did), because I was really captivated and fascinated about the detailed performance concerning articulation, dynamics and tempo! I would love if every piano piece presented here at the forum had that quality.

I especially like the accentuation of the melody which is interwoven in the triplets, so that even if the score looks „simple“, I had the impression that were more voices involved as one could think from a short look at the score.

I just did not understand completely your comments how you created the score and recording:

The recording is a live recording resulting into a midi file which you have now reproduced with a better piano sound. That’s great, so we know that you are not only able to compose or improvise that piece but also to play it in that intense and expressive quality. But what about the „quantized notes“? I can’t imagine what a software would produce for a „score“ from a live recording with such an amount of rubato, fermatas and accentuation …

I’m asking such silly questions since my approach to compose is quite opposite. I first write the notes down (even not as a „paper composer“) but using notation software and produce my score and midi files from that input. And, yes, I’ve always the intention in mind how I would interpret it on the piano. Therefore I always maintain two scores, one to print out and one for the recording with a huge amount of additional articulation, dynamics and time changes to achieve a satisfying recording result. And I must admit, it would a hard work to encode that amount of interpretation you gave your piece!