Chills... (Is this any good?)

Hi to all musophiles!

Just wanted to share my latest piano work, which was improvised around three chords.

These were C major 7 sharp 11, E minor +6 +9, and B minor +9.

The first two are from Howard Shore's score for "Lord of the Rings", and the last one is Ravel's favourite chord.

I haven't put my phrasing slurs in yet; but it's otherwise maybe finished?

Not sure if it's any good; or if I should just bin it?

Have also included an earlier version (#34) that had an awkward passage one minute into the piece.

I liked this material; but couldn't find a way to integrate it into the piece. It sounded rhythmically weird, no matter how hard I tried to make it work.

Thanks for listening,

Alex

Chills #40.pdf Chills #34.pdf

Edited yesterday at 07:25 PM1 day by Alex Weidmann

Alex, I enjoyed the interesting harmonies; however, I felt the structure of the work to be a bit loose. I had difficulty following a coherent theme and I felt the work didn't have an arch to it to carry me through from the beginning to the end.

Mark

16 minutes ago, MJFOBOE said:

Alex, I enjoyed the interesting harmonies; however, I felt the structure of the work to be a bit loose. I had difficulty following a coherent theme and I felt the work didn't have an arch to it to carry me through from the beginning to the end.

Mark

That's fair.

Hello,

It sort of sounds like a mysterious ice/cave level from a video game. As a side note, do you need all these time signature changes? Maybe just lots of fermatas, I don't know. I guess you probably need at least some of them.

It feels like good background music.

The chords are very pretty sounding :)

The LH feels a bit clumsy sometimes...but not like in a bad way. I suppose it would be clumsy to get around in ice or a cave.

So yeah, those are my thoughts. Overall, enjoyed it.

Thanks Grant,

I think the icy quality and low dynamics make it sound a bit like Koechlin; though that wasn't deliberate.

The clumsy feel of the LH is probably down to the frequent fermatas, and time signature changes.

I seem to have a problem sticking to a regular beat in my compositions, and end up tying myself up in knots! Then having to make loads of adjustments to make the rhythms sound natural.

Maybe I should try to give the piece more structure; though I do already have a repetition of the opening theme in the middle, and near the end. So it's not completely without form.

Edited 1 hour ago1 hr by Alex Weidmann