I just finished the first movement of my first String Quartet. I'd love to hear your feedback.

Hi! I have some initial comments, however wanted to ask about the score PDF to place specific feedback on the score. Would you be able to share?

Comments:

I thought overall it was good; however, there are a lot of ideas throughout. Even with the structure chapters on YouTube, I found it hard to grow attached to one idea as it felt you would change texture every other phrase. Outside of this, the main thing that caused me pause is their overall engraving. You have various moments of duplicate information like Arco texts, dynamic markings on rests, a lot of tempo instructions, etc.

With the constant tempo changes, it felt like some of them were for midi playback so you can make sure a ritardando or transition felt right in the interpretation. If you give a tempo marking, we also expect to see some sort of adjective, or if it was a general “increase tempo” instruction, to see words like “Piu mosso” or “sempre mosso”.

Good work!

Hello MK_Piano,

Thank you for your response.

I agree that there are a lot of musical ideas throughout the movement. The introduction, for example, is a continuous flow of ideas that eventually leads to the slow march-like melody. I believe the A theme returns effectively in the recapitulation. As for the B theme, I reused some motives from its first appearance, so it is perhaps less obvious that the fast E-major section represents the B theme.

I must apologize for the improper use of the tempo markings in the score. Those were mainly intended to improve the MIDI playback and would certainly be revised before a live performance.

I really appreciate your feedback, and I will definitely work on these points.

Thank you!