Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Composer's Lounge one of mine

of only about a few... gotta do more writing. I know there's more in here.
http://youtu.be/TFEamOYVbf8
just gotta keep at it... -sousa

Nice job sousa. A lot of really interesting harmonies and textures here.

I would have liked to hear more harmonic development than just repeating the same eight-bar pattern throughout the entire piece. This is in effect a passacaglia, and, as Bach and Brahms both knew, they can be hard to pull off, and require great overall planning to avoid repetitiveness. You have such a well-developed harmonic ear; why limit yourself to a single repeated chord progression?

I found your right-hand textures and harmonies, though, to be rich and beautiful. Do write more, please.

-Jason

Yes, there are some nice things in there! But why put it on YouTube with the comment "...played hesitantly and a bit sloppily by the composer"? If you're not satisfied with the performance, practice and do it better before showing it to the world!

thanks for the words... I am ok with my performance of it,albeit imperfect. The idea of that ground bass was done completely with improvisation in mind, because one of my mentors wanted to possibly do this composition in one of his recitals as arranged for 2 pianos, and an a-moll deal like this can make for a vehicle built for plenty of improv. Yes, it wasn't completely in the fingers and the natural rit. that happened as a result of struggling to read my very own voicings caused a greater emphasis on the reharm-ed original 8 bars [at its conclusion] that added some more emphasis and tension upon my own re-hearing, thus justifying that previously unintended rit. One can tell that I can rationalize many things in this harmonically twisted brain- that's ok too, up to a point. I just try not to take myself so seriously all the time, and I am quite happy to poke fun at self. But yeah, practice will always be the way to go... I have a feeling that if I do it once again it will get edited and become something else entirely... time will tell. Thanks.

I enjoyed much about this piece. It has some of the most interesting harmonies I've heard composed by any PW member. I was going to suggest finding ways to change the texture. As others said it essentially a set of variations, but without much variation. This could be so interesting if you really worked on finding variations. Here you just find modest shifts in shading, nothing really different. It's OK as far as it goes, but do you really want your music to be just OK?

I really like what you have going on here. I have a lot of Ideas that I would like to suggest for you Nothing too significant (You have done all the hard work already, this is truly fantastic in my opinion) but just some thoughts that you may or may not find useful. I'll send you a PM.