# Classical music album attempt



## Azural (Jun 10, 2012)

I have attempted to make an album of classical music (possibly in vain):


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https://soundcloud.com/azural%2Fsets

Check it out, yo.

Word.


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## StevenOBrien (Jun 27, 2011)

Not bad! You have a lot of potential as a composer. I listened to a few of your pieces, and I find your harmonic language to be pretty interesting, keep working on it and developing it.

My main criticism would be that you seem to have a lot of ideas, but do very little with them, and you also seem to tie ideas together that are great separately, but don't really fit together well as a complete structure. For instance, 14 seconds into "Laid to Rust", you have a rather jarring transition into your new theme, it doesn't really work for me. Perhaps look into studying the transitional sections of pieces by other composers, to try and fit your themes together better, and also work on developing your themes a little more, you can do so much more with them. Another example is in Disparation, you have a nice theme going, and then at 55 seconds, I just get a sense of "What's happening?! Are we onto another movement already?"

I felt things got a little overly repetitive at times, with the same phrase being repeated over and over in sequence. This is a great technique and can be used to great effect, but I feel you overuse it in places, and don't have enough related material around it to justify its use. I would also remind you to treat both the treble and bass as two separate melodies, not just one melody with accompaniment, I find there are times when you do have a tendency to do this.

Overall; Interesting ideas, but you need to work on developing them more and building whole, cohesive pieces with them.

Now, I may be being presumptuous, but I get the sense that you're very new to classical composition? If that is the case, I will leave you with some advice and educational resources to help you grow;

The most important thing you can do now as a beginning composer is to listen to your favorite composers as often as you can. An old technique for learning composition is to buy scores of your favorite pieces and copy them out in order to study how they've been put together, you might like to try this.

Look for a book called "Classical Form" by William E. Caplin, you will benefit a lot from reading it.

Robert Greenberg of The Teaching Company has done many wonderful audiobook music courses that you will benefit from a LOT. I can not recommend these enough for you: http://www.thegreatcourses.com/tgc/professors/professor_detail.aspx?pid=3

Leonard Bernstein's Harvard lecture series might also interest you: 




I wish you luck with future efforts and hope that you will share them with us!


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