# Sonnet for Soprano Sax and Orchestra



## chee_zee (Aug 16, 2010)

Tried something with a smaller orchestra than what I have been using.


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## DrKilroy (Sep 29, 2012)

I have no time to analyse the score, so: has the form of the piece anything to do with a sonnet?

Best regards, Dr


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

This reveals your most basic weakness: in brief, that is all blocks without any confluence.

You write a tune, which is fairly self-contained, i.e. there is not much of anyplace for it to go. Your harmony is blockish, in that (without saying your or any music should be contrapuntal) it shows very little familiarity with or use of voice-leading. This has the change to, say, a harp part not showing as an interesting solo or coming from the background to the foreground, but instead has you dropping the other activity altogether and presenting the harp, which then drops out the moment something else is dropped in because you cannot track or control more than that. This makes the sound of 'a chunk of this,' then the ball dropped followed by a presentation of 'a chunk of that' as dropped in, and that is how you consistently proceed: this and your other works all have the same clearly apparent weakness.

Whatever the genre, it is a basic requirement (to call oneself a musician, performer or composer) of being able to fluidly handle up to four voices. Right now (your previous works shown also have this trait) you think of a tune, then maybe a harmony, or you drop the tune for a bit of a chord progression. Alternately you have a motif -- nearly as musically locked in as a tune, which you then repeat or sequence to death. This is most revealing that you only hear or think of one note at a time, then 'add' the rest, so the music sounds just like that... a scrap of a melodic idea or motif, then repeated and overdressed with instrumental filler.

You really would benefit from backing up to harmony 101 and doing the basic chorale sort of exercises, where the melody is but one part of the texture, the rest of the harmony moving in a way (voice-leading) to at least give an illusion of independence of parts. You are missing a lot of fundamentals without which what you write will have all the same weaknesses, regardless of how many or how few instruments you use.


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