First two: "Ephemeral Parade" and "Dance of Irresolution (revised)"

[MM Coston]

The first one on the track is a new piece that is very vanilla sounding to me. It is followed by a revised version of Dance of Irresolution with several issues fixed including the ending. The score is quite bare at the moment. 

Note: The audio sounds good on my headphones, weak on my laptop and terrible on my phone.  I'm not sure how to strike a happy medium there.

These two are the first compositions for a little ballet I want to write.  I will add more detail in a comment. Ephemeral Parade is a very simple composition with a small twist.  I don't think its very good but its in its rough stages still so its hard to tell. 

I would like to hear any positive feedback and impressions or suggestions.

[MM Coston]

Details:
The tentative title is "Imminent Moments That Pass Time". So far I've independent ideas for 9 scores but will only give information relevant to the two in this thread.

The setting is a parallel universe circa the 1890s.
Costume and set notes: The people are 3/4 normal size so the set must be 25% larger than real life. Also, the clothing is fanciful and oddly-decorated as a sort of souped up American Victorian Era fashion that never existed.

The lead character is thus far only known as "Darling". The ballet focuses a lot on her over-active imagination but hopefully will have an underlying philosophical theme, as she eventually will have to decide if it is better to be right or be kind.

Note: While mostly ballet, I intend to include other elements sparingly such as vocals.

Music:
Ephemeral Parade is an opening act that also answers the question: "What would it be like if a chamber ensemble hosted their own mardis gras parade?"
Aside from technical audio issues, there are at least two potential problems. Between 1:00 and 1:15 there might be too many staccato notes?
Between 2:33 and 2:56 it might need a more prominent melody?
Also, I'm not certain the Cor Anglais can play the octave skips.

As for Dance of Irresolution, I am content with it at the moment since having fixed all the issues.

If anyone has any resources or information regarding how dynamics affect which harmonic overtones are prominent, please let me know.

[Ingo Lee]

MM -  This sounds good to me, the audio is fine and you have nice elements of melody, harmony and rhythm.  The problem for me now is that it all seems to run together.  You have little in the way of tempo changes or dynamics and the harmony seems very static in the first piece and not too exciting in the second piece.  Other than a change of key and a small difference in tempo the two pieces sound the same. There is rhythmic variation but not enough to grab my attention. It's not that this sounds bad, it sounds good actually, but it's just kind of boring.

[MM Coston]

Ingo, thank you so much for letting me know about the audio quality and weak parts of the composition. I had been concerned that it might be too homogenous. There are many new things for me to learn before I can get these pieces to an acceptable level. Instrument combinations are definitely one thing, and I see that you are right about the harmonies. That would explain why it sounds plain to me. My ideas about harmony have been changing and I think I need to begin planning harmonic development as much, if not more than, the other details.

[Ingo Lee]

I don't know where you are in the study of harmony but here are a couple of sites that start with basics.

https://www.musictheory.net/lessons/57

http://openmusictheory.com/triads.html

One exercise I like to practice is to choose a common chord progression, maybe even a pop song, and then write a theme and variations on it. Repeat the progression several times with a different melody each time and then fill in the other voices below it. Piano to start with so you can focus on the chord sounds. Then add chord extensions and substitutions.

https://d83mezhuhqi17.cloudfront.net/53/60/71/536072?Expires=152382...

Then maybe some modualtions

http://www.harmony.org.uk/book/modulation_basics.htm

But of course we know, rules are made to be broken!

MM Coston said:

Ingo, thank you so much for letting me know about the audio quality and weak parts of the composition. I had been concerned that it might be too homogenous. There are many new things for me to learn before I can get these pieces to an acceptable level. Instrument combinations are definitely one thing, and I see that you are right about the harmonies. That would explain why it sounds plain to me. My ideas about harmony have been changing and I think I need to begin planning harmonic development as much, if not more than, the other details.

[MM Coston]

Revisiting reharmonization exercises will definitely be useful once I manage to determine which harmonic framework I want to use.  My current delimma is in choosing and organizing harmonies outside of functional harmony. I've given more detail here

 http://composersforum.ning.com/m/discussion?id=773368%3ATopic%3A495799