"Three Peculiar Dances" for Piano

[kalospiano]

Hello! Here's a suite of three piano pieces I recently composed.
The notation is a bit messy as I suck at transcribing and I don't really use professional software, but I hope you'll appreciate the music.
Cheers!

[ted]

I found these very enjoyable. You obviously take your music seriously and do a lot of listening, as I can discern various influences. Changes involving unrelated minor chords, if not overdone, do have a peculiarly disturbing effect at times, but aside from this I cannot hear much that I would term peculiar. From your Youtube, you seem to have played quite a heap of music in five years, good for you. The only suggestion I can think of is that you could expand your rhythms beyond the easily written ones, perhaps improvise more, but you are doing very well anyway.

[kalospiano]

Thank you very much for your input, Ted.

I'd say the "peculiar" in the title refers more to the general mood of the pieces, which might not be regarded very much as dance-y in a modern sense: I doubt any of my friends would think about dancing if I made them listen to this music, but I did have dancing in my mind when composing it, in the sense of some slow, romantic choreography or ballet. I guess I might as well have called them "short dances" instead. But it does also refer to a few - to me - unusual chords or key changes and especially time signature changes, which I believe are not a common occurrence in dance music.

When I started playing the piano, five years ago, I was actually hoping to reach a much higher level by now, but soon found out that it was difficult to practice as much as I wanted while working a full time job without sacrificing sleep or social life. Tough luck! I appreciate your suggestion to practice more complicated rhythms and to improvise more, it's definitely something I intend to do.

Thanks again for listening!

[ted]

...I was actually hoping to reach a much higher level by now, but soon found out that it was difficult to practice as much as I wanted while working a full time job without sacrificing sleep or social life...

It depends what you mean by "higher level". If you just mean finger dexterity, that is easy enough to acquire if you set about it cleverly in ways which do not make heavy demands on your time. It will come more slowly than for someone who has all day to practise but it will come. On the other hand, if you mean musically advanced, in terms of being capable of expressing your own ideas, then I tend to think you are in fact considerably advanced as it is. You clearly have much of interest to say with whatever technique you have, which is a great deal better than the far commoner state of having a colossal technique and nothing to say with it. I would be quite happy in your position after only five years.   

[ranjit]

I found your pieces quite enjoyable! I would typically not call a piece a 'dance' if it doesn't have a clearly dance-able rhythm to it (such as a waltz). Your pieces, I think, abstractly evoke dance, but aren't the "dances" themselves. However, this is subjective.

I found your first piece especially nice. It might have played into a personal preference for that kind of aesthetic. If you're interested, you could make it sound a bit more "dark" by adding a lot of motion in the bass registers using bass octaves, chromatic scales, etc., similar to Rachmaninoff or Liszt pieces.

In the left hand in the third piece, you are more-or-less repeating every measure twice. This gets predictable, and eventually you stop listening to every even measure because you know what is going to happen. I felt that it might be a good idea to switch it up, maybe with a question+answer phrase, an arpeggio, four measures of each, etc.

If I may ask, how do you compose? Do you have a particular form in mind, and to what extent do you use your knowledge of music theory?

[kalospiano]

Thank you very much both for your kind words, I really appreciate it.
By "higher level" I mainly meant technique-wise, which I think might also help me better express myself in my music. I hope I can improve that with the help of a good teacher once the lockdown is over.

Ranjit, I'll gladly accept your suggestion to vary the left hand for the third piece, particularly in the last part, I think that's a very good idea and I'll work on it.
As to the first piece, I'd prefer to leave it as it is. I believe sometimes beauty is in simplicity and I feel that a thicker left hand would obscure the delicate melody. If I think about pieces like Satie's first Gnossienne or Tiersen's Comptine d'Une Autre Eté, I wouldn't want to change a note of them, even if there isn't that much harmonic or melodic variety.

As to your question, I normally don't have a form in mind, except once with a minuet I wrote. But otherwise I focus more on the mood I wanna give my piece and see where I get from there.
For instance, with Sad Dance I casually found the left hand line while noodling on the keyboard and then decided to develop the melody over it, using the arpeggios as an intro, adding a quick incursion to Major, etc.
With Dance of Life, instead, I wanted to have a jazzier and dreamy feel, so from the start I knew I wanted to use pentatonics, major and minor sevenths, occasional sixths and ninths. Also my intention was to describe a fickle, unpredictable subject, so to that end I knew I needed some key and time signature changes. From those premises then I just went with the flow and built the whole piece.
Hope this answers your question. Sorry about the prolixity!