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music My Midterm Project in Berklee - String Nontet with SFX

This is impressive work man. Everybody's a critic I suppose, but it did feel like sometimes the dissonant harmonies were pushed further than necessary to achieve the effect. I liked the cascading layering of the rhythmic motifs. Just personal taste, but I would have probably liked it to resolve the dissonance more often. My main feedback would be that you are using your compositional skills too much, that may sound strange, but what I mean is that there is less contrast for the listener when you are "on" all the time. It's good compositional work for sure, I just would have liked it more if there were more dynamics and harmonic contrast.

I'll give an example of a composer handling this type of contrast well - strong emotive dynamics, vibrant dissonant sections bookended by conventional melodics that provide strong contrast. Note how Stravinski kind of uses dissonant harmonies in stages, off, half on, full on.


then here is another example, this time from the father or perpetual dissonance, but you'll see a similar compositional technique here, with the utilization of emotion and dynamics to make sections of the piece "stand out" in terms of the chording.


And here's a piece that I think overuses dissonant harmonies, I met a lot of composers in theory school, and this is what most of them sounded like.


It may not come off this way, but I liked your piece. I'm just trying to give you helpful feedback, because I know when you put this on the internet most people are just going to hit the thumbs up button, and it's hard to learn much from that. Closing note, almost every aspiring composer I know underuses volume dynamics. Listen to the great classical masters, and you'll be shocked by their dynamic range in comparison to recent stuff. They are constantly getting very quiet and very loud.

I wish I had time to compose like this these days, it sounds like you're having a lot of fun!
 
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