I recently wrote a piece as an experimentinf polyphony. It is a piano piece set in rounded binary form. However, it does not preserve the classical I - V - I chord motion that is typically associated with it. The harmony is basically a progression of thirds.

I don't have the ability to save a PDF of my score so I used the windows snipping tool to capture the score (one/two bars at a time talk about painstaking.. ) I have since created a video with a midi rendering of the piece.

I am not really happy with the second theme, I tried a few different things, but it still sounds crunchy to my ears (the second theme starts at measure 25 which is about :56 in the video)

I am attaching the audio file and here is the video:

http://youtu.be/wI3zXUyGskQ

Always a nice idea to venture into polyphony. Some parts of it have tuneful simple counterpoint, and there are some echoes of figures which make things interesting, but in general its greatest problems are frequent pauses that don't seem to carry much weight (e.g two semibreves in bar 34-35), which kills the movement of the piece abruptly (even though it might be augmentation of the previous phrase), and the ending, with that sudden turn to A major, seems too abrupt (though the bar two bars before that is a nice turn or sorts). I also think the enharmonic spelling might be a bit strange in your youtube example and that some of the harmonies seem out of place (e.g the C# in bar 7)... otherwise it's a worthy effort. You should work on the voicing in your score too.

Hi Jonathan,

Thanks for taking the time to listen and comment.



Yes, homophony and monophony are fun, but I thought I would give polyphony a shot! Why not? There were some parts to your Sonatina that seemed to have a little polyphony if I remember correctly?



I agree, the semi-breves do seem somewhat out of character, when in the context of thick textures, for example the more dense parts of the first theme. And about the ending, it is a sharp transition, I agree, but I thought it would go unnoticed as a lot of the piece does not follow strict voice leading principles, of restrictive/conservative tone movement. Apparently it did not.



I wonder what you mean about the enharmonic spelling of c# in bar 7? I don't see any c-sharps in that bar, but I think you mean the a#. I could be a b-flat, but I think in this context everything should read in sharps. That's my take, Eddy may say otherwise He's given us all feedback on our pieces hasn't he Andreas has also taught me a thing or two. He calls it "enharmonische verwechslungen" Regarding the voicing, I finally found a feature in my program that allows me to fiddle with the una corda pedal. As you hear there are parts in this recording that sound quieter than others, those are the parts I used the virtual una corda pedal.

Thanks again for listening and your feedback,

Riley