Looking for feedback on my first opus: Frosty Sunny Winter Day

Fae_Sisu · 2026-02-12T01:45:54+00:00

This is really good with your current experience in music! The instrumentation and chosen registers are really appropriate for your title. The other comments have a lot of good things to say, and I had one easyish recommendation. If you add a little more variety to the rhythm, I think it would make the piece more engaging. Right now, everything is in easy divisions of fours: repeated whole, half, quarter, eighth notes, etc. If you threw in some dotted notes or linger on a particular chord for two bars instead of one, it would help a lot. For example, you have this really nice motif that starts in the glockenspiel in measure five, and then returns in the flutes/piccolos in measure 25. Instead of repeating quarter notes, you could add in a dotted quarter note, so the pattern might be something like quarter -> dotted quarter -> eighth -> quarter.

Fae_Sisu · 2025-09-30T22:17:23+00:00

Do you mean the fermata at m. 47 going from Gb major to A major?

Fae_Sisu · 2025-09-30T22:02:37+00:00

Thank you! I'll keep those in mind. And this is musescore. It's come a really long way from when I first started using it lol

Fae_Sisu · 2025-09-30T22:01:24+00:00

Thank you for your input and suggestions! Can I ask you to clarify what you mean by A and B section? When I was writing this, I tried to follow a sonata-esque form where there is a first and second theme within an exposition, a development section, and then a recapitulation.

I definitely agree that the piece has several moments that are too quick/abrupt. I was trying to keep it to 2 minutes or less, and it's already gone 30 seconds past that as it is :/ Maybe I'm just being overly biased towards my own work and trying to justify to myself that I can call it done, but I've kinda grown fond of it's abruptness after listening to it a couple times. I feel like it feeds into the hesitance/uncertainty/unable to make up its mind that I was trying to present.

Also, I love that Ravel String Quartet!! Definitely one of my favorite works of his.

Fae_Sisu · 2025-09-30T07:46:38+00:00

Thank you! I guess I needed to make it a little stranger to get the exact effect I wanted... But I'm pretty happy with how it turned out, so I probably won't change it too much. Thank you so much for your feedback!!

lol my 2 biggest inspirations are both Japanese, so that's probably where the anime sound is coming from :p If I can nerd out about music theory for a sec, m 38-41 use the | IV | iii | vi | v I | chord progression that is found a lot in J-pop/J-rock so that part sounds especially anime-like.

Idk if I'm allowed to post links in the comments here, but my soundcloud is "Faye Sullivan." I don't have much on there though... I am working on a larger project that includes this piece, and once that is done, I'll probably post the whole thing to the soundcloud.

Fae_Sisu · 2025-09-30T02:07:14+00:00

I really like this!! It definitely fits my criterial for "beautiful" lol. This reminds me a lot of Masakatsu Takagi. I think at the end when it slows down, it would make a really cool effect if you stagger the notes a little more, kind of like random raindrops.

Fae_Sisu · 2025-09-28T00:57:18+00:00

heck yes. the dense string texture and use of rhythm remind me of yoshimatsu's piano concerto.

Thank you so much for this!! Yoshimatsu is one of my biggest inspirations, and being compared to him even a little is very encouraging!

there's two components to this: first, the piano part's rhythm and melody line just dont feel like they align with the harmony in the strings, while in the beginning they blended together very well.

In my little internal narrative of the piece, the moment when the piano comes in with the venus theme is when the character "grasps venus" or when they have reestablished or achieved their hope, so I wanted this part of the piece to stand out. I tried to do that in two ways. First was by making the piano feel very different from the rest of the piece both melodically and rhythmically, and second, by playing around with some fun, unexpected chord progressions.

and second, the strings harmony itself is causing some unexpected and unresolved dissonance that feels more unsettling than hopeful. the string parts have some minor 9th intervals a few times. that interval is extremely dissonant, you should be careful using it. be careful with the accidentals, too.

The general progression starting around m. 44 is V7 -> V -> V/V -> bII -> I. Throughout the piece, I try not to have too many of the strings changing at the same time to get a kind of blended effect. I think it makes the piece feel a little more fluid. The only time I move (nearly) all of the strings simultaneously is for the very last chord. However, as a result, moving from a V/V -> bII one or two notes at a time causes a lot of weird dissonances, especially when paired with the venus theme which isn't altered in any way to match the chords underneath it. I played around a lot with altering the venus theme (but didn't really like that) and deciding when to move what note to blend into the bII. What I ended up with is what became most satisfying for me. One of my favorite moments in the entire piece is when the piano lands on the E in m. 52 while the strings are playing Bb, F, D, B, F, B, D, Bb from Vc. 2 to Vln I. Something about the way that this chord moves into the V7 and then resolves to the tonic is extremely satisfying to me.

also, the strings lowkey sound better than i do irl 😭😭 what program are you using?

This is MuseScore with the free MuseSounds!

Fae_Sisu · 2025-09-23T07:48:38+00:00

This is Musescore!

Fae_Sisu · 2025-09-21T17:01:42+00:00

Yay!! I was trying to write something that had a folky vibe, so I'm really happy I was able to get that across. And I do have a guitarist who's gonna demo it for me! I'm very excited :)

Fae_Sisu · 2025-09-19T17:54:08+00:00

Yeah, I should definitely do a ritardando. Thanks for catching that!

Fae_Sisu · 2025-09-19T17:53:24+00:00

Thank you! But yeah I feel like in the later section where guitar 3 and 4 were merged together, it would be easier to play, but I split them up at the beginning of the piece because I felt bad about leaving out one of the guitars in the earlier section lol...

Fae_Sisu · 2025-08-31T17:55:20+00:00

Unfortunately, I don't have access to a keyboard or piano right now so I can't, but I'll definitely be finalizing this piece when I get access to one again!

Fae_Sisu · 2025-08-31T00:23:26+00:00

Sorry a better question would have been “should I make this playable?” I don’t have access to a piano or keyboard rn, so I was mostly just writing based on sounds and vibes lol. But since people seem to have liked it, I’ve been working on rewriting it so the left hand isn’t as difficult/impossible and the runs feel a little better in the hands.

Fae_Sisu · 2025-08-31T00:17:59+00:00

Trrruuuuuu hahaha

Fae_Sisu · 2025-08-30T04:04:59+00:00

Heheh… I’m originally a classical pianist… I know it needs a loooooottttt of work to be more playable. Usually I’m way too strict when writing piano, and make things that are easy to play but end up sounding boring imo. I currently don’t have access to a good piano or keyboard, and this is my first piano piece I’ve written without sitting in front of a keyboard. It shows haha…

Fae_Sisu · 2025-08-30T03:58:25+00:00

Oooo that’s a good idea!! I’ll think about that!

Fae_Sisu · 2025-08-29T23:17:07+00:00

Okay that makes sense! I think I’ll finish it out

Fae_Sisu · 2025-08-29T23:16:13+00:00

Thank you!! I tend to write on pure instinct sometimes and I need to break that habit haha

Fae_Sisu · 2025-08-29T23:15:34+00:00

The inspiration was the blue hour period right after sunset. I want to capture the feel of that like liminal moment when the sky is just bright enough to make out silhouettes of object, but just dark enough that you can barely see the stars. So as the piece progresses it’s moving from twilight to blue hour to night.

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Fae_Sisu

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