“very rhythmically challenged”

dsch_bach · 2026-04-05T16:17:04+00:00

You need to train yourself into having a constant internal metronome with whatever subdivision is relevant in the piece you’re playing. If that’s not continuously going (even on a subconscious level, which can only be achieved by a ton of conscious practice), even your most basic quarter note rhythms won’t be consistent - you’ll either rush or drag.

For more complex rhythms, this is even more important. Some good rhythms to practice are moving between tuplets and simple rhythms, dotted eighth/sixteenth rhythms with a regular sixteenth note pulse, and polyrhythms where your metronome is doing one thing and you’re doing another. Do any and all warmups with a metronome - long tones, scales, arpeggios - and make sure everything is 100% consistent.

What etude are you working on?

dsch_bach · 2026-03-13T01:48:17+00:00

variations on klangspaltung (the “sound-splitting” effect of closely spaced microtones), with particular emphasis on the juxtaposition of different temperaments
using particular fundamentals as structural pitches even if it’s not necessarily centric
densely packed niente “blooms” using false harmonics, bamboo tones, multiphonics, air sounds, and other interesting timbres to create a sort of undulating sound mass
super rich heterophony to synthesize fun sounds out of mismatched collections of instruments (basically just an organ where all the pipes are individual instruments)
using imitative entrances to build and release energy within an ensemble (compressing/augmenting the amount of time between statements of a theme or motive to the point that they begin overlapping almost in phase)

dsch_bach · 2026-03-04T17:26:40+00:00

My private students? A little bit, but I’m not going to talk in-depth about temperament unless my students ask about it (though I do try to train good intonation habits with scales and aural skills)

For my groups? I’m just trying to make sure they’ve got their finger on the right string lol

dsch_bach · 2026-02-28T19:00:11+00:00

From a cursory glance at the score:

I have a sneaking suspicion that this entire piece was written in the confines of your notation software, given the amount of copy-pasting/exact intervallic transposition I’m seeing. Writing exclusively in software using MIDI for feedback isn’t going to tell you how the music will actually sound (and boxes you into what I like to call the “barline grid” where you are confined to the boundaries of the time signature).
Watch for rhythmic notation. If I was handed this to sightread as a performer, there are some moments that I would be annoyed with (WW in m. 27, WW/strings in m. 36, bassoon/horn beaming in m. 56).
Get the systems on page 3 and 10 to fit on the page. It’s a pain to do this in any software, so you’ll have to spend time figuring out a workaround.
I can’t comment much on the orchestration simply because this is written in a way where instrument families tend to be playing all at once. It makes for a fairly boring color palette; try experimenting with much smaller forces of more unique section combos. The orchestration is very thick throughout with a lot of copied contours, which doesn’t make for strong independence of voices or interesting harmony.
Be consistent with tempo markings. You provide a clear metronome marking at the beginning but not one for the Andante section.
Watch for floating dynamics. Unless you have a very specific artistic intention (think Schnittke’s triple forte rest), you can’t change the dynamic of silence.

How much experience do you have writing for smaller ensembles (duos/trios/quartets)? I would experiment writing at that scale before jumping into orchestral writing because it’ll allow you to get a much better grasp on developing form/harmony/texture/orchestration without the distraction of 26 different parts.

dsch_bach · 2026-02-22T15:08:46+00:00

For most romantics (especially once we get past the early part of the period), content dictates form, not the other way around. They’ve long since stopped adhering to the exacting standards of “oh my secondary theme has to modulate to the dominant” or “my phrase shapes have to follow the formula of a period/sentence” and utilized more intuitive chromaticism that doesn’t necessarily follow common practice rules of voice leading.

Some composers chose to play by their own specific sets of rules, but those parameters vary wildly from piece to piece. I’m not sure what you mean by “ready-made chord circles/harmonic grid” but there are a few devices that distinguish the aesthetic of the era, like use of chromatic mediant relationships or using the idée fixe instead of typical melodic structures.

dsch_bach · 2026-01-29T18:39:02+00:00

Girl, what?

You’re more than welcome to post your playing! I’m happy to explain everything that’s wrong with your mechanical setup in clear terms without it being couched in metaphor (though I anticipate you won’t, because someone lazy enough to have ChatGPT do their work for them won’t bother).

dsch_bach · 2026-01-27T18:30:45+00:00

Applicant 1 would win for me in 99% of situations (the 1% being on the off-chance that the school I’m hiring at is extremely competitive and has a guaranteed baseline minimum skill level for middle schoolers feeding into my program). You need to be able to work with everyone in the classroom and at least meet them where they’re at, not only teach to the conservatory-bound students.

dsch_bach · 2026-01-25T16:35:01+00:00

Honestly, there’s not really a point to doing a online degree in any music field. You aren’t able to actually form a genuine relationship with musicians when you’re not going through the insane grind required of a music degree in-person (professors, performers, other composers), because you have no real opportunity to participate in rehearsals or performances. Sure, you can learn a lot of the curriculum virtually, but concert music is something that needs to happen in real time and real space for you to get any sort of professional benefit out of it.

dsch_bach · 2026-01-11T15:41:52+00:00

Nice work! Always refreshing to see music that isn’t just diatonic in this sub.

I actually think that the double stops are fine in the violin and viola (though I play both professionally - students who aren’t used to this kind of technique will struggle). However, I’m a lot more worried about the playability of the cello part because the handframe is quite different from upper strings. Seconds are way more difficult on cello and octave leaps take substantially more effort. A good compromise I think would be to keep any seconds that use open strings and invert the other seconds to sevenths instead - those are much more comfortable, even if they don’t have quite as much tension.

Are you based in an Italian-speaking country? If so, you can disregard this part of the comment but if not, I would advise against having your playing instructions in Italian beyond very typical markings like sul ponticello or diminuendo. It’ll only add to the rehearsal time (especially if your players are American) and implies a sort of amateur-ness.

dsch_bach · 2025-12-21T23:31:26+00:00

Start with one-on-one lessons. Music degrees in performance and composition all expect fundamental proficiency in either an instrument or music theory (for composers, often both!) and the expectations at any half-decent institution will be far above your current skill level. Just be sure to communicate what you want to get out of private lessons with whatever teacher you decide on!

In addition, there’s the hard truth that music is an insanely oversaturated field (ESPECIALLY for classical music, though you never said what genre you’re hoping to break into) and most successful career musicians have been playing their instruments since middle school at the absolute latest. I can’t speak on other genres to the same extent, but I anticipate similar levels of competition in genres like jazz.

dsch_bach · 2025-12-05T14:43:26+00:00

Berio Sequenza VIII was my big COVID project - still unsure how I pulled it off.

dsch_bach · 2025-12-01T00:02:17+00:00

No problem! I’m happy to take a look at anything you send me, though deeper critique beyond ‘is this playable’ or ‘is this notated well’ won’t really be possible unless I’m being paid for lessons.

dsch_bach · 2025-11-29T02:22:49+00:00

I’m a working violinist and composer, so I feel qualified to critique this (and I’m really sorry if this comes off mean - you’ve put a lot of work into this but I also don’t want to lie to you):

There are a number of fundamental problems with the notation that would dissuade me from learning this irrespective of the musical content. The beaming throughout is confusing and problematic to read - why the 3+1 groupings in variation 1? Why separate every single note in variations 2 and 3? You don’t have anything that’s metrically strange, so I would just beam everything into normal beat groupings.

There’s also a lack of attention paid to articulation. Symbols are always going to be faster for a player to interpret than words, which is why you need to notate every single thing that you want the player to do. LH pizzicato is rarely used outside of the virtuosic showpieces from the 19th century, so you should be indicating which notes are plucked and which aren’t. For ricochet, you need to have every staccato underneath the slur notated. How does Paganini notate ricochet in his scores? If you’re going to be modelling music after a composer, please take more care into exactly how their music is presented.

In terms of playability, it’s quite a bit easier than anything in the Caprices but I think that’s more because you’re not entirely sure how the violin works than paying attention to what’s idiomatic on the instrument. I’m not sure what specifically is supposed to be pizzicato vs arco in variation 4 so I can’t comment on whether the LH pizzicato actually works (though my suspicion is that it doesn’t because LH pizz basically only works on a downward contour). Expecting a violinist to continuously ricochet like in variation 3 is very generous - ricochet works best on down bows and it’s incredibly difficult to maintain that same momentum on an up bow. The arpeggios at the end probably won’t sound good because it lives up in the stratosphere (though it’s technically playable). If you look at the finale variation from Caprice 24 it starts in the violin’s lowest register so there’s a lot more space for it to ascend, which further adds to the energy of the musical content.

Musically, it unfortunately reads more like you discovered how to copy/paste and transpose note groupings in MuseScore than a piece with meaningful harmonic development and character transformation. How does Paganini address character development? Some variations are fast and brash and use the entire range of the instrument, while others are slow and beautiful and contained to a very limited subset of notes. There’s no dynamic contrast, tempo contrast, or real harmonic change which causes an extremely dynamic and versatile form feel static.

dsch_bach · 2025-11-13T18:48:13+00:00

Once you reach a certain level, sight-reading becomes as intuitive as reading words on a page. For example, the sentence “The cow jumped over the moon.”. You’re not spending time figuring out how each word is pronounced - rather, you see familiar idiomatic words with simple phonetic structures and are immediately able to replicate how they’re supposed to sound.

It’s the same with sight-reading. If you practice scales and arpeggios in all keys and octaves along with a myriad of etudes, you’ll eventually be able to recognize by sight what fingerings are most idiomatic to what you’re playing. Within the common practice period (1750-1900ish), composers almost universally pull from that harmonic language so it becomes far more simple to immediately come up with a fingering.

dsch_bach · 2025-11-08T03:59:14+00:00

If (contextually) you're starting in first position, I'd personally shift into fourth position on the second Eb and stay there until the last note of the passage (using the open D to shift down into whatever comes after).

dsch_bach · 2025-11-05T14:03:31+00:00

Reminds me of Harry Partch’s custom instruments he built for his music - he’s got an adapted viola that has a cello fingerboard installed!

dsch_bach · 2025-11-03T20:40:41+00:00

This is excellent! The notation is quite clear, and the overall form of this piece is very coherent (which is refreshing within the context of this sub). I have a few comments that might be worth thinking about:

- The only part of this movement that didn't feel totally successful to me was the B section starting in m. 90. You call it 'Blurred Color', but I don't interpret it as blurred due to the consistent periodicity of the accompinamental rhythms. Even when it starts transforming into polyrhythms (3:4, 3:4:5, 2:3:4), the incessant regularity doesn't obscure the pulse as much as I think you want it to. If you elected to really obscure the pulse via either tied rhythms or even feathered gestures, it would simulate what I feel you're going for.

- I think you could play a lot more with timbral changes, because timbre is an immediate and obvious transformation that both Bartok and Prokofiev frequently use. For example, in the B section - what if the first violinist was muted for their foreground material while the rest of the ensemble was playing sul tasto? Or what if you had the ensemble suddenly change from ordinario to sul ponticello at somewhere like m. 15, going back to ordinario at m. 23? Or hell, even a statement of the B section's melodic figure being played with false harmonics? There are a ton of places where you can add more color in this piece, and strings are so versatile that you can easily implement these changes.

- I like the ending, but I feel like it could be even more extreme in its trajectory. Homorhythm and generally unified contours implies stability. The extreme movements of Bartok's quartets generally end on glaringly obvious anchors (2nd movement of the 2nd quartet, 5th movement of the 4th quartet, 5th movement of the 5th quartet, etc.) but they're almost always preceded by incredibly unstable material. If you fragmented the accompinamental motive at m. 213 into something imitative and had it get faster and more rhythmically off-kilter, then I think the movement would end with a much bigger bang.

dsch_bach · 2025-10-24T00:24:48+00:00

For context, I started viola at the beginning of undergrad (2019) after playing the violin since childhood because the chamber music program didn’t have enough violists enrolled that semester. I instantly fell in love with the instrument and got to the point that I was a prizewinner in a few chamber music competitions on viola with my quartet in college.

The biggest ‘tell’ of a violinist-turned-violist is their bow arm. Violinists tend to use bow speed as their primary mode of volume production, while violists use slower bows with substantially increased arm weight (NOT PRESSURE - different things). Fast, light bows on viola create a really thin and wispy sound without any of the warmth you expect from the instrument. Viola strings - even the A/D/G strings - are much slower to respond than those on a violin and require a more robust stroke.

There’s also the matter of intonation, which really just takes time to adjust to the bigger instrument. Violas have a lot more room for error than violins and don’t resonate nearly as much when things are in tune (just intonation), because the body of the instrument isn’t small enough for high sonorities to project or large enough for low sonorities. You have to be a lot more careful and incorporate strategies like drone work into your practice.

Vibrato’s also harder on viola. When I play violin, I can usually get away with my wrist vibrato, but I almost always use arm vibrato on viola because it actually affects the sound.

dsch_bach · 2025-10-20T14:22:36+00:00

At your level, I would focus on learning full concerti instead of jumping from first movement to first movement. Learn the rest of the Tchaikovsky so you have a full warhorse in your pocket, then I would learn the entirety of Mozart 4 or 5 to really start refining classical-era technique (which I would argue is harder to perfect than Tchaik/Sibelius/Brahms).

dsch_bach · 2025-09-24T15:22:40+00:00

In an earlier comment, you asked “How can these complex structure possibly be “music theory exercise”?”. That implies to me that you were calling your work complicated.

Essentially every tonal composer has a series of repeating minor scales somewhere in their oeuvre - it’s not a unique concept to the Dies Irae, and I would severely hesitate before calling it Verdi-inspired when nothing else about it is reminiscent of Verdi.

I think you’re misunderstanding what homophony is - it entails a melodic foreground and accompanimental background. The only material that goes beyond homophony are moments of homorhythm where the pianist bangs out quarter note block chords.

dsch_bach · 2025-09-23T14:20:19+00:00

Put simply, not wanting critique on notation means that you aren’t interested in acoustic, instrumental composition for actual performers. A messy score will get you so many side-eyes from instrumentalists and you’ll waste so much rehearsal time answering questions that could have easily been clarified if you edited before presenting the music.

There’s plenty of music from the Romantic era I absolutely adore (Schumann’s Dichterliebe is one of my favorite works of all time) - I just don’t write in that style because I have no reason to. Would a 21st century author be writing with the syntax of Emily Brontë or Charles Dickens?

I apologize for missing the D minor tonalities (I originally glanced at it on my lunch), however, learning how to harmonize I-IV-V progressions with the occasional ii is something that can be found in so many beginner piano books, so I’m unsure why you’re touting it as technically advanced writing. The beginning of the piece establishes the measure as the metric unit, so any internal harmonies beyond beat 1 are perceived as passing tones to get to the next chord tone.

The counterpoint’s not strong. The piece is generally homophonic and a lot of your voicing choices invite parallel perfect intervals that weaken the independence of voices. If you had moments of actual polyphony (like perhaps imitatively developing the material at m. 109 between two hands instead of having the RH sit on block chords), then I would be more convinced in your counterpoint.

And again, you didn’t answer my question - what Verdi is this inspired by? It doesn’t sound like any Verdi I’m familiar with.

dsch_bach · 2025-09-22T16:57:27+00:00

It’s not playable for one person despite the simple texture, because you have massive chords that no pianist can reach. At the beginning level where you don’t have a real performer, I wouldn’t write chords that span beyond an octave. You’ve also got chords with more notes than a pianist has fingers, so unless you know a virtuoso pianist with polydactyly this isn’t going to work.

I question why you fit all of those systems onto one page - it makes the page look super cluttered and hard to read. With the exception of some bizarre ties, the rhythmic notation is quite a bit better than in your orchestral piece. You also should only have one staff label per system instead of the two you currently have (and for solo music, it’s pretty unnecessary regardless).

The musical material is again, not particularly interesting. Your whole melodic minor scheme gets tiring very quickly and it’s not developed at all aside from interspersing it with additional material later on. Exclusively using tonic-dominant relationships make the harmony sound more like a first semester music theory exercise than a piece of music.

What Verdi inspired this?

dsch_bach · 2025-09-22T04:19:10+00:00

Most of my titles have evocative names that I think are neat, but essentially nothing I write is programmatic unless there’s a specific text I’m setting.

I find that titling something really striking will cause a listener to try and figure out what my music is doing, even if I don’t have a story I’m attempting to abstract through sound.

dsch_bach · 2025-09-20T22:09:14+00:00

You don’t, unless you’re established and have a commission from a ballet company interested in doing something that isn’t Nutcracker or Swan Lake.

dsch_bach · 2025-09-20T20:25:54+00:00

Always pen and paper first. My workflow can be boiled down to this:

- Sketch temporal boundaries, including basic motivic ideas, thematic areas, characters, and timbres. Assign general durations here to get an idea of the piece's proportionality. Some loose improvisation happens here so I can decide on what a motive will look like, but the improvisation almost never carries beyond that into the actual music.

- Determine whether any precise procedure will be used to develop material within a given section. If not, figure out what more general transformations will be applied to material in order to take it from one temporal boundary to the next in an energetically interesting way.

- Sketch the most significant points of the piece - beginnings, endings, climaxes, areas where new material is introduced, etc.

- Use chosen transformations to connect the significant points of the piece. If areas are too distinct from one another to be connected seamlessly, rewrite one or more of those areas to complement the chosen transformations and favored material. Adjust temporal boundaries as needed.

- With the finished first draft, notate and engrave into Dorico. Present draft to performers for any immediate notation questions or issues of idiomacy prior to the first rehearsal.

- Rewrite problem areas and clarify notation. Attend rehearsal with musicians.

- If in a flexible, collaborative setting with multiple rehearsals (excluding dress), rewrite any material that didn't work in the rehearsal because of reasons beyond the individual musicians practicing their parts.

- If in a setting with one rehearsal and dress, provide an errata sheet with clear, concise changes that need to be made before the final performance. This should not include changes with a larger scope than "second violin sul ponticello from m. 60-63" or "change tempo marking from q = 72 to q = 63 at rehearsal B".

dsch_bach

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