Mountain Air

Hey John!

Nice to hear your work. Lovely piece, and piano sound throughout.

You know it is at a high enough level of sophistication that for 95% + of listeners will never have anything to say other than "it sounds nice".
Congrats. You have a high level of musicianship and I hope you post more.

Best wishes

Doug

PS. If you have thick skin I will post my criticism below. I don't know you personally, so please don't take any of my comments as such.
What I wrote above is true. I just also will give you my personal opinion on what I did not like


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This is not my favorite style, but you do it rather well. Sounds like a theme song for a radio show called "All Jazz Matters" if you get my drift.

My prejudgement aside, I felt like you got stuck in a corner and needed to find a way out.
The first 100 seconds, up to the Dbmaj7, work really well. The problem comes after this.

Really you have 2 options (I feel). 1. Continue trying to milk this one idea for everything you can, or
2. have a secondary theme that gets developed.

You are stuck in the middle IMO. If you take route 1, then I felt two minutes is enough. While it sounds pleasant it also sounds forced.
At some point, the music needs more tension to feel an internal reason for continuation.
One idea is to explore only second or third inversion harmonies. Another would be the classic pedal bass which you can extend long
modal ideas on and then resolve in your coda.

If you take route 2 then you need more time. However, you will have more options.
I liked the idea you seem to have stumbled upon at 2:05. The I maj to minor iv. in F.
However, this does not get the same development or attention or mixed with our first theme.

I wanted more of this theme, and for it to appear earlier, and interact with the opening theme.

Just my two cents. Of course my stylistic leanings might be very different and I encourage you to follow your own muse.

 

I loved the first couple minutes of this piece. This is my all-time favorite progression, and I've heard it and thought about it so much over the years that it's usually cringe-city when I hear a new piece that uses it. But not here, especially the placement of the run up to the Bb in the Gm, and at the end of the phrase where you resist the usual thing where it would go Ab -> Bb and instead go back down to Gm before resolving back to tonic (probably getting some of the details wrong here). Love it.

I agree with Doug, though, and felt a little lost after 1:40. It sounds really nice, but I wasn't as gripped until it returned to the main theme at the end.