over-developing?

Hey Lauri,

Nice melodic piece. Well as it comes to my own taste and understanding of development ( I come from this silvestrian / Williams kind of school), I say that your piece develops just a little. Development has not only to do with changing melody notes but more importantly to change moods also. You are more or less in the same mood for the 4 minutes which feels after a while jarring to me. When I develop musical ideas I try to feature them in a new look. A very basic example could be a melody in major which is later featured in a minor context. Probably you try that here too, but it is not that clear. The use of different modalities can help. Also what I encourage you to do more is to feature surprise harmonies. A common technique here are modal inflections. I could make you a long list of techniques to create more interest which leads to more development in your track, but here are some:

quite vs. Loud
fast vs. slow
uplifting happy - dark / sombre
intervallic vs. stepwise motion
diatonic writing vs. modal writing (interchanges)
etc.

Al lot these aspects doesn´t show up in your piece and they are imo integral parts and techniques for developing a piece.

Also what Doug already mentioned, you never leave the midrange with your melody, it is pretty much left hand lower notes and in the midrange the melody on the right hand. When you would orchestrate it would be difficult to make it interesting because you stay in the same range all the time which limits the way of orchestrational instruments and therefore choices to create color changes. I like the melodic piece, and I feel after 3 minutes everything is said. You can even wrap that up even a little. I neither don´know your background nor I know your goals in composition, but to answer your 1st question: This piece is def. NOT over-developed at least in my opinion. In the end: Go by what you like to write. If you think that your piece is fine, there is nothing wrong with it at all. Nobody needs to learn classic filmmusic development techniques to be a succesful composer in the media.

 

You changed indeed some things which is good, I enjoyed some sections. Though some parts you need just to well develop more and build them more up. Over all I would say the structure of the whole piece could be still wrapped up. I know it is not easy. Just focus on the important things. THrough modulation and interesting orchestration you can keep simple motives alive and last longer. One other suggestion: Write short pieces, lets say 2 minutes or something. Say the most important things in that time. Build a structure like:

Intro v -10 seconds (optional)
A Section (stated twice) - Your motif - 30 seconds
B Section (Stated twice) - Motif derived from A Section but with a different harmonic - 25 seconds
Bridge 10 seconds
A Section (2x) - intensified - 30 seconds
B Section (Stated twice) Take ideas from the first b Section but go other ways, introduce a slight new idea for it - 30 seconds
Finale - 15 seconds

= 2 1/2 minutes around

Thats already challenging shit to work on..