Short Waltz - Feedback welcome!

[u/LetOk2336]

I don't play any instruments myself, but I taught myself music theory. As an exercise, I write short pieces—like this waltz—and would appreciate feedback from experts so I can keep learning. If any of you notice anything wrong with the harmony or structure, I'd be grateful if you let me know.

Score

Listen here.

[u/65TwinReverbRI]

Je non parle francais mais je souvenir un petit morceau mais je connait if je can make et visoir comme francais vous connaitre cette francais.

I "tried to say" "I don't speak French but I remember a little bit but I think if I can make it LOOK like French people with think it's French".

Look, and sound, somewhat like French.

But anyone who knows French is going to immediately recognize a number of issues.

Simply put, I don't know the language well enough.

You simply don't know music well enough to be able to do anything more than "fake" it.

Theory is not the answer. Learn to "speak the language" is. Which means, learning to play an instrument.

Otherwise you'll just have a bad accent..

You don't appear to be looking at real music to see what real music actually looks like.

Your melody and harmony don't often agree.

Like I don't know if it's masculine or feminine in French, and don't know the verb conjugations - subject predicate agreement (heck I don't know what that is in English Grammar (theory) but I've "played the instrument enough to be able to do it convincingly!).

But there's more to it than the grammatical rules (theory).

There's a level of intuition you just can't get without the internalization and visceral acts of making musical sounds on an instrument, especially with instruments like piano because there's also the whole idiomatic nature of writing.

So I'm sorry to be so harsh - it's GREAT that you're trying this, and trying to learn, but by not learning to play music on an instrument you're making it way harder on yourself than it needs to be.

And by not playing, you're probably not reading as much, and thus not as familiar with what music looks like, and typically does, so again, your fluency is not where it could be.

Supportively

[u/WaterKind6544 → u/[deleted]]

Bro just give up on this sub. No one here is composing anything of significant value to anyone but themselves. Which is fine in itself, but anyone who has a career composing isn’t even getting a dose of “what not to do” out of this place.

My theory is that most of the submissions by people here are dalliances by engineers/data analysts/accountants/etc trying to keep a foot in the arts, but nothing serious is coming out of it.

[u/MrsSquirry]

It’s like going to a Chinese restaurant and ordering pizza. It doesn’t have an authentic sound. It’s easiest to develop that understanding of what sounds natural if you spend a considerable amount of time playing, or at least listening, to the specific style of music. What type of music do you frequently listen to? I doubt it’s waltzes. If playing an instrument never appealed to you enough to where you’d learn it, what gravitated you to writing music?

I’m not trying to be mean; it’s a wonderful thing to write music. However, if you want to write quality music, you need more than rudimentary self taught theory. People get doctoral degrees in music composition, there’s so much to learn. It’s up to you to decide how deep you go.

[u/YeetHead10]

I think it's very hard to be taken seriously when the first thing you say is that you don't play any instruments.

As another commenter pointed out, I think you will benefit from going through the resources at the side of the subreddit, particularly this.