caters Wrote:After a few years of piano playing I wanted to become a famous composer like Mozart and Beethoven. So I started by trying to write a symphony. But I was like "Where should I start? What instrument/instruments should I use first? What key signature? What time signature? etc." I had so many questions popping up in my head that I just couldn't do it.

So I thought about doing a piano concerto. At that time I was learning Piano concerto no. 21 by Mozart. I thought that if I use the piano as a base. I can figure out the rest of the orchestra. But I still couldn't do it.

This is when I said to myself "You might want to start big but really, you have to start with simple sonatas before you get to orchestral stuff." So I wrote the first movement of a piano sonata in Bb. It was written in Mozart's style(That is exposition in original key, development in a minor key, start of recapitulation in a different key than the original, end of recapitulation in original key.) When I played it, it also felt like mozart in that it was simple but complex at the same time.

I was then trying to write the second movement of it when I lost my composition book. To this day I still haven't found my composition book. Because of that, every time I try to play one of my compositions I either don't remember how to play it or it ends up being different every time.

I really had beethoven in my mind when this whole composition thing started since he wrote symphonies before he wrote piano sonatas and I wanted to be the same way.

Is there anything that can help me answer those musical questions easier and write orchestral pieces and not just piano pieces? Listening to orchestral pieces has not helped with it at all. It has just made me want to either play a piano concerto with an orchestra or play the piano solo transcription of the piece.

caters Wrote:Yeah, that is what I realized when I couldn't do a symphony or a piano concerto and is why I wrote a sonata instead(or at least tried to). I don't know why my composition book was lost though but it has been lost since I tried to finish writing the sonata. So I have an unfinished sonata somewhere but I have never been able to find it. And while theoretically I could turn notebook paper into musical paper or use plain paper and draw the staves myself, that is much harder than using a composition book, especially the plain paper method where you draw the staves yourself. I mean, I might understand "Okay, despite the wobble, this is Bb in the 2nd octave." or whatever it is but somebody else might mistake that note for a G or a D or some other note. Everything but the staves I can get to look right. If I try to draw a staff, I get wobbling lines and sometimes even crossing lines.

So yeah, I have an unfinished sonata that despite years of trying to find it, I can't.

Because of that, I haven't been composing much. If I hadn't lost it, who knows how many sonatas and other pieces I would have written during those several years. I might have written a symphony even if that composition book hadn't disappeared.