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Thank you so much, I truly appreciate it! I have a feeling you'll like the rondo :) We did perform this first movement a total of 3 times back in 2016; I don't suppose it would be all that difficult to get some of the many talented musicians at our university to give this piece a more professional performance now. A couple of my fully tonal chamber pieces have actually been performed professionally - my _Adagio and Fugue_ op. 18 for string quintet even won a prize in a youth composition competition in 2017 (this is how Labelius and I met!) and has been performed a total of 4 times. Even as a composer of modern music who occasionally gets commissions, I'm very traditional: if you're into impressionism, you might like this piano suite that was premiered in October last year: ruclips.net/video/OqGXY3DRUOg/видео.html Haha, I've thought about it, but the problem with reddit is that there are redditors there...

@@niilokorsulainen ohh thats incredible!! its definitely nice to know that at least in Mainland Europe there are still those opportunities! So cool that you and him met as well! Yes, redditors indeed ):

Thank you! It was really just years of loving Mozart's music, studying it and thoroughly immersing myself in his musical language until it became second nature. Getting formal training in harmony and counterpoint was important too of course, as one cannot write convincing tonal music without knowing the rules. But this specific style is just something I've taught myself over the years. It was the reason I started composing in the first place: I fell in love with Mozart's music at age 14 and wanted to learn how to achieve that same level of beauty. My first attempts were total garbage (I only knew the very basics of theory and absolutely nothing about composing) but I had a good ear for melody and started gradually improving, especially after starting harmony and counterpoint lessons at age 15. It took about 2.5 years to get from level zero to writing this trio movement. It's been 11 years now, and I'm currently pursuing a Master's degree in music theory with Mozart-style composition as my main focus. While I was already quite familiar with the style before starting my Bachelor studies in 2019, these studies have of course helped deepen my theoretical understanding of it immensely, allowing me to further polish my skills and dive deeper into the sophisticated details of Mozart's language.

​@@niilokorsulainen Interesting! How do study his music, concretly? Do you just annotate the score, or do you also do other things like having a notebook where you write down the common ideas, or whole citations that you find particularly interesting? Also, how do you immerse yourself into his music? Do you just listen to it a lot? Do you have specific ways of listening to it (like reading the score at the same time)?

@SlowTrill To me, it's mostly about familiarising myself with the repertoire. I don't really write down notes or annotate scores (unless I'm specifically trying to analyse a particular aspect of it); I mainly just listen to the music while looking at the score so that, in time, I'll begin to remember more and more details of the piece and its construction. If there's a particularly fine passage, I might take it to the keyboard and memorise it so I can really understand how it works harmonically. But basically I just try to get to know as many pieces as possible, even on a surface level, so that I can have a better sense of what is typical or possible in the style. It's like maintaining your vocabulary in a foreign language: you need to have a wide variety of different formal strategies, harmonic schemes and melodic gestures at your disposal, and the more you've listened to Mozart's music, the more natural it becomes to think of these things on the fly. We have theories of form, and we have names for the various _schemata,_ but mastering the very specific and incredibly nuanced gestural language of Mozart really just comes down to having enough tacit knowledge from listening to a lot of his music over the course of many years.

@@niilokorsulainen Interesting! On my end, I often find myself too lazy to analyze the music of Joseph Haydn, who's the composer I try to imitate, so I mainly just listen to a lot of his music, much like you do with Mozart. However, I rarely read the scores. Reading your message has strengthened my belief that reading the scores more often could significantly improve my skills.

@@niilokorsulainen It's incredible that you're *allowed* to do a masters degree focusing on that. I'm pretty sure that wouldn't be allowed in the UK considering that practically all universities here believe that the past should stay in the past and that pastiche isn't valid. Good for you Niilo and best of luck with it, I'm quite certain you are already impressing everyone there haha

Thanks!

Thanks! He was also the instructor of our chamber ensemble and knew me well enough that he probably knew to expect something very classical from me. What he probably didn't expect was for me to bring this whole finished movement to our first one-on-one session (which was meant to be more like a preliminary check where you'd show him your initial ideas for your song and he'd give you tips on how to proceed). To be fair, the teachers completely welcomed submissions of all genres and seemed to like this piece very much, but it was sort of funny when we had the final concert and we'd perform this Mozartian chamber trio in the middle of generic pop/rock songs :D The next year, they added a new rule that submissions for the course must include lyrics, and I _almost_ wrote an elaborate Lied fantasy in Finnish national romantic style just to be petty but I ended up dropping that class because I was too busy with other stuff.

@@niilokorsulainen hahaha amazing story!

Thank you so much, this means a lot! I agree that there's something uniquely difficult about the Classical style. I guess it tends to sound quite simple on the surface level compared to Baroque, but especially with Mozart's signature style, there are so many little details and nuances you have to get right - the music needs to speak in this very specific way that's not easy to put into words. It's taken a great deal of trial and error to get here, and after 11 years of doing this, I feel as if I'm just now starting to understand it. This Agnus Dei in particular is nothing like Mozart's existing mass settings; it was deliberately written in a much more secular language, inspired above all by the sombre C minor slow movements in K. 271 and 364. I try not to write exact "copies" of anything Mozart wrote; I've borrowed the "concept" for some of these movements from K. 427 (perhaps most evident in the case of my "Quoniam" which shares its key, metre and general character with its K. 427 counterpart), but even then I try to do at least some things differently, and of course the musical material is always "my own" as much as it can be in a pastiche like this. K. 427, as it happens, is also nothing like Mozart's other mass settings since it's the only mass he wrote in his mature Vienna years (apart from the Requiem) and the only truly grand "missa solemnis" he wrote after K. 139/47a and 66. So, since I'm aiming specifically for the style and scope of a Great Mass in Mozart's mature years, it's really the only available model I have of what there already is. The purpose (and challenge) of this endeavor is to then imagine what else there could've been...

Thank you so much! It was a real joy to write :)

Thanks! I was neither consciously nor subconsciously aware of it, as I must confess it's not a work I know thoroughly. I mean, I must've heard it at some point in my life but I had no recollection of what its final movement is like. In any case, I don't think they're that similar apart from sharing the exact same melodic skeleton in the middle (mm. 2-3 of Handel's theme); the "head" as well as the overall construction of the subject were more closely inspired by the corresponding movement in Mozart's K. 66.

Thank you, glad you stumbled upon this project! The Kyrie has 3k views on musescore.com (where I've been posting since 2014) but I guess the algorithm gods haven't been quite as favourable on this site

Kiitos paljon! Ensimmäinen versio tästä aiheesta oli itse asiassa tahattomasti melkein identtinen tuon KV 66:n Cum Sancto -aiheen kanssa - sehän on fuugateemaksi melko pitkä, ja sen "juju" onkin se strettopotentiaali, jonka Mozart hienosti käyttää tuon fuugan lopussa. Tästä syystä myös päädyin hylkäämään sen, kun tuntui että tästä tulisi nyt sitten lähinnä sellainen kopio kun kontrapunktinen loppuratkaisukin oli niin sanotusti jo valmiiksi pedattu :D

Many thanks!

Todellakin!

No tottahan toki, kunnon old school stile antico -meiningillä!

@@niilokorsulainen Loistavaa! 😎 Oon aina miettinyt mistä johtuu, että juuri se Cum Sancto Spiritu -osa on monesti fuuga. Mozartin c-mollimessu, Mozartin Dominicus-messu KV 66, jopa Beethovenin Missa Solemniksen Cum Sancto Spiritu yrittää olla fuuga.

@@late8641 Se on kai aika vanhaa perinnettä, että nimenomaan nämä laajemmat jaksot (Gloria ja Credo) usein huipentuu fuugaan. Esim. Zelenkalla noita näyttäisi olevan paljon, ja Mozartillakin suunnilleen joka toisessa messussa on vähintään joku pieni fugato noissa kohdissa.

Thank you! :)

Joo, Bachin "Kyrie eleison" soi kyllä myös päässä tuota teemaa kirjoittaessa :D ja kiitän! Odotas vaan Qui tollis -osaa, siellä on lisää Bach-vaikutteita + riipivät pidätykset potenssiin 2

@@niilokorsulainen En malta odottaa! 😂

Kiitos paljon! Tulipas hyvä mieli tästä, tällainen palaute on syy miksi elän :D Silloin kymmenisen vuotta sitten kun näitä hommia aloittelin oli lähinnä kaukainen haave että pääsisi joskus samalle "virheettömyyden" tasolle Mozartin kanssa. Pedanttisuus on juurikin oikea sana, kun tätä projektia varten on tullut vieläpä syynättyä tarkasti kaikki nuotinnukselliset yksityiskohdat (miten Mozart käyttää dynamiikkamerkintöjä, milloin appoggiatura kirjoitetaan auki nuoteiksi ja milloin etuheleenä, millaisissa kohdissa bassoon merkitään "tasto" jne.) Kontrapunktiseikkailut jatkuvat tulevissa osissa...

Thank you! This is actually 100% musescore: I made a separate file for the audio (these are the new default sounds of MS4) where I can tweak dynamics and articulations as well as write out ornamentations if I'm not satisfied with the programmed playback. When I originally wrote this in MS3, I even did everything in one file by simply hiding the written-out ornaments etc. but in MS4 it makes more sense to do it this way since I'll usually need a separate file for other audio tweaks anyway.

Oh, that's so nice to hear! Glad you stumbled upon me again! :)