Thanks for the critique! A lot of the music I'm writing these days under the SleepFacingWest moniker is with the intent of being useful in video games and animation. My friend Kevin (of incompetech.com) criticized some tracks I wrote for him recently saying they were too active and dramatic to be used as underscoring. He maintained that if someone dropped one of my tracks in a video of a dog being funny, and all of the sudden there's a shift in the music but the dog is still being funny, the music will kill the video (and thus be useless). Since then I've been trying to figure out how to keep music moving forward without making use of dramatic shifts, melody changes, or heavy orchestrational tricks like I normally would. One of the solutions I tried with this piece was doubling of extant instruments so the music would change slightly in texture, but not so much that it would steal attention from possible on screen action. That said, as you pointed out, this might not be enough in and of itself. I still need to experiment more to find a balance between music that can stand on it's own but also be useful as scoring material.

The track is loosely programmatic meaning that events in the music correlate specifically to the story written above. A lot of flourishes indicate scene changes where she falls asleep, or suddenly moves from a starving artist in the streets to a famous painter in galleries. The angular piano solo is her eccentric/exotic suitor trying to awkwardly (much to her amusement) woo her. As such, some of the repetitive quality of the music is intentional as it mirrors the mechanical themes of the story (see the piece "Gretchen am Spinnrade" which uses a whirling motive to parallel a young woman spinning yarn as she fantasizes about love). All intent aside, if it doesn't work, it doesn't work. I fully believe that music shouldn't require an explanation to be good. I'll try something else next time.

I agree with all of your critiques with the exception of the conclusive end. The story ends with her waking up at the clock strike (the orchestral chime) and realizing that it was all just a dream. There's an indication that she has been working on the machine that will create paintings for her (the unfinished clockwork man slumped in the corner) but hasn't really touched it since she has a job to do. I sort of wanted this piece to end inconclusively as it suggests the story goes on, but whether or not she is actually able to realize her artistic dreams or gets stuck at her day job remains to be seen.

As always, thank you for the thoughtful comments. This is very helpful!

thanks!