I'm composing a duet with a friend for an english project meant to reflect the story of Romeo and Juliet. The duet is for flute and alto saxophone. I have a few measures to begin with, and I'd like to get some advice.

This was made on finale 2003, so if you want the full effect you should copy and paste it and then reinsert the dynamics and articulation.

If I might ask, what emotions or images are you trying to evoke in these first few measures?

I laughed out loud when I saw "rit........ar.........don......do......."! That's really funny! I don't think I've ever seen it written quite like that...

As for the music itself, there's far too little to really be able to give you much advice. So far it works alright.

Alright. I wanted to get make sure the the last two to three measures didn't seem tacked on. I'm looking to make it seem like the saxophone is the Montagues (Romeo) and the flute is the Capulets (Juliet) later in the piece. The first few measures were just supposed to represent 'chorus' telling the prologue. I'll post some more soon.

Yeah, it's a nice opening. No issues there. The minor arpeggios make it sound a bit like Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bI9akyHz_wc

I have the next section up. It's being used to represent the rivalry of the families/the first parts of Act I Scene 1. I made a couple changes to the rythm in the beginning. It was a suggestion from the saxophone player doing the duet with me.

Mmmkay, what I would recommend is to do some counterpoint beyond this call and response thing you've got going. I think that works well for the intro, but it gets kind of old. Give us a melody and have one of the instruments accompany it with an arpeggio or counterpoint. (Hopefully, do both at some point.)

Once I have it finished, I'm going to create a modified (better) version. We don't have much time until the project is due and don't have much time to change things. I'll be happy to apply your advice to the rest of the piece and the new version though.