Rules of reviewing:

Please only write about works you have performed in public. Exception: If you are a teacher and are writing about pieces you know very well for beginner and intermediate players.

Please only write about works that you genuinely like, and please be generally positive. Instead of writing a bad review, simply do not write about a piece at all.

Please do not write reviews anonymously, or under a false name, or use multiple accounts.

If you make substantive changes or corrections to your review after publishing, please log these at the end of your review with a brief explanation.

Please do not review work that you have written.

This site is subject to editorial oversight, which will hopefully never be required.

You must rate the piece on a scale of 1-5 stars. Here are the rating guidelines:

A piece you think is a good piece worth playing is 3 stars. As a guide, roughly 60% of your reviews (6 out of every 10) should fall here. This is not a bad review at all. We wrote this to explain the system, but really think NY Times Restaurant reviews. A 3-star review is a positive thing. The rating system is contingent on the 3-star review being something we all feel comfortable giving and receiving.

A piece you really like is 4 stars – e.g. one of your favourite pieces. 30% of your reviews should land here. 

5 stars is reserved for best of the best. Please do not hand this out unless you absolutely must. As a general rule, for every 10 reviews you write, allow yourself 1 5-star review. 

In general, we don’t encourage anyone to review anything for below 3-stars, simply because we don’t encourage reviews of music that you don’t really like. 2-stars would be a good piece with some reservations. 1-star is a non-recommendation.

If you don’t want to use the WordPress site to enter in your review, you can send us reviews as text in any format – this includes as an email, pdf, doc or google doc or open office doc.

STEP ONE: Register

Before you do, please register as a user on our site. We will give you Author status and when we enter in the review we will credit it to you.

Please note that there is no anonymousreviewing on MoMuRe.com.

Click on Register and fill in all of the fields. Don’t forget to check the box.

You should receive a confirmation email from the site. Click the link in it to confirm your account and then 

That’s it! You’re registered.

STEP TWO: Compose text

Your review. Write about the piece. Tell people why you like the piece. Talk about the challenges in the piece, the best moments and the things that you would want to know before picking up the score. Browse the site for examples of reviews if you want a guide.

Notes to the performer (optional)

I like to include bulleted points about learning the piece. e.g.  Particular challenges and strategies to overcome them, hints on learning the piece, tips about ways to interpret or think about the piece

• instead of nails i like to use candles for the preparations
• b. 37 I like to take this part with the left hand.
• first movement – think of this as a slow dirge. when i play it i don’t move my body, and i try not to blink.
• gavotte – i really voice the RH here a lot. it annoys my roommates.
• Watch out for this spot here. It is easy to miscount the 9/55 bar. I like to divide it into a 33/77 and then a 14/971 bar.
• bar x has a mistake. it should read y.
• i play x section at 154, not 112.

Your rating

Rating from 1-5

Difficulty

Rate the difficulty of this piece on a scale of 1-12 as per below:

RCM Level (Grade 1-10), ARCT/Undergrad, Grad

Information about the piece: (you don’t need to fill all these out)

Title:    

Composer:  

Country:  

Duration:

Date of Composition:

Publisher:  

Purchase Link: link to where i can buy or obtain the score

Commission:

Dedication:

Premiere:

Performance History:  (fill in as many as possible. Include yourself!)

• Bulleted list of performances
• Format is Name, Date, Location
• Greta Kraus, 1 January 1981, Walter Hall, Toronto, Canada
• Or
• Lois Marshall, 1988, Italy

Discography:  (optional. Include yourself!)

• Bulleted discography
• Hyperlinks and/or small thumbnails here if you’re comfortable or just a link or just text/info. We include, where applicable, links to the record label or wherever they can buy the physical media, plus spotify/itunes/amazon links

Relevant Links: (news articles about the premiere, links to other articles about the piece, etc)

Instrumentation Notes: (optional)

• Special equipment required or electronics
• Specific instrumentation required. I.e. nord electro, yamaha wx7, etc.
• Percussion list if applicable

Composer/Program Notes

If you have non-copyrighted program notes, or links to program notes, these go here.

Also any text written by the composer about the piece in general.

Articles specifically about the piece can also go here. For example – Tovey essay about Waldstein.

Composer Info

A bio of the composer. Even better, a url (web address) for an online bio. Composer website url.

Score Samples

It is great if you can send a few samples of the score. We don’t post full scores unless we have the explicit permission of the composer. One page per movement, or a few for the entire piece, or whatever you can manage. Optional.

 

Media

We can search online for appropriate media, but help us out if you can. We like to post:

At least one video or recording of the work. We encourage reviewers to present their own work, but multiple interpretations is great. You can send us URLs to vimeo, youtube or soundcloud, or dropbox/icloud/wetransfer/googledrive/hightail us mp3s and compressed video files.

Composer photo – if you have a good one, send it, but we can also grab one off the web or from the composer.

Any links you want included. Where applicable also indicate where you’d like them to be located in your text.

First time author? Welcome!

Please send a photo of yourself and a short bio. We’ve been using first person bios, but whatever is easy for you works just fine. 50-75 words is plenty!

If you are comfortable with wordpress, or want to get comfortable, feel free to login and enter it in directly to the site.

You’ll need to register, confirm your email and then email me to get upgraded to author status.

The template for the review page is located here. Please use it. Copy it from the doc and paste it into the VISUAL editor (not the Text(HTML).

Reviews are subject to admin approval before publishing.