# CWS library style

Confirmed by Craig on 6 September 2026.

- Straight solo piano for now.
- **Velvet Estuary, CWS Op. 2**, is the preferred reference: gentle, flowing and impressionist. Carry forward the sweet melancholy, dreamlike quality, warm isolation and independent voices.
- For Op. 7 onward, Craig asks for more languid, dreamy, free-flowing and jazz-inflected writing, with the atmospheric freedom of Clair de Lune as a broad reference. Avoid mechanical repeated accompaniment and default four-bar symmetry. Compose longer arcs, tied suspensions, varied phrase lengths, spacious bass answers, and gently resolving sevenths/ninths. Keep the harmonic centre audible. Use deliberate phrase rubato and voicing; random timing changes are not a substitute for musical phrasing. Preserve earlier works while developing this direction.
- Craig subsequently asked for increasingly experimental writing and a progression beyond the original beginner/intermediate framing into advanced repertoire. From Op. 21, progressively develop richer jazz harmony, rhythmic displacement, irregular metre, wider registers and more demanding independent lines. Later studies may explore tuplets, cross-rhythms, denser counterpoint and more adventurous tonal relationships. Retain dreamlike flow and emotional warmth; difficulty serves the music. Document each new piece's technical demands and review actual gestures rather than applying the old easy-study span/leap ceiling universally. The four-page and 256-onset limits remain.
- Keep **CWS / FIRST STUDIES** at the top, the two-word title and **CWS Op. [number]**.
- Omit subtitles, the dedication/name line and descriptive playing notes throughout the score.
- Retain standard musical notation, including metronome marks, dynamics, slurs, hairpins, fermatas and conventional tempo changes such as *poco rit.*
- Replace the descriptive footer with a single numeric composition stamp: **YYYYMMDDHHMMSS**, in **Australia/Sydney** local time. No separators or explanatory text on the score.
- Keep the original composition stamp across revisions. For these first three pieces, **20260906182116** records the first saved score time, 6 September 2026 at 18:21:16 AEST; it is a documented proxy for composition time, not the time of this formatting revision.
- Keep the score within four pages. Use the provisional ceiling of 256 sounded pitch onsets, counting chord pitches and repeated attacks separately, with tied continuations counted once.
- For future audio, use a little warm room reverb while keeping the moving voices clear. The current three listening demos retain their original faint reverb; the new rendering default is slightly more audible.
- Continue the CWS opus sequence for new pieces. Revisions of an existing piece retain its opus number.

The renderer reads the corresponding settings from `data/library_style.json`. Score format version: 0.2.
