# 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.

- On 7 September Craig requested a bounded batch of seven pieces, Op. 124–130, with rhythmically distinctive minimalist LH repetitions/arpeggios and dreamy jazz swing. This specifically permits deliberate ostinati, superseding the earlier avoidance of repeated accompaniment for these studies. Keep the shared warm aesthetic; the phrase “without our aesthetic” is provisionally read as “within our aesthetic.” Use written rhythmic values for the lilt, preserve score/audio timing, check account usage after Op. 126, and stop at Op. 130.

- Craig then authorised twenty further works, Op. 131–150, asking for new styles and experiments, more chords and some pieces made entirely of chords. Develop distinct chordal textures and harmonic forms, with deliberate voice leading and contrasted spacing/rhythm. The stop at Op. 130 is superseded; stop after Op. 150. Preserve the four-page/256-onset limits, straight piano, warm identity and sequential score/audio review.
