Sunday, November 17, 2013

Memorandum

This is a prelude and fugue for piano. Instead of a prelude followed by a fugue in the same key, however, this is an E-flat major fugue wrapped inside and intertwined with a C minor prelude. It's in 5/4; the fugue subject kind of wanted to be in 3/4 (as in the entries of the first three voices in the stretto section), but the opening prelude idea was in 5/4, and I knew that the two were going to end up being played together. While I'm obviously not opposed to changing time signatures (for example, Allegro in CPerenepsis #3), in this case it seemed that maintaining a single time signature helped unify the prelude and fugue.

What surprised me here is that after several attempts to write a major key fugue, none of which seemed to quite work, I finally managed to do one inside of an otherwise minor key piece. It still seems to me that minor keys are somehow inherently more conducive to fugues, but this piece encourages me to try again to write a stand-alone major key fugue. But not right away -- now that this thing's done, it's time to work on another "accidental" Christmas piece (a la Bells). I hope to finish it within the next few weeks, but no guarantees; I'm still tinkering with the instrumentation, which could significantly bog down progress.