Merry Christmas!

Here's a little piece that I've worked on at the piano for several years around this time of year without getting very far on it. I recently realized why that was -- it wasn't meant to be a piano piece! It's just a happy and relaxing little tune that makes me think of Christmas, dressed up in some instrumentation that hopefully makes it more interesting than my previous messing about with it on the piano. For now, it's called "Bells":

Anachronistic Rabbits

Not only anachronistic, after an initial well-behaved cadence landing squarely on G Major, these rabbits become somewhat anarchical as well. Being rabbits, however, they eventually settle back down:

A Little Fugue for String Quartet

Here's a funny little thing -- I started writing my String Quartet #3 (I might eventually post my second quartet, but I can't find the first; not even enough of my notes to re-create it), and it went and turned itself into a fugue! The four-bar subject, which supplies the material for everything that follows, consists of an unwinding chromatic idea (along the lines of a couple of orchestral pieces I'm still working on) followed by consecutive fourths and then a falling pattern. If the ending seems a little strange, that's because it's actually a transition into the second movement of the quartet. Given the number of pieces I'm currently working on, it may be a while before the remaining movements are completed, so I thought this was interesting enough to post on its own for now:

Prelude in B Major

This little piece has been percolating upstairs for a little over a week, and on Easter morning it let me finish it. It's a tiny perpetual motion machine with a bad case of the stutters, sharing some characteristics with the C Major Allegro posted here and a fugue-like piece (also in C Major) that I need to find and finish, but in this case, the 16th-note motion, while it passes back and forth between the right and left hands, never stops until the end. It may be brief, but it's got as many notes as most pieces that are twice as long! I'm now planning to take the final progression of seven chords, transpose to a "flatter" key, and make something a bit calmer; this is my idea of recycling, but it won't be recognizable as coming from this.

Note: Listening to it now, I am vaguely reminded of a duet from some old opera, although that never occurred to me while writing this; I'll leave it up to listeners to figure out which one.

Theme and Variations

It's been a while since I've posted a piece (working on several new ones that aren't done yet), so here's an old one from around 8th or 9th grade, a pretty simple, traditional theme and variations in B-flat major. I found my original manuscript of this recently and although it's barely (if at all) worth sharing, I do like the second variation, so go ahead and suffer through the rest of it for that. All of the sections -- the theme and the three variations -- are repeated, and for some reason I followed these with a coda section in G minor, which I now find rather strange, but it is the relative minor key of B-flat major, and the second half of the second variation does at least hint at it, so I decided to leave it as originally written.