As promised/threatened in my previous post, Perenepsis #4 is now well under way, and to my surprise, this one is (I think) much more "user friendly", or -- to use music geek terminology rather than tech-speak -- "accessible" than its predecessors. I seem to have finally made the giant leap from organized chaos to chaotic organization! Yay!
There's also a fun new thing for percussion ensemble and trumpet; still working on getting to the part where the trumpet joins the party, and writing out sufficiently precise and nuanced drum parts is not a lot of fun -- having played with a drummer who didn't need to be told what to play (Hi, Neal!) has spoiled me -- so progress on this will likely be slow.
Finally, on Sunday I began the final movement of my String Quartet #3, the first movement of which was posted here a year ago as A Little Fugue for String Quartet, the only movement that's completed so far, and even that is likely to undergo some revision before it's all done. The second movement is over halfway done, the third is nearly complete, the fourth (the oldest in terms of material) maybe nearly halfway done, and already the fifth is making good progress. It was going to be a second fugue using a variation of the first movement's subject, but just as that movement's fugal structure kind of imposed itself on me, in only my second session working on this movement, it decided it wanted to be something more like a sonata form, while retaining its thematic relation to the opening fugue.
I like the overall structure of the quartet -- tempo-wise, the movements are slow - fast - moderate - fast - slow, with the final movement itself having a slow-fast-slow layout, and in terms of tonality, they're E minor - E major, A major, A minor, then back to E minor. Hopefully, finalizing the overall structure will spur me on to complete this, but Perenepsis #4 will probably be finished first.
Unfortunately, my relative shortage of free time means that the above pieces have pretty much crowded out everything else mentioned in my previous update. The good news is that I won't be running out of ideas to work on any time soon... and there's always the prospect of a Perenepsis #5 lurking in the future -- I don't think I'm quite done beating that idea into the ground yet, and #4 has led me to consider whether the Perenepsis concept can be applied to a slower piece (as opposed to slow sections within the existing faster tempos used so far). In fact, I just remembered that I have the first 16-20 or so measures of an old idea that may fit the bill for this, so I guess the question now is: Will there be a #6?
