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.

Reductions

This is a serial piece for brass quintet -- serial, but not 12-tone (which can be interesting, but I find its underlying ideology even more offensive than the ugly music it tends to produce) . Instead, it uses a set of tone rows generated by a random process I developed in college. Starting from an initial state consisting of a set of values, each iteration produces a new set by randomly selecting from the elements contained in the previous step. As the same element can be selected more than once, rather than producing a mere permutation of the same elements, the process gradually eliminates elements until it eventually converges to contain a single distinct value, at which point it will remain constant. I presented an AMA paper defining this process and analyzing a specific configuration of it, focusing on calculating the mean steps to convergence. The math is pretty messy, but I thought that the process itself could be useful in music -- as each iteration produces a rearranged subset of the previous step, there is an inherent continuity. I would also point out that this process is anti-darwinian, as it gets simpler over time, exactly what would happen if evolution were the actual driving force behind life.

Now about the piece -- it's not a strict run-through of this reduction process, but uses tone rows generated by it. The initial state was the 12 notes of the chromatic scale, but I start with the result of the first iteration of the process -- I actually ran it several times until I got a starting set that I liked, so even here, random chance is at the mercy of a designer. This is one of those pieces that I'm not sure I really like, although I do like parts of it; I could probably make something better with elements from the reduction process without using serial techniques, but that isn't something I'm planning at this point -- there are several better things I'm working on now.

Note: This is not a live performance with real brass players; it uses digital samples. I'm pretty happy with the sound of the tuba, trombone and horn, but the trumpets sound weak to me. It was also hard to get the dynamics exactly how I wanted them, and I'm not interested in being a sound engineer. Maybe I'd like this piece better if I could hear a live performance of it with real instruments. Maybe not.

Fugue in G Minor

It's been a while since I posted anything, not because I've been doing nothing, but because I've been working on too many different pieces concurrently rather than finishing any of them right away. So, I took a little break to work out this old piece, a 3-voice fugue that I wrote before I knew the rules for writing fugues (actually, I still don't really know -- my only counterpoint class was in 16th century modal counterpoint, but anyway...). I cleaned it up slightly a while back, but there are probably still a few hidden parallel fifths in there somewhere along with other technical errors. Nevertheless, I think it's not completely horrible...