Composition (2022, Q3): Fugue
Three months is enough compose something decent, right? Okay, I'm trying this out, because I've noticed I get things done with a deadline, but I also don't think I can casually do one piece a month, at least not yet. On the other hand, I've never given myself three months to do something I could do in a week, if I put my mind to it. Let's see whether this works out in my favour, or whether I just neglect it until the last minute, not unlike the previous composition projects.
So I've got time from July to September (according to those suspicious stock-brokering fellows that have been spending the summer either crying into their coffee or furiously war-profiteering all over the place). Usually I can pretty easily make something out of a preexisting melody, or something else to ground me. Let's see if I can make that happen again.
I wanted to try my hand at writing something in 6/8 time signature. I had explained to me once that it tends to give pieces an erratic feel, which might help define what I could go for, and it'd help get me away from old vanilla 4/4. I messed around at the piano for a bit before coming up with a sort of piano baseline that reminds me a little of a Rachmaninoff I played a while back.
I still have this Scriabin in my head that most people have heard (Etude Op. 8 No. 12), especially those up-beats leading to half-measures. I'll think I might use something like this in the melody.
This was a bit of back and forth on this one, but I think I've pinned the tone of this piece down. There's a very specific form of dramaticism that pairs the chords with a fast base. That concludes my first session of composition for this one.
Weeks and weeks go by, until August 19th, and I don't do anything even resembling composition. I really don't function without a deadline. Anyway, a thing happened that day that left too much adrenaline in my system to go to sleep at a reasonable time, which I will regret in the morning, so instead of going to sleep, I might as well do this.
I don't want to draw the same base through the whole piece, so each new segment will get its own little frantic base.
It's a somewhat abridged iteration of the previous theme, but I wanted to get to the key-change. I haven't done a lot of key-changes, and even when playing pieces from qualified composers, I occasionally stumble over those. It would be a nice thing to do, now and then. I'm also starting that this piece might remain limited to the piano.
I introduce a new theme after the key-change, but don't actually iterate it to the end. Those last two bars before the double stop is reminiscent of the first two bars of the segment, so where one might expect there to be more, I wanna cut that short and maybe think of a B-part, which probably will be a tad calmer, then cap the whole thing off with a reprise.
The B-part is usually a counterpoint, so I tried slowing it down and decoupling it from the preceding part by key signature. For that last part, I did need to insert a transitional bar that at least resolves the bs, otherwise the shift to what B-Major would be pretty jarring. Towards the end of this admittedly somewhat short B-part, I got back the tempo.
I didn't want to jump straight back into the familiar stuff with the reprise, but give the shift from B-Major to D-Minor a little breather. It's the same key-signature technically, but the character changes dramatically, once the first theme sets back in.
This is the aforementioned breather. As you can see, the tempo is back, and there's space for modulations, until we get back to the first motif in bar 45.
Here, the first motif had previously given way to another iteration, that I don't think is necessary, so I decided to cap it off here.
Like the times before, this whole project went okay, but I don't seem to take the time to get to it regularly enough. The composing itself is a question of whether I have headphones on hand, or a piano at my disposal, which is most of the time. It just seems to take a back seat in my priorities a lot of the time.