I’m catching up to our current week of Lent! As these Lenten Improvisations were being composed, I remember thinking that the compositions as a whole needed to have an arc. For these first three, I wanted them to slowly get closer to something resembling tonality; meaning I wanted the pieces to be less and less abstract as they came, ultimately leading to the final movement for Palm Sunday.
My relationship with this movement has always been interesting. Every time I come back to it after not playing it for sometime I always question the piece. Composers often write works that they are not totally satisfied with and yet still release them. The compositional device used is pretty obvious: canon. It is a device I find consistently useful and always interesting.
I think what happens is that the piece begins and I groan at the obvious compositional technique used until the pedals come in and remember how good the two canons/imitations sound against each other. And by the end of the work, with all the imitations/counterpoints moving, it’s a really cool effect. Like the last two movements, this one also ends with the sound/silence effect, but I feel it is less important to the overall purpose and goal of the piece. Still useful, but this is again pointing to where the Lenten Improvisations are going as a whole.