My Miniature XII, latest in the series, is here and I hate to say it, it’s left overs. By that I mean, the kernel of the movement comes from Miniature X. In that blog post I mentioned my fascination with using repeats to create a lot of music with little in the score. That particular movement took a long time to write and generated a lot of material, some of it being worthy of its own movement.
Now when I talk about material, in this case it was more of a tonal progression than say a literal set of specific notes. Listening to Miniature X, there are a lot of places that I tried to take it, none of them correct until I found its C major/C minor interaction at the beginning. This Miniature XII uses one of those rejected progressions and maintains the use of repeats. Here is where I want to address something: I am not the biggest fan of 4×4 phrasing. Mozart and Haydn and much of pop music did/does it excellently and I have no problem with that for them. It’s fine, I am just not terribly interested in it and prefer to subvert it when necessary. (Honestly, it always depends on the composition.)
In order to avoid the constant 2×2 repeated measure groupings, I stuck a single measure in the middle of them once in a while. I am not claiming to be clever or anything like that, just that the solution to all the repeats giving the work a 4×4/2×2 like phrase structure is a single measure. 8 measures becomes 9, or 12 becomes 13. It gives the work an odd feel at moments when you might expect the harmony to follow the strict phrase structure. It keeps the work fresh and interesting! At least I hope so. You judge: get the score here on IMSLP.