The piece I am presenting today comes from another set of Chorale Preludes and Postludes that I finished recently – this set being for the Christmas season. I didn’t record any of the Chorale Preludes and Postludes VI, which I may get to at a later date. But for this more recent set, I had a rare compositional experience that I felt deserved a recording and a story. Or perhaps an explanation of a rarefied moment.
Depending on the piece that I am writing and the needs of the particular work, I most often work from both ends of the candle. I write the beginning, I composer the end, I make plans and things meet in the middle. This includes, but is not limited to, many of my improvisations, both weird Evening Improvisations such as THIS RECENT IMPROV, or even my more predictable works such as the Prelude, Adagio, and Fugue, which was taking queues from Bach’s version of the same set of titles. I often plan things out as a good composer/improviser should – the beginning informs the end and everything in between.
BUT, that does not mean one should not be open to the possibility of something unfolding in a chronological order – a friend of mine calls this discover writing. That’s a very apt title/name for that kind of composition and that is the case with this Chorale Arrangement. I personally think of this as a Prelude – a piece that happens before the actual singing of the hymn. I do not think that this arrangement is earth shattering by any means, but it is something I think that is worth consideration; meaning I think it holds up well against other arrangements of the hymn tune (I’m thinking of Brahms in particular).
It’s hard to talk about a piece of music that simple FLOWS out of one’s consciousness. Perhaps I’ll record the other Christmas Chorale pieces as both went through massive edits, but this one did not. Once it was finished, it needed no edits. That is a rare thing for me! I am usually pretty critical of my composing, and this REALLY applies to keyboard works, but this is a rare moment where the piece “wrote itself.” By that logic, I mean to state that the composition was written from beginning to end and it somehow worked out. This was not an improvisation which has that “unfolding” aspect – it was a composition that “unfolded” in a similar manner over several days of looking at the score.
Maybe someday, I’ll improvise on this German Chorale; but for now, let’s let this very nice prelude be a thing.