Category: Piano

This is the final piece in the Interludes for piano – a series of works devised for my music theory teaching.  The last movement contains one of my earliest ideas – during the B section.  Somewhere in my old files is a bunch of scherzo sketches that never amounted to a work.  The B section in this piece uses exactly one of those concepts from the scherzo sketches.  It is something I have always liked and it fit this particular piece very well, even as an old idea and super secret introduction to the octatonic scale.

And here is where I admit that I didn’t know what the octatonic scale was until much after I had invented this idea.  Or perhaps I didn’t pay enough attention to my theory classes as an undergrad but absorbed particular ideas.  It does’t matter.  It fits the piece and if you want my original idea, pull an 8′ and 2′ flute, play the beginning of the B section quickly, and you’ll hear my original plan.

Always write down every musical thought.  Every idea can have a place: discard or future use. This piece is an excellent example.  Download here!  Here’s me performing the work:

 

The fifth piece in these (free!) piano interludes is perhaps the most obvious in its form: namely, ternary.  I never had the chance to use this in a classroom setting but I am really happy with the B middle section, which is a two voice fugue.  I wrote this fugue for this piece because I had attempted to write an easy fugue for another work (TBA) and I eventually scrapped it.  But I love fugal writing and I find two voices in particular to be challenging as much has to be filled in by the listener.

That being said, I love the contrast between a more aesthetically driven section and something contrapuntal.  Franck, Beethoven, my favorite of the romantics often used counterpoint as an element of contrast.  There is even an interview with Philip Glass where he admits the study of Bach helped him understand voicing.  Maybe the next set of free works I write will be a variety of fugues or some other forms of counterpoint.

Download the score here.

Enjoy!

This particular Interlude, one I would call a valiant attempt, is supposed to be in rondo form.  As I have stated in previous posts, these Interludes were composed with the a teaching element in mind.  The problem with rondo form is that it is usually a larger scale form, one that cannot simply be put on a single page.  From this point on, this and the next two interludes were never presented to any class I taught.  I like these pieces, but didn’t feel they did what I wanted for teaching purposes.

Interestingly, this was my second attempt at writing a single page rondo.  I’m not sure it is entirely successful, but here it is in any case.  Each line in this rondo form has it’s own form marking, ABACACoda (A-B-A1-C-A2-A-coda in reality).  But expressing this form as found in a single page is quite trite.  Most classical rondo forms are lengthier than this particular piece.  Download it here.

The third Interlude in this series is the earliest written.  Just as the other Interludes incorporated elements taught in a theory curriculum for both written and aural theory 3, this one too does as well.  The element prominently used is of course the metric modulation.  There are some harmonic elements typical of later 19th century music too.  It’s also written in a rounded binary form which was a part of the assignment.  That’s all well and good as far as the assignment goes, but what I enjoyed about writing was using the romantic harmonies.  I hadn’t done anything quite deliberate like this before, one were I was explicit in form and harmony.

I also like E Major.  Fits nice in my hands.  Download the score for free here!

This second interlude was more recently written and is a demonstration of rounded binary form.  I also used this for my aural theory class by erasing a number of notes out and having the students fill it in.  Hence, there are no accidentals in the work, making it slightly easier as an aural theory assignment.

That last statement presented me a challenge: how do I get the piece to fit into two different assignments at the same time?  Part of the answer is making the piece somewhat modal.  I also inverted the theme in the return of the A section, leading to a cadence in the key.  That part, I think, tripped up a few people in the assignment.  I’ll discuss the style of these works in the next post, but I was trying to allude a certain style coming in typical written theory 3 curriculums.

Greetings!  I know I haven’t posted anything but it is because of the usual things that happen around March and April, which is of course Palm Sunday, Holy Week, and Easter.  The other event that usually happens to me around this time is the end of a semester of teaching music theory.  This year, I decided to write a series of short piano pieces to demonstrate different binary and ternary forms.  Two of them were written in prior years, but this one was specifically written this April for an assignment.  Important: get the score here!

The assignment was to decide the form of the piece and defend your answer.  The answer is ternary because of the three distinct, independent parts = A B A (and repeats).  Like many of the free works I post, this one was fun to write and is definitely related to how I often improvise on a piano.

Oof.  That is how I will being today.  I have never thought of myself as much of a pianist and the technical ability on a high performing level feels much out of reach.  I hosted a recital where the fantastic Ching-Wen Hsiao played some Debussy and reminded me how much I am not a pianist.  (This is a backward compliment to say that she is FANTASTIC).   That being said, I do try to keep my fundamental skills and technique together by doing my scales and other exercises.  Combine this with a renewed interest in piano repertoire (I have been playing through Beethoven and Gershwin for fun) and I have decided to tackle and create some etudes.

The etude, study, is usually used to enhance one’s technique.  That means the piece needs to offer some technical challenge while being artistically pleasing as a piece of music.  Ideally, of course.  My favorite set of etudes are Ligeti’s.  So good.  There are others, perhaps most famously Chopin’s Etudes.

What can add to this genre?  I’ve thought about it and I think there are things that I may be able to offer.  This is the second of the Etudes that I plan to write and the first one that I have completed and performed.  And as stated at the very beginning: oof.  It was hard!  The goal of the piece is to stretch your wrist motion and it certainly does that.  I’m generally happy with my performance here and I hope to have a few more etude recordings posted over the next several months.