Study in C

Allegedly, Arnold Schoenberg, the father of twelve tone atonalism, once said, "there is still a lot of good music to be written in the key of C", meaning that you can take a key, a group of notes that represent a tonality and create an interesting piece of music. You can create something that has never bee written before. The key of C is the most prosaic of keys so the challenge to make something interesting in the key of C is significant. 

One day, I  decided to take up the challenge and see what I could compose in the key of C. I came up with this piano piece that I call a Study in C. To me, the thing that makes the piece interesting is that I  feature the tritone, an interval that I was always taught never to use or to use sparingly and only briefly, in passing so that the sound does not linger in the ear. Well, most of what I compose goes against what I was taught, but isn't that always the way? In this piece I use the tritone obsessively. It gives  the piece a driving quality, an obsessive quality. It started out as an idea, a whim, something inspired by this aleged utterance by Arnold Schoenberg. I guess that there still is many good things to write in the key of C. Maybe I will see what I can write for the piano in all of the other keys.

What I like about this piece is the relentless forward motion of the piece. By the end, it has a driving quality that is almost hypnotic. I was very satisfied with the result of this little experiment in the key of C.

Part of my inspiration for this piece comes from the music of Terry Riley, one of the proponents of minimalism. The other part of the inspiration for this piece comes from Bach's Well Tempered Clavier collection, not any one piece in particular but the ethos of the entire collection.

Here is the link for the video on Youtube 

Memories of Barcelona

It has been some time since I last wrote a post. A good many things have happened in that time. What I want to write about is music.

Over the last year or so I have renewed my activity in music. I never lost interest in music but I always found a reason to delay it or tell myself that there would always be time for music later. Well, later is now!

Last year, I gave my piano to a piano student who needed a piano but could not afford to buy one. I can't say that I regretted giving it away but I miss having a piano, especially now that I have started writing music again, after 20 years.

After the piano was gone I started playing my classical guitar again. I played every day but I was always playing someone else's music. It was fun but not as satisfying as playing my own music. One day I was sorting through some old paper that I was going to throw away and I came across some of my compositions from years ago, 20 years ago when I lived in Michigan. There was a string quartet that I had not finished. I had drafted two movements and left it for some reason. Did I lose interest? Did I not know where to go after the second movement? I could not remember. It was too long ago. I found a guitar piece that I had started. There were only a few bars of music but the melody was nice. I could see why I had written it down but could not remember why I did not develop it. The idea came into my head to finish it. I took the fragment and put it on my music stand and played it over and over to get a sense of where I might take it. Eventually, I began to have images and memories of the trip that my wife and I took to Barcelona, Spain. I decided to call the piece, Memories of Barcelona. The first movement of the piece brings back memories of the street life and night life of Barcelona which was quite lively and varied. I have finished two movements of what I conceived to be a three movement guitar piece.

About the music. Nominally, the key signature is E minor but I don't strictly follow the E minor scale. In fact, I use a tonality that is more modal in nature. This is what I heard in my head when I wrote the piece. It is more important for me to realize what is in my head than to follow some academic rule that says I have to keep within a specific tonality. In this day and age, almost anything goes regarding tonality. In the last hundred years, we have experienced everything from Serialism where tonality was more or less destroyed by Arnold Schoenberg to Philip Glass' minimalism where tonality is kept to the barest minimum. I feel completely justified in following my own sensibility regarding what tonality I chose to follow in a piece.

Here is the first movement. I hope you like it! I will give you the second movement next post. It is too bad that I could not attach a midi file to give you an idea of how the piece sounds.

I have been trying to attach the audio of this piece of music to the post by putting together a video but I could not attach it to the post so I uploaded it to Youtube. I hope this works.

https://youtu.be/u1zg--P01KM