This is, literally, my musical diary–notes fresh from my pen and recorded in a few hours. You can find my finished works elsewhere; here, it's all about capturing the moment!
In the past few years, I’ve played through almost all of Scott Joplin’s piano music. His music is intelligent, full of life, and simply fun. I wish I was more of a pianist, because I really don’t do his compositions justice. Given my love of Joplin’s work, it made total sense to me that piano miniature #4 (in 4/4 time) should be an homage to him.
You can hear a bit of Joplin in the left hand stride pattern and the melody’s syncopated spring. Of course, mimicry is not my thing; I had to put my own stamp on it! The most striking feature of #4 is that the left hand lays down a march in 4/4 time while the right hand waltzes in 3/4 on top of it. Oil and water? You bet! Check out the PDF of the score.
This third piano miniature is–not surprisingly–in 3/4 time. It reminds me a bit of Erik Satie’s whimsical compositions. While the meter is the “straight man,” remaining in an elegant waltz tempo, the harmonies never seem to land quite where you expect and the melody leaps as if over-stepping its goal. I expect I’ll return to this sketch in the future to expand on these themes.
I was telling my son tonight that I feel like I’m working out my harmonic demons. Perhaps “demons” is too strong, but I do feel that I’ve been exploring a particular harmonic palette in depth lately. It’s not clear to me yet whether this is something I’m refining for use over the long haul or if it’s just something I need to get out of my system. In either case, a series of diminutive piano compositions is the perfect vehicle to develop some of these ideas.
I guess my recent harmonic language could be considered pandiatonicism, that is, the free use of the diatonic scale (as opposed to chromatic) stacked into harmonies without implying tonality. (Non-music-theorists: from this point, on feel free to let your eyes glaze over while nodding your head knowingly.) I’m trying to create a satisfying “musical gravity” without using any of the traditional trappings of I, IV, V chords, etc. I avoid tritones and dominant sevenths–intervals that would imply tonal movement. And I find myself using pentatonic scales for my melodic material.
Blah, blah, blah. You can also just listen to the piece and enjoy it (or not) without understanding the music theory behind it. Sometimes it’s better not to know how the sausage is made…
But if you do want to see the sausage, here’s the PDF.
I often take part in FAWM–February Album Writing Month–as a way of keeping the creative juices flowing. The FAWM challenge is to write 14 songs in 28 days. This year I plan to compose 14 “piano miniatures.” (I’ll think of a better title later: sketches? bite-size compositions? Think Erik Satie’s “Gymnopédie” and you’ve got the right idea.) Just short pieces that allow me to work out some ideas in small form.
Tentatively, each piece will be numbered, 1 through 14, with a time signature corresponding to that number. The first is #1 and is in a 1/1 meter. This is not only a cute idea, stuffing a piece into the unusual 1/1 meter for show. Instead, I composed a piece that truly has a one-beat pulse and that doesn’t group into larger 3s or 4s. If you want to try this out at your piano, download the PDF score.
