August 09, 2015

Rundown of this week's highlights

• Received the proof copy of the first novel to be published by Trabant Books, and fixed some photoshop issues with the cover
• Submitted PDF Bookmaker to the Mac App Store (more time consuming than it might sound)
• Dealt with some zip file downloading issues with the 1.5 GB wav files at Zwillinge
• Posted the Zwilling catalog on Amazon (the titles are still not showing up in non-US Amazon store and I don't know why)
• Wrote a new Prelude in F in mixed meters, for pipe organ.

The first hour of organ practice today was spent playing through the new Prelude in F, written this week. I had started this piece some time in May, but had set it aside. When it started to rain here on Thursday and I wasn't able to take my daily bike ride, looking for something different to do, I decided to input my sketches for this piece into the computer. About 9 hours later (at around 3 in the morning), a first draft of the piece was finished, and the next day I made a few revisions. Playing through my own music at the organ is exciting but can also be a bit painful, because I find things in my writing that disappoint me. For example, a passage that was supposed to be exciting turns out to be too awkward to play, or some voicing I thought sounded great doesn't quite work after all. Sometimes there are silly errors like a parallel octave somewhere I just didn't catch when I was writing (it can happen in 5 parts). Anyway, after fixing all those kinds of things, although I can't play it up to speed, I was able to get through it well enough to verify that it's a good piece, so that made me happy.

During the week, I put some time in on BWV545 just to get the hands in order (no pedals at home) so I put that together with the pedals for a few read-throughs, once with a very slow metronome. Some passages are still tough going, but I think in a few more weeks I'll have it down. Otherwise I practiced service music and hymns, beginning to get a feel for how hymn introductions might be worked out.

After about 6 hours, I was about to head home to get in my bike ride before sundown, when I looked outside to find it was raining, so I sat back down at the organ and started fiddling with a fugue subject I had in mind to go with the Prelude in F. Last night I had decided on a meter of 5/4 for the fugue, but looking over some of Bach's fugues during practice I decided to change that to 5/2. It's just a stylistic thing, so all the rhythms have double values. It could be written in 5/4, but it wouldn't look quite right. The practice of using cut time or meters based on half notes in organ music was a holdover from the Renaissance, and Bach followed that practice often in his fugues. To me, the longer note values give more of a visual sense of the powerful sound the organ makes. It didn't take long to find the subject. This is why I choose a meter first. Without rhythm, for me it's tough to come up with an idea. Once I have a meter in mind, rhythm begins, and melody comes from that. The subject I'm working with for this fugue is a simple one that requires a tonal answer of the kind I've not worked with much before, so this will be a chance to study some of those issues more in depth and try out some new things in my writing.