24 Preludes and Fugues (2011)
Listen to Erica Rumbley, Jennifer Shafer, Kelsey Minarik, Ben Norton, and Justin Crenshaw perform the pieces below.
In order to reconcile my desire to compose large-scale music with my tendency to write short pieces, I have occasionally written music such as this set of preludes and fugues: large pieces that are made up of smaller units. While the individual preludes and fugues do not share motives or themes, they are meant to come together to form a single large entity, rather than a series of unrelated pieces.
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Fugues often tend to be highly academic, and they have the capacity to be little more than technical compositional exercises or demonstrations of compositional virtuosity. But these potentialities are not what draw me to writing fugues. I think that fugues can have theperfect balance of a few different musical dichotomies: clarity and density, formlessness and formality, inevitability and ingenuity, emotion and intellect, freedom and tight control.
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In some cases, the pairs of preludes and fugues are intentionally thematically related. Other times, for variety's sake, they are intentionally unrelated.
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These preludes and fugues were written, for the most part, in order. I prefer to write music in this way because it tends to allow the piece to grow organically. The listener can hear the process of the music becoming and “maturing” over time. Rather than having a static identity regarding what it is “about,” the music grows into its own existence.
*
Fugues often tend to be highly academic, and they have the capacity to be little more than technical compositional exercises or demonstrations of compositional virtuosity. But these potentialities are not what draw me to writing fugues. I think that fugues can have theperfect balance of a few different musical dichotomies: clarity and density, formlessness and formality, inevitability and ingenuity, emotion and intellect, freedom and tight control.
*
In some cases, the pairs of preludes and fugues are intentionally thematically related. Other times, for variety's sake, they are intentionally unrelated.
*
These preludes and fugues were written, for the most part, in order. I prefer to write music in this way because it tends to allow the piece to grow organically. The listener can hear the process of the music becoming and “maturing” over time. Rather than having a static identity regarding what it is “about,” the music grows into its own existence.
