Fantasia for Solo Piano - Explanation/Score

[Saul Gefen]

Hi,

This is my latest composition for solo piano. For those of you that were following a discussion between Dane Aubrun and myself he made several comments about my compositional style and I answered him that my compositional style and method has progressed and developed from a traditional old fashion style which means purely classical music writing each note manually into a more liberal approach to composition from sound exploration, DAW, recording and editing and using midi for score creation.

With this composition titled Fantasia I have returned back to my old way of doing things. This is purely a classical piece of music, written in the Baroque Style, and writing each note manually. It took me a little over a week and several hours a day to complete the work, and I had a lot of fun composing it, even though it was a lot of work.

How did I compose this piece?

*I recorded myself playing a very simple melody using quarter notes and 3/4 beat. This was a very raw piece of music

* Then I added counterpoint to the quarter notes using 16th notes. The piece began to wear some clothing and stand up on its own.

* As I'm adding the counterpoint, I begin to notice that the counterpoint itself has its own distinctive melody and is not there only as a harmony so I decided to concentrate on the counterpoint too

* As the counterpoint melody was progressing, I noticed that the main raw melody of the quarter note has to be edited as well at some point to harmonize together with the counterpoint, so I did that.

* Slowly but surely the piece began to sound absolutely different than it was at its raw inception, I have added new ideas to it, modulated, borrowed and inserted and changed the harmony from one section to the next to create a variety and basically let the music lead to a desired natural conclusion, there were new musical ideas and sections that I have added to the piece as I was writing the counterpoint.

* I have chosen a Keyless platform in order to give me more freedom to do what I want with the piece, but naturally the piece is in D minor but ends in D major.

Hope you'll find it enjoyable,

Score is attached,

Best Regards,

Saul Gefen

Fantasia

Saul Gefen · Fantasia

[Dane Aubrun]

A nice performance, Saul.

Not exactly my sort of music but I can imagine it played on a harpsichord. One thing I like about it is the way you interleave the cantus firmus, taking the higher part most of the time,  with the species 3 elaboration. It seems to be truly polyphonic for the most part breaking for the rhythmic pedal around the 3 minute mark.

Great.

Cheers for now,

Dane.

[Saul Gefen]

Glad you liked it Dane, though this is not my performance rather its a computer generated performance through Logic Pro 

Regards

Dane Aubrun said:

A nice performance, Saul.

Not exactly my sort of music but I can imagine it played on a harpsichord. One thing I like about it is the way you interleave the cantus firmus, taking the higher part most of the time,  with the species 3 elaboration. It seems to be truly polyphonic for the most part breaking for the rhythmic pedal around the 3 minute mark.

Great.

Cheers for now,

Dane.

[Timothy Smith]

Nice work on this! You have done quite a bit with this basic melody. The harpsichord would make for a very period sound.

I have been tempted to compose like this. Seems a very structured way to do it as opposed to playing in parts. That way you can think more about the construction rather than the playing possibly? 

I love music that stays in the barogue style. It does seem a bit fast to my ears.Maybe my ears are slow :)