This work was begun in 2020 at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Initially it was to be an exercise in fugue writing, but I soon became captivated by the expressiveness of the counterpoint and shaped it into a long, one-movement polyphonic fantasia. The first version was for string orchestra only (Op. 2a), though with distinct "choirs" and an embedded string quartet as well. My original aim was to try to write a piece in a Classical idiom that has been largely abandoned after Beethoven, as a sort of homage to the Age of Reason. Even the harmonic language is essentially Classical (unlike in my String Quartet), though with a tendency to modulate continually a la Carl Nielsen, and even a couple of bitonal passages. The first version ended with a feeling of defiance or maybe stoic triumph.
After preparing a version for a full (but Classically-sized) orchestra, I began to feel that the material and colouring were too dark for the piece to end in a blaze of defiance. I have now tried six different endings in all, and this is still very much a work in progress. A few (including the one I'm presenting here) end in a mood of resignation, though one was decidedly grim (posted elsewhere). The main technical problem in the music is that the Coda strives for C major against a tendency for that key to work as the dominant of F minor. Many Baroque-era works end with a similar cadence (and Nielsen used a form of it in his Commotio), but the tendency to move to the subdominant minor is usually not so strong in those works. In this piece, I'm convinced that the cadence cannot be the end because of this - some kind of postlude is needed, but it has to be much shorter than the rest of the Coda. The current version ends in C after a brief, chromatically descending passage based on earlier material.
Since posting it on the previous board, I made several tweaks to the rest of the work as well, especially expanding the timpani part. I do believe that part is likely unplayable without an assistant to manage the frequent retunings.
A rendering made with NotePerformer 4 is attached, along with the raw Sibelius score.
Playing time: about 27.5 minutes. If you only want to hear the Coda, it begins at about 24:50.
Edit: I made a couple of small changes to the postlude, to make the transition back to C less jarring. The ending chord is also now an open fifth.
Edit: I added an extra bar of timpani roll (on low G) to the postlude, as breathing space after the intensity of the main part of the Coda, and also to bring the work "full circle" back to the opening. Unless someone can convince me that something else needs to be changed, I think this will be "it" for now, i.e. tentatively final version, if that makes sense. My musical language has moved on from that of this piece, and I need to start working on something new.
Edit: I'm withdrawing all previous renderings. The renderings and score below are of the most current version, made with NotePerformer 4 under Dorico, and are pretty final, I think - the only issue I still have is with the final chord, which is written to die away to ppppp but clearly does not, at least by any reasonable concept of ppppp. I suspect the problem is the dynamic power law that Dorico uses to map notated dynamics to actual velocities, which makes very little difference between pp and ppppp. I should adjust it, but that would affect everything and I would need to recreate these audio files, two of them spliced together in Audacity from multiple individual playbacks. So I am leaving these here as provisionally final, in case a new member runs across this thread and wants to hear the piece.
Audio: Fuga I; Interludio I; Fuga II
Audio: Interludio II; Evoluzione
Replies
Sorry about the link to the score - I thought I had made all of those files accessible to everyone. It's fixed now (I replaced the link in the OP), and I checked that the audio files were all shared.
As to making the last chord fade away, yes I know I can manually make it do that in the key editor, but was thinking that in fact the dynamic range of the piece is reduced by that power settng and I probably should experiment with a value less than 2.5, maybe even 1.5 or less. But actually I've been thinking that the last chord really *shouldn't* fade away. Having a piece end with a crescendo / diminuendo into silence is fairly cliche, I think. Anyway, that final chord should be a stark, blank stare into the unknown. I am thinking I will maintain maybe mf or mp in the woodwinds and have only the strings fade away. There's a hint of that in this rendering, because I couldn't quite make the transition to all winds work smoothly yesterday. I will try again when I have time.
the dynamic power setting tends to reduce contrast at lower values, rather than increase as you seem to be suggesting. But anyway, I'll leave you to experiment!
As I understand it, increasing the dynamic power reduces contrast at lower dynamics and increases contrast in the middle of the dynamic range. So with a value of 2.5 (apparently the default), the difference between mp and mf is much greater than the difference between ppp and pp, and there appears to be no difference at all between ppppp and pppp, though of course there must be a slight difference. With a more linear dynamic curve, the difference between adjacent dynamic levels at the ends of the range would be more noticeable, according to what I read.
Source: Dorico Operations Manual, p. 1199. Am I misreading the manual?
no, you're not misreading the manual. I tend to go by what I experience when I change settings, not what the manual says. With extreme values, the effect may be as you say, though I can't say I've noticed it, but certainly the overall contrast is increased with higher values. Anyway, I suggest you try things out for yourself (well, you probably already have
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