Friday, December 18, 2015

Voluntary in G Minor

Music for one hand? (link to the PDF)


Of my 24 Preludes, the one that's probably my favourite is #12 in F Minor, which is just a long string of notes. This is written in a similar vein, in a toccata style, not quite as fast but not slow either. And as I demonstrated when I played the F Minor, the fact that it's one line of music doesn't mean that it has to be handled by one hand; there are a dozen different ways that this one could be divided between two hands.

One of the reasons for the weekly preludes (and now voluntaries) is to stretch my compositional imagination and technique, not just the harmonic and melodic language I use but also textures and structural ideas. There's a tendency to get bogged down in one way of expressing something, and as I look back over the thirty pieces I've written since May, I think I've managed to avoid the pigeonhole and have produced a wide variety of works. Are they all good? Probably not. But they're all representative of me reaching for something new in that moment in time. And even if they're not all good, some of them are, and I'm working to suss out what works about those and what doesn't about others.

In the meantime, all the best of the season to you and yours; happy organing, and we'll pick this thread up again in the 2016! I'm taking two weeks off from preludes for the holidays.



Creative Commons License
Voluntary in G Minor by Mike Cutler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

2 comments:

  1. Please give us a left hand version with a few suggested fingerings! This would be VERY useful!

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    1. If anyone wants to give that a try, by all means! I haven't got time to do that sort of work during the holiday season (although it's extremely tempting to subtly point out the donation button...). Thanks for your interest!

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