Preludium & Passacaglia

Preludium & Passacaglia in b for piano, marked as op. 9 or op. 7a on SibeliusMusic is a composition composed for one of my friend, who turned 19 this January. So that's why it is dedicated to her. So I tried to write a not so hard, but brilliant piano piece.

The composition has two parts: a Preludium, which is in a style based on minimal music and baroque (mainly organ) preludes and toccatas, and a Scherzo part with little jazz influences.

As you see, the Preludium part has a lot of common with the Allegro Assai movement of my Quintet, op. 7. This is because that movement existed first as a short piano piece (not 100% what you see here, but mainly that), which I arranged/edited later for the clarinet quartet. But the base rhythm of the second movement of this piece is based on an idea "stolen back" from the quartet... So because that facts, I gave both op. numbers 9 and 7a for this piece.

Visit it on SibeliusMusic

Preludium&Passacaglia.sib

Preludium&Passacaglia.mid

Preludium&Passacaglia.pdf

The preludium started to get on my nerves after a while. It has nice moments but overall it is very demanding on the ear and to repetetive imo. The passacaglia is nice though. I like the accompagnement and the melody also. I think the prelude and the passacaglia fit together good. I would try to give the prelude some extra varation though. Give away the melody of the passacaglia a bit maybe.

Hmmm... Philip Glass meets John Adams. :P

I don't think the repeats are necessary in the Preludium - the music is repetitive as it is, any addition of extra repetition seems superfluous to me. I also don't feel as though the music "goes anywhere" harmonically. The brunt of the motion is produced through changes related with texture and/or range, and while that does work, I'd have liked to see you do something more interesting with the harmony. You have a lot of opportunities with this kind of music to stack up motifs to form polychords and such. I did find the return to the theme at bar 27 quite neat, though. :)

The Passacaglia was rather limited in terms of material deployed, so I think it could do with some revisions. In particular, the rather sedentary pace could do with quickening.

Thanks for the interesting reviews.

As for the tempo: 'cause it was written for an amateur pianist, I didn't wrote so fast tempi, but I recommend 120 for the preludium and 132 for the Passacaglia.

As for the repeat mark in the first movement: 'cause it is in a very minimialistic quasi sonata form, that's why I added it. Anyways, it can be also skipped by the performers.