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Toccata e ricercare


Simen-N

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Toccata e ricercare in d minor for keyboard.

I usually write programme music, but this time is just for the sake of the instrument. I chose the affective key of d minor ( Melancholy womanliness, the spleen and humours brood. )  for this piece.

1. Toccata: The meaning of this word is "to touch".  Its a virtuoso piece with fastmoving immitative parts.

2. Ricercare: A Renaissance and early baroque intrumental form in counterpoint. The word means "to search out". The ricercare is seen as the early fugue, with more free counterpoint.

Please tell me what you think

SimenN

 

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Generally very nice to listen to. A couple things I noticed.
Texture change on the V/IV modulation at m. 18 was really abrupt for me and seemed strange for an important pivot point. 
m. 32's half notes are a bit weird to me, both for the lack of rhythmic momentum and in particular m. 33's F∆7 that doesn't act like a suspension, especially since the E5 isn't interpreted as an approach tone to a dissonant chord tone.
 

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  • 1 month later...

The toccata could have used a lot more variation and solo-like instances. There's also too much comfortable counterpoint repetition (I mean, typical fortspinnung but you could've done more with it,) so it doesn't really have the explosive energy you'd expect from a toccata. I guess if you played it faster it would be better, but I don't know. I think it sounds pretty but it doesn't really say much (which is sadly a fault a lot of baroque music actually had haha!) Also, D minor should be bolder, faster, in the norm those pieces are usually pretty aggressive, with plenty of solo moments and changes in texture (plenty of examples for this, I'm sure you're aware.)

 

As for the ricercare, historically a ricercare has no actual form assigned to that name (that's a later thing and when Bach used it, famously, it was his own interpretation of what it would be like. It was a revived term by that point since it was in disuse when he revived it.)  But regardless I think it's really boring that you didn't change the textures up at least somewhat. If the intent was to make a fugue, or something fugue-like, it would've helped greatly to vary a lot more how and when the "important" parts appear. It's always the same pattern repeated over and over, which makes it really hard to hear to me. Why did you keep 3 voices running constantly throughout the entire composition?

 

There's also basically no meaningful rhythmic variation of any kind (the 8ths vs 4th typical pattern that run through almost from beginning to end nonstop really kill it.)

 

So yeah, I don't know, I'm not very convinced by the effort here. I suppose it's accurate enough to early 1700, but to me that's neither here nor there since I'm not going to judge it as an exercise since that's not what you said it was. I don't see anything really creative here, only a bunch of patterns we've seen a thousand times before and I can't see where you, as a composer, actually put your own view/creativity on it. Your technique has improved vastly since we did those lessons so long ago, so that's very nice, but that's also why I know you can do better than this.

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