Theme and Variations

Hi! This is a "theme and variations" piece i made some time ago. This is meant for string or woodwind soloist, but could be also played with piano. There is main theme and 3 variations. After that is short beginning of 4th variation but i have put ending in the 4th bar. 

Edit: i added live clarinet recording 

the recording is not very good, i played it without practising, so i added syntheziser version

Hi @semotivo,

Is this theme and variation a baroque style solo piece? i think maybe to play it with piano and add a LH accompaniment under it will make it more interesting.  The theme has good potential, and these few variations you are doing it with rhythmic variations only and I feel like you can do more with the harmonic variation as well.

Henry

I quite like the theme you've written, especially seeing that it sounds very idiomatic with the clarinet (I am no woodwind player, however). It looked to me as if there wasn't much indication as to where it would be reasonable to breathe, but I guess that should be up to the player 🙂

Apart from rhythmic variation on a verbatim quotation on the theme, you could also choose to slice up the theme into different bits and develop ideas on those separately; for example, you could have a variation that only uses the descending figure from the first bar, or a variation that only develops with that rising appoggiatura. Harmonic manipulation, as Henry suggested, is also possible, as is a lot of things you could do to the theme (inversion and retrograde modifications, playing it at different tempi, embellishing it, as you've done, or even stripping it down to the basics). I'd be interested to see what other variations you might be interested in making are.

I think it sounds great as a solo instrument.