On 20/02/2014 03:11, Rockford Mjos wrote:
Thanks for posting this. You continue to bring our attention to interesting
music with your fine performances.
How much of the piece did you play?
Thanks again for the music!
-- Rocky
Thanks Rocky. There are 9 pages of music, leisurely laid out. The whole
piece last for over 10 minutes and this is unusually and surprisingly
lengthy for Howard Skempton. I got to half way through page 4. In the
next section the original Bach fragment from a sarabande seems more
explicit - for a while at least. About three-quarters of the way through
there is a longish section which is repeated and and is strangely
insistent on a major chord with an added ninth. The last couple of pages
refer to earlier material.
Obviously a better player would be more technically secure than I am but
the piece is not technically difficult apart from changing meters: 2/8,
3/8, 2/4, 5/8, 3/4, 7/8, 4/4.
I have read that Skempton is not interested in development nor in
variations. Maybe he is here but more likely there is some underlying
schema - important to the composer but not the player. I'm sure Nigel
North would make the piece sound quite magical.
Stuart
On Feb 19, 2014, at 4:04 PM, WALSH STUART wrote:
This is a shot at an opening chunk of 'Par la bande' written for Nigel North.
The complete piece lasts for over 10 minutes. It is based on the first few bars
of a Bach sarabande but in a 'roundabout' way.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HgUn0kCjGE
Howard Skempton is usually described as a miniaturist and some of his pieces
are shorter than a minute. For some reason, for this piece, Skempton wrote at
much greater length. The music is in standard notation with bass and treble
clefs. The music goes down to a low A and is presumably intended for the D
minor, 13-course lute. Putting the music up a fourth brings it back to its
original D minor and fits a Renaissance lute (with at least one extra bass)
surprisingly well.
Stuart
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