and the beat goes on

I may well have overcome some hurdles in my preludes and fugues project. I've got a subject for E major, D flat major, and E flat minor. I have two ideas for D major and D minor respectively and an idea for an E minor fugue. If I can knock out these then all the major and minor keys from C major to F minor will be covered. Yep, you guessed it, I'll be at the half-way point for the 24 preludes and fugues.

I'd like to finish the whole set as quickly as I can but I want to finish it as EFFECTIVELY as I can. Pairing the works off into dozens made sense for Igor Rekhin and I would be a fool to not follow the precedent established by earlier composers. So while I would love to finish F# major, F# minor, G minor, A minor, B flat major, B major, and B minor those form a hefty amount of work. Meanwhile, if I focus on the smaller number of fugues to be finished in the first half I could reach a point where the first half in chromatic sequential and major/minor order is finished.

Seeing as this is intended to be a complete cycle of pieces it makes more sense to finish them in groups. Having said that, there's no reason that a guitarist could not perform just a few entries from the series. As yet I have few takers for performance. I've gotten some positive feedback about the project and specific pieces from a composer whose work I admire greatly so that's encouraging.

I'm thinking about performing all my F minor material as a unified work later this year. It may prove to be as brutal a gauntlet as Diabelli's F major guitar sonata (which pretty much nobody plays except Anthony Glise)! My compositions are not exactly in that style but for hard core classical guitar nerds you should go snap up Glise's edition of complete sonatas or Sor, Giuliani, and Diabelli. If I had money to burn (and believe me I don't!!) I'd go get this edition! Be warned, it's way, way out of print (as of 2006, why didn't I think to get that back when I had a job!).

So, anyhow, I'm still hunting for work and while I'm doing that I'm trying to prepare a few pieces for performance. The odds are good (unless something catastrophic happens to me) that I can finish at least half of the 24 this year, which excites me a great deal. These are the things that make life exciting for me (other people, I imagine, get excited by things like dating or building things). It would appear that other than Rekhin no one else has finished a set of these works. I won't be the first but at the rate things are going I'll be the first to finish a set that uses invertible counterpoint and employs grand stretto. Brouwer uses grand stretto brilliantly in his one fugue for guitar.

Man, now that I'm thinking about it, why doesn't Leo Brouwer write a set of preludes and fugues for solo guitar. I don't doubt that they would rock. Someone who has the time and resources should ask Brouwer if he plans to write more fugues for guitar! I'd do it but I've got no reasons to head to Cuba!