The Mazurka: Tonal serialism I’ve used what I dub “tonal serialism” for this piece. Rather than using a 12 note tone row with all semitones of the octave, as is customary for regular serialism, I’ve used a row of 7 distinct diatonic pitches, without specifying any accidentals, allowing it to be easily used in a tonal context. I’ve used the series in the melody only, allowing the harmony the flow freely, accompanying the melody....
After the opening section which I’ve analysed here, a fugue starts, which I will analysis in this post. As is common to fugues, this fugue starts with the subject in one voice, which is answered by the subject on the dominant in another voice, accompanied by a countersubject. After a short transition section, the subject is played in the tonic in the bass voice, accompanied by the countersubject and some other contrapuntal material....
The beginning of Bach’s Ouverture in B minor is built from sequences hidden in plain sight. Sequences are parts of music that are repeated an interval higher or lower. In this particular piece, single notes in the melody and in the bass are repeated sequencially, moving in parallel most of the time. Due to embellishments and octave displacement, the sequences might not immediately be clear to the ear, but once you’ve seen my analysis, you’ll be convinced that this page of Bach’s music is fundamentally based on sequences....
In this blog I will show how I composed the baroque style piece ‘Ouverture’ starting with simple, strict two-voice counterpoint, and then embellishing that into a fuller baroque style. Most of the material is derived from a single melody which is varied using augmentation, fragmentation, inversion and embellishment. In the sheet music for this blog I’ve added numbers in between the two staves indicating the intervals between the top and the bottom voice....