On Quotation
I use quotation a lot in my music. If I’m writing a choral piece or a song, and I can refer to another piece of music that deals with the same or similar text, I’ll often throw in a chunk of someone else’s music to spice things up a bit. My first treatment of this, so far as I can remember, was in using a notable chord progression from Vierne’s Berceuse in the Nunc Dimittis of my Faux Bourdons. A Berceuse is an evening piece, and a Nunc Dimittis is an evening canticle, sung by Simeon in the evening of his life, so it felt right.
My PhD piece is being brought together by quotations from the hymn tune Columba: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sds1oHhFFSo
The opening rise and fall is the subject of my fugue:
Columba opening phrase, in 5/4 with a raised 4th (gotta have that Lydian flavour!)
And the first 2 phrases are the canon from the beginning of ACC 5 that I’ve been working on.
This time, it’s been modified to fit into a “1,3,1” scale that I’m using, but still with the raised 4th to fit into my overall Lydian approach.
And last night and today, I realised that the beginning of the 3rd phrase would work really nicely as the bridge from the 1st half of ACC 5 into the 2nd.
Bridge – Work in Progress
Which also ties it in nicely with the big passacaglia I wrote for the beginning of ACC 7
Passacaglia – Fragment
There is a recurring bell motif that happens throughout the piece. Until today, I wasn’t happy with any of the actual motifs I’d come up with. The beginnings were fine, but the endings were not. The ending is now going to be this 3rd phrase, and so, the whole piece will tie in together, bound by this one hymn tune, which is never explicitly stated – only played around with.
There is a similar treatment in the 3rd movement of The Falling Tear, which I think of as a toccata-fantasia on King Jesus Hath a Garden. Listen to that here: https://youtu.be/f5uqXGmD7Fg?t=334