100 Days – Day 91

Another fugue, this time in the first movement.

To be honest I always knew it was going to be there. I’ve just been resisting. This time though, it’s got quite a long, meandering subject, so I’m only having one exposition before moving on to the next bit of text – no episodes or anything. Although it does have a tiny bit of stretto between the alto and bass just before the end.

When all this is over, I think I’ll sit down and arrange the 3 fugues from ACC into an organ piece called “Three Fugues on Columba”. It would mean developing this first one, and writing proper endings for all of them (at the moment they just segue straight into the next bit of music) but that would be ok. Could be an interesting companion.

I’m also intending to apply for a commission opportunity that would see me writing for string quartet and one other instrument. I’m thinking celtic harp, and taking some of the principal themes from ACC and arranging them into a sort of 10 minute tone poem type thing, based on the famous Fil Súil nglas fégas Érinn dar a hais poem. It would be appropriate for ACC to produce these kinds of ‘children’ , as the High King of Ireland himself decreed when Columba copied a book out without permission – in what may have been the earliest judgement on copyright – that “Each cow has her calf'; Each book, its copy.”