Ten Little Waltzes

You all know I’ve been reading Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and enjoying it immensely. However, I’m usually able to read only a handful of chapters (they’re very short) because just as he introduces a topic or a character, he veers off into a completely different direction. His ability to pull the same gag every six pages over 800 pages is pretty genius, I have to admit.

Anyway, over the weekend I popped out two more Little Waltzes, and they’re bangers, Viennese from top to bottom, beginning to end. But first I need to circle back and talk about “10. Grandly.”

“Grandly” [score [pdf] | mp3] has always seemed to have problems, to me, harmonic weirdnesses that kept getting weirder the more I futzed with. I never felt that it was finished, nor that it could serve as the grand finale to the suite.

And can I bemoan how much I miss Finale’s “human playback” options? There was some subtlety there that MuseScore is simply lacking. If you go and listen to the nine current waltzes, you can probably tell which ones were exported from Finale; they simply sound more human.

Not that Finale human playback is any match for an actual human, or better yet, a goddess. I was fortunate enough to be asked by a goddess if I would write a piano suite for her: Maila Springfield, of Valdosta State University. That’s one reason Six Preludes (no fugues) is so hard to play — I was writing for a goddess.

As an example, here’s the score for “Prelude No. 2 (no fugue).”

Here is what Finale thought it sounded like:

Not bad, but when I first heard what Maila made of it, I couldn’t comprehend how I wrote that.

See? So while I wish MuseScore did a prettier export, I really would like to see what an actual pianist could make of “Grandly.”

I completely disassembled it. I took a blank sheet of score paper and went through “Grandly” measure for measure, just penciling in the chords of each measure, seeing if they made sense to my minimally-trained eye — and then I sat down the the keyboard and let my minimally-trained hands play through each chord, listening to see if each one sounded “right” and if it led somehow to the next chord.

I discovered more than one place where even I should have known better, and in the long run I think I have triumphed over what I originally wrote. The next question is, do I want it in the suite as the finale, or even at all?

Anyway, that means there’s only one more Little Waltz to go. Can’t wait to tell you about it!