As promised, I have been stabbing away at Prelude (no fugue) No. 6, and by George, I think I’ve got it. So naturally I’m taking a break.

First of all, it occurred to me that the sounds (“Piano Moods” by one Herbert Boland) I had downloaded from freesound.com to make a warning sound for my teaching periods at school would make awesome ringtones. Thanks, Herbert!

(I used GarageBand to combine three minutes worth of Boland’s sounds to make this warning sound. We’ll be deep in some kind of info skills work, and from nowhere comes the sound of the “time fairies,” as the kids have nicknamed it. Very gentle, very nice, and it gives us three minutes to put our work away and get ready to leave.)

So, Prelude No. 6. I had sketched out a nice little ditty previously, but set it aside to see what else I could come up with. (Here’s the mp3 of that sketch.) This morning, I started afresh with a quiet, simple theme which I then could repeat at a fugue-like interval: Prelude 6-2_sketch. There’s the opening thematic statements, then a little break, then a trial run of how I could play with the theme and defeat the expectation of the fugue.

Then I took a break, since it was going well, of course, and picked up a book, Labyrinths, by Sig Lonegren, which I had not opened in months. Just kind of thumbed through it and all of its New Age-y moonbattery. That’s where I found, on p. 139, his correlation of the paths of the 11-circuit labyrinth (mine is a 7-circuit) to the notes of the scale. Well, who could resist that?

So now I have a twelve-tone row, which I am treating as a tonal progression, in a non-fugue kind of way. To wit: Prelude 6-3_sketch. Notice the nice opening theme, which leads into a fugal statement. There’s a break, and then I try out a chord progression for the notes, both in the tonic and the dominant.

That’s where I am at the moment. It’s lunch time, and I’m happy. Now all I have to do is write the damned thing.

Oh, and the first one I think is going to be used in the cello sonata.