Professor Paul has given me his approval to post the following little essay on the Prologue to his piano work Episodes and Elegies.
He has offered to send the score to anyone who requests it, so send him a message, if you have not yet done so. He is also working on making a performance available.
For those who already received the score from him, brush it off and review it! Here is my little "analysis" of the first movement:
The opening Prologue contains a desire to fly away into freedom: the opening bars contain the instruction to 'bring out the uppermost line' which rises and seemingly wants to escape upward through a quasi-C# tonality. But then silence intervenes, along with a minor 9th mysteriously cradling a syncopated figure barely rising (bars 4-6). This dialogue, with variations and marked by silences, forms the structure of the Prologue, as the next bars indicate (e.g. compare bars 4-6 with the minor 9th on A-Bb in bars 16-18).
Of great melancholy is the lonely music in bars 19-28, where the cantabile line desperately wants to burst free, but is brought back down and ends in a variation of those minor 9th figures heard earlier, and it becomes obvious that escape to the stratosphere is not allowed for some reason. Pathetic, frantic flutterings show that Icarus has crashed. Of interest is how the fluttering on 16th notes in bars 33-34 contain minor 9th "arpeggios" (the entire up and down begins on F# and ends on G, with an intervening upward Bb-B and downward from D to Db), which link them to the dominant minor 9th figure heard in bars 4-6. We hear a variation on that motif in bars 36-40, and the silences marking off the two half-note chords in the bass show us that the game is over. We end mysteriously and even simmeringly in the bass, with that C# submerged with a low E, under a C minor chord, pulsing with its Eb and insisting therefore on the primacy of that minor 9th sound, causing one to sense a doubled minor mood."
