Peebles Composition #1

Composition #1: Longish Ago

Longish Ago is based off of a standard folk tune written in the mid-nineteenth century by Thomas Bayly, Long, Long Ago. The original lyrics to the first verse of this song are:

Tell me the tales that to me were so dear,

Long, long ago, long, long ago,

Sing me the songs I delighted to hear,

Long, long ago, long ago,

Now you are come all my grief is removed,

Let me forget that so long you have roved.

Let me believe that you love as you loved,

Long, long ago, long ago.

This song yearns nostalgically for the past. In my setting of this melody, I tried to capture this nostalgia by recasting this song using pitch and rhythmic materials from the twentieth century. This composition is influenced by Bela Bartok, a Hungarian composer who traveled the country side collecting folk tunes, which he then used as a basis for his own compositions.

The pitch material in my composition, Longish Ago, comes from standard twentieth-century referential collections. The opening is centered about pitch-class D, which sounds as a drone pitch in the opening violin accompaniment.  The pitch-class D also shapes the melody, with several phrases beginning and ending with this note (see m. 2, m. 3, m. 6, m. 8, and m. 12). This piece is in ternary form, which is defined in part by the use of referential collections. The opening A section is in D-Dorian, while the B section is in WT₀. When A returns in m. 8, the melody is once again in D-Dorian. The middle section does not feature a distinct pitch center. A few times I used notes outside of the prevailing mode, notably the Bb in mm. 2, 5, and 11. This note provides a tragic contrast to the B-naturals that occur in D-Dorian.

I began the piece with an asymmetric meter, 5/8, and I switched to 7/8 midway through the A section. The unpredictability of these meters made the melody less rhythmically square (compared to the original). The metric modulation occurs at the beginning of the B section, where the previous eighth note becomes the new quarter note. The effect is a slowing down of the melody.

This composition is for violin and clarinet. The opening A section begins with a melody (clarinet) and accompaniment (violin) texture. While clarinet’s phrase ends on the downbeat of m. 8, the violin takes up the melody for the B section of the piece. This gesture is passed imitatively between the two instruments. When A returns, the violin now has the melody while the clarinet has a new countermelody.

I wanted a contrast in dynamics between the A and B sections of the piece. The A section is wistful and reflective what the B section is a dramatic outburst. In the A section I gave the melody line slightly louder dynamics and the crescendo and decrescendo follow the shape of the melody. To give closure to the piece, I decided to end with the same accompanimental gesture heard at the opening, but played backwards.

The recording is posted on Sakai.