Sonic Groove Live, Week 12 - Jongbloed, Prelude "Tota pulchra es" (original)

Recently I wrote three posts about my learning proces how to compose a chorale prelude when taking an existing composition as a model:

• https://steempeak.com/classical-music/@partitura/how-to-compose-a-choral-prelude-1
• https://steempeak.com/classical-music/@partitura/how-to-compose-a-choral-prelude-2
• https://steempeak.com/classical-music/@partitura/how-to-compose-a-choral-prelude-3

And I posted a recording of the resulting three choral preludes here:
https://steempeak.com/secretsoforganplaying/@partitura/how-to-play-a-chorale-prelude

As a result of the publication of these three works I was contacted by someone with the question if I could write something to end a choral piece. And he send me a link to hymn in question, called "Tota pulchra es": https://musescore.com/user/14184756/scores/5318919

Though I would not (yet?) call myself a composer I decided to try anyway. I started playing with the first five notes of this hymn, to see where it would lead me. The melody is far to long to do something similar as I did in the three posts mentioned above. So I wanted to create something else. To my ears the melody evokes a sound world of mild dissonants in a romantic idiom. I could of course try to harmonize the given melody in that way, but than I would have a choral harmonization and not really a prelude or a postlude. It would be more interesting to me to start with the first motif of the melody and perhaps later on reference some elements of the melody and let the rest of the piece grow out of these elements.

When not following exactly a given melody, the problem immediately rises of how to structure the piece, how to give it form. Musical form can become quite complicated, but I wanted to keep it simple. After all, it's my first organ piece where the form is not dictated by the choral melody. And the most simple musical form is A - B - A. Or in words: play something, play something else, play the first something again. I made it a bit more complex than that, but only a bit. The form I used can be summarized as: A - A' - B - B - A' - Coda. Or in words: play something, play a variation of that, play something else, repeat it, play the variation again, play something to conclude it. And each of these elements is only four bars long, so it is still a short piece.

I actually quite like the result. I hope you do too.

Score: http://partitura.org/index.php/david-abel-praeludium-2