This is music from my “Contemporary Classical” period and…

Wait, stay! No, really, this is not boring!! (I hope…)

Years ago I composed 24 piano preludes, one in each major and minor key, as is usual with such things.

I used the preludes as a kind of music lab where I could experiment with different ideas and techniques. In some ways this created a wide variety of different pieces.

But I had another idea – From the beginning I tried to make the preludes interconnect. Think of it, a prelude is supposed to lead into to something, like a fugue (Bach’s Preludes and Fugues being the best example). So I decided to have a prelude introduce the next prelude in the series. Sometimes the new one would even start with the main motif of the last!

Anyway, I had been improvising at the piano and came up with a wonderfully dark piece. I decided to write it out and came up with a stand-alone piece in C Minor, Remembrance. After listening a few times, I decided that it would fit in well with my preludes. I was working on a prelude in major, so, knowing the target, I changed it to introduce the new one. Only I had to transpose it to F Minor. This actually made it darker…

I had almost forgotten this until it came up on iTunes. I knew immediately that I had to do a video!

(Click here if you don’t see the video below)

I have posted several other preludes from this series and have written a handful of blog posts about them. Here are three others that have videos:

Prelude 3 in D Major.

Prelude 5 in E Major (my very first YouTube Video a decade ago!)

Prelude 9 in Ab Major – Dreams of Paris

I made this video before Notre Dame burned. One of my favorite places in the world.

I hope you enjoyed these Preludes! I recently put out an album with the Preludes and my piano sonatas. You can find them in the usual places, like Spotify.