Jenny Has A Go At Composition #6

Irregular metre, phrases and grouping 29/5/21

Another piece of music I want to draw inspiration from is Dvorak’s 7th Humoresque in Gb Major. The lilting feel of pastoral folk music is captured in this piece. Despite the work being in 2/4 Dvorak wrote out the lilt characteristic through use of note values. In contrast, Stanhope uses irregular meter in Dancing on Clouds to evoke the dance characteristic of the piece. Now I have had the chance to experiment with both concepts. I also like the idea of challenging the notion of grouping irregular meter the same way throughout a piece. It seems pretty neat to be able to create variety from using different groupings within consecutive bars.

I want to pair this with odd phrase lengths, three bar phrasing using the theme mentioned previously isn’t as jarring as I expected. Particularly due to the two bars of moving notes and one bar of longer note values that acts as more of a transition into the next phrase. Before the indicated C section, I used a 2/4 bar to suggest a new idea and create consistency between parts.