Rag and Fugue on Dorian Clusters - (2007) ![](images/01_Little_Green_Dot.gif)
for piano
The defining characteristic of the rag -- or ragtime music -- is a specific type of syncopation in which melodic accents occur between metrical beats, as one hears in the fine rags of the turn of the last century, which has a melodic theme avoid some metrical beats of the accompaniment by emphasizing notes that either anticipate or follow the beat. Rags have been notated in 2/4 and 4/4 time, and there are ragtime waltzes as well. Black American poet and author James Weldon Johnson wrote " the United States is popularly known better by ragtime than by anything else it has produced in a generation. In Paris they call it American music." The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, 1912. It is from his collection of other black poets' works in 1922 that I have taken poems to set as art songs.
This rag places five-notes diatonic clusters into the right hand as the left plays out the underlying square rhythm, according to the normal rag pattern. Rooting the tonality on D yields a "white note" Dorian scale as the rag's tonality. The occasional non-harmonic tone within the Dorian scale adds spice and a sense of secondary tonal regions.
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The fugue subject is spelled in three-note clusters in the Dorian mode, with the answer in a corresponding but inauthentic quasi-dominant, still rooted on the "white notes" of the keyboard. The fugue abandons the 2/4 of the rag for this three quarter time contrappunctus.
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The last statements of the fugue subject layers one atop another, offset by one beat. A final recollection of the rag theme brings this short fugue to its close still firmly in the tonality of D Dorian.
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The score for Rag and Fugue on Dorian Clusters is available as a free PDF download, though any major commercial performance or recording of the work is prohibited without prior arrangement with the composer. Click on the graphic below for this piano score.
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Rag and Fugue on Dorian Clusters
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