Another piano piece. This was a 6 bar doodle in my files from April 29, 2005 that had resisted extension until now. But once I seized on what the subject was, it became pretty easy to round it off:
The math team is at an away meet – in the cafeteria of an unfamiliar school, on enemy ground – and tensions are, as always, running high. Something goes wrong – Seth left his TI-82 in Mr. Walecki’s car and it’s too late to get it now – which is the kind of retard thing Seth would do, and that means that it is now LOGICALLY IMPOSSIBLE for the team to come in any better than fourth place. So Alex starts in on Seth about how he SINGLEHANDEDLY DECIMATED the team’s chances, and Seth, red-faced, snaps back about how Alex is DEAD WRONG because he doesn’t understand that with the new scaling, the calculator round is only 5% of the score, and then Jason, with bitter exasperation, shouts that they’re both being IDIOTS because the last four rounds are OBVIOUSLY not going to be AVERAGED, and then the whole team degenerates into a tangle of heated, convoluted sniping about technicalities. Nerd fight!!!
You can make up your own scenario, but something along those lines.
As has been true of all the pieces on this site for the past year or so, I haven’t taken the time to clean up the score for public consumption. Sorry.
You may well point out that the original 6 bars are markedly better than the rest of it. I agree. But isn’t it better to finish something badly than to never finish it? Well, gosh, I’m not sure.
Nice. It’s a real likeable and successful final movement of a sonatina. If, at about 3/4 of the way through, (sorry, no bars to refer to) the buildup built even further to a full-fledged and developed fugue, it could be the final movement of a big sonata. I say keep this one in your notebook and keep poking at it now and then to see what other goodies it generates. Just like Lenny.
Nice.
I definitely hear Kapustin’s influence here. The piece is fun. And I like your nerdy mathlete scenario.
You are surely correct about Kapustin being an influence – but only technically, rather than, uh, artistically. At least I hope! I should probably post some of my many and conflicted thoughts about Mr. Kapustin on here at some point.