North Coast Synthesis Ltd.

Prelude

At one time it was common for performers, especially on harpsichord, to play a little bit of improvised music to check the tuning, warm up their fingers, and set the mood for the more seriously planned performance to follow. Originally, these "preludes" would be entirely made up on the spot; but there eventually developed a tradition of practicing them in advance and writing them down. Nowadays the "prelude" is a specific genre of short written keyboard (usually piano) music. But there was an intermediate stage, especially during the 17th Century, when some composers wrote unmeasured preludes, where the written music showed which pitches to play but not their durations. Louis Couperin is one of the today best-known 17th Century composers of unmeasured preludes, and I have followed his notation (an interesting challenge for computer notation software) in writing mine.

I wanted to put an unmeasured prelude into the Carmilla suite both because I thought the concept was fun, and as a sort of clue to anyone who might try to play the music from the written form that this entire suite is intended to be played under something like Baroque performance practice, in other words, with improvisation allowed. In the Baroque period, written music was seen as more a guideline or suggestion than as detailed and precise instructions. It is not meant for players to reproduce the timing and exact notes played by my MIDI sequencer; and writing the prelude unmeasured forces them to realize that right from the start.