Activity

And the final movement of “it”, as my Oxford friends and I nicknamed this piece. Wq 23, III… this is one of the movements of Wq 23 I analyzed in Thrice Great Hermetica and the Janus Age. It’s composed around two, and only two, motifs, a falling octave (with all possible permutations), and a falling sequential three-note motif, f-e-d. Then a look backward at his father’s toccata in D minor for the final phrase as an homage to his father(who visited Berlin the year before this piece was composed: 1748). The fun in this piece is how many permutations of just those two motifs can you detect… backward, forward, upside down, slowed down, sped up, inverted order, and all combinations of those combinations… put on your thinking cap, because Carl Philip’s genius mind is having quite a bit of fun: