Analyzing the short piano piece

So yesterday your assignment was to listen to this short piece. Now I'm going to talk about a few techniques I tried to use. If you want to try to find these techniques in this short piece I have provided the sheet music here

Chromatic Saturation

this is the subject

a subject is a short idea for which a whole fugue is derived. I can go more into the details of how this works if there is interest.

This subject is chromatically saturated which means that it contains every chromatic pitch between the lowest and highest note of the melody. here the lowest note is C and the highest note is G 

below are all the chromatic pitches between C and G 

this example shows that each note is present in the subject

Thematic Transformation

the numbers shown in the previous two examples will be used to explain scale degrees. Currently these numbers represent pitches in the chromatic scale but they can be applied to different scales.

Now the theme is made up of scale degrees in this order: 1,7,5,7,4,8,8,3,2,6

so if we apply those numbers to the octatonic scale instead of the chromatic scale we get a subject that looks like the one below

 any scale can be transposed (each note shifted proportionately up or down a certain number of semitones) the example below is the Octatonic Scale 0,2 transposed up three semitones

If you look in the right hand (the top staff) at measure 9 in the score you will see a transformed, transposed version of the original subject.

Stretto

To understand stretto, one must understand imitation. typically when one voice imitates another, it repeats the material of the first voice DIRECTLY after the first one is finished with the idea. sometimes it might be at the same pitch level (or transposition) or it might be at a different one

here is how that plays out at the beginning of my short piece

however, stretto occurs when the second voice enters with the imitation before the first voice finishes the initial idea such as in the example below

there's something about this imitation that is unusual. It has to do with one of the previous terms we learned. If you can figure it out then post it in the comment section of this article.