In January of 2025 my father mentioned to me the idea of extending a few organ works that he had written in 2011/2012 as short preludes to choral works for the organist at my old school of Oakham in Rutland. I don’t believe the organist, Thomas Chatterton, ever really played them, and Gavin thought it might be nice to give them a new lease of life through my extension of them. There were four of these pieces, which he had labelled Pythagorean Comma Pieces.

​

From my initial viewing and listening to the pieces I felt they were rather complete in of themselves and was unsure how to extend them in a way that would feel organic, but I did have the idea that they could work as ‘preludes’ to a set of ‘preludes and fugues’ (in the loosest sense) and as such decided to use that as my working template and methodically worked through the four, creating ‘fugues’ in response to Gavin’s ‘preludes’.

 

In each of my ‘fugues’ I took something from the ‘prelude’ that preludes them as my starting point and then wrote the piece onwards from that, sometimes referring to the prelude, but often just responding to it. I tried to also create a overall feel to the work as a complete set of four pieces that could be played together by also having my ‘fugues’ contrasting the ‘preludes’ in timbre, feel, scope, speed, etc. and in doing so I feel the overall set works quite nicely together.