Perenepsis XV: Not a Waltz

Nothing for nine months, and then two new pieces in two days? Here's what happened:

Reverie was actually finished (as in no more tinkering at all) for a couple weeks before I finally got around to posting it yesterday, and a couple days ago when I decided to declare it part of the Perenepsis series, I wanted to make sure which number came next. It should've been 14, but when I looked through my manuscripts, I found a 14 sitting there already, and to top it off, it contained bits of four different ideas. Instead of going out of order as I've already done a couple times, I decided to make Reverie #14, yank out one particular idea from the old 14, make it 15, and retain the rest of the old 14 as 16.  Now that that's all cleared up, on to the piece itself.

It's in 5/4 (except for a 7/4 at the end of the first half and another at the very end), hence the subtitle -- while it's also not a lot of other things, a waltz is one of the things it's most not, even though part of it is rather waltz-like (while still not being a waltz). The overall form is ABAB(A), the last A in parentheses because it's highly truncated. The A section is in Gm/Dm, and the B section (the part that's waltz-like, but not a waltz) is in Eb/Ab. Like Perenepsis XIII (Tapping), it has a lot of grace notes, this time to make up for the fact that 5/4 isn't a naturally graceful time signature. When I yanked it out of the original #14 manuscript, only the first 8-10 bars had been written, but once I got back to it, spurred on by having finished Reverie (and having made good progress on my G Minor Symphony), the rest of it came together pretty quickly.

Something I recently noticed is that my titles have been somewhat inconsistent in regard to the Perenepsis series -- Some have a descriptive name as the main title with the Perenepsis number as a subtitle, while others have the Perenepsis part as the main title with a descriptive subtitle. There's a reason for this: The main title is whatever name I come up with first. If I start out writing a Perenepsis, that's the main title, and I try to come up with something descriptive as a subtitle (with varying degrees of success, as shown by this one's subtitle). Other times, as with Reverie and Uncertain Time, the descriptive title comes to me first, and I decide that it's a Perenepsis while writing it -- sometimes early on, and other times toward the end. If anyone besides me was wondering about that, there it is.