A Pedagogical Piece Proceeding from Paganini (Part I)

Five years ago, the music theorist Richard Cohn published a book called Audacious Euphony. At one point in the book, he expressed no knowledge of the existence of a certain kind of triadic succession in nineteenth-century classical music. When I wrote a review of his book, I expressed the same thing. So I decided to write some music that not only used this succession, but also demonstrated other aspects from his book. It may be twenty-first-century music, but it is based upon a well-known and oft-varied piece of nineteenth-century music: the last of the 24 Caprices of Niccolò Paganini for solo violin, whose composition was completed no later than 200 years ago this November (as shown on this manuscript). Here is my variation, with a score and my approximating performance.

I'll reveal this progression, and discuss other aspects of this piece—including why I chose Paganini's caprice to illustrate parts of Cohn's approach—in the coming months.

Here is also a PDF of the score.