Believe it or not, I have enough interest and confidence in my work so far that I frequently go back and listen to older stuff with pleasure. (The pieces are like kids — I had a substantial role in their creation, and love checking back in to see how they fit into the “family” as it grows!)

Today I decided to make some changes. This, of course, is a dangerously slippery slope which could clog up my schedule, perturb recording and publishing — and sometimes with no positive effect. But I made a couple of very small changes to my string quartet which actually make logical sense, and boosted one movement’s liveliness.

The quartet’s 4th movement just seemed to drag a bit, so I boosted the tempo just a hair. It was a subtle change, but the results were very much to my liking, so I made them stick. What’s interesting is, the tempo is now closer to “Allegro,” so I changed that marking, and the title of the movement. But wait! The first movement is “Allegro!” And it’s slower! It’s now “Allegretto.” (Yeah, I’m spending too much on this!) Since the performance of all but the 4th movement haven’t changed, I just renamed stuff. However, I exported the 4th movement in the new tempo, and updated the video to match. You can find the 4th movement here, or see the quartet’s project page here. (A word of warning — The URLs still use the original movement names to preserve web links, but the page titles and reference text have been changed.)

Speaking of changes — Je danse, J’apprends has a few updates. Most notable is the “Gavotte/Musette,” which has been changed to improve its “dancy-ness” — I’ve made the play style more in keeping with the dance feeling of a gavotte. There hasn’t been a lot of other changes to the movement, but the whole thing sounds different enough to push through a new export video. You can listen to it here.

And, of course, in the “yeah, that’s trivial” department, I’ve renamed the 2nd dance to “gigue,” which is the original French name for that style of dance (more currently called “jig”). The whole suite has a French title, so that makes some sense. I didn’t change the music itself, so that playback isn’t new.

For those of you following along at home and hungry for a completed fourth movement (the final of that piece), patience! I’ve made real progress, and have a pretty good picture of the whole thing in my head. But you can’t listen to that, so you’ll just have to wait until I commit it to notes!

(Image note: As you can tell, I’m still playing with Microsoft Bing’s Image Creator AI tool. Too fun!)