David Mecionis

Organ

Composer's Note:

Fugue in Z: Fugue-fantasia on two pairs of z-related hexachords (organ solo, 2024) is a four-voice fugue inspired by the idea of "z-relation" as discovered and propounded by American music theorists Allen Forte and Joseph N. Straus. Z-relation is characterized by two sets of pitches—in this case pairs of hexachords, or six-pitch sets—where neither set of the pair can be inverted or transposed to produce the other set and yet they possess the exact same interval content. It is not that they are unrelated but that they are, as Straus argues in his seminal work Introduction to Post-Tonal Theory, "like first cousins" rather than siblings. I believe this commonality can be used to give the listener an impression not unlike what one gets from classical tonality, in which controlled similarites and differences contrive to bring attention to a chosen key center and a small number of related keys. All of this is admittedly—with apolgies to Dr. Straus—not very "post-tonal." But I found it too interesting and fun to resist exploring.

The six-bar fugue statement is comprised of four uneven sections freely derived from two pairs of z-related hexachords. Each hexachord is transposed such that the statement sounds more or less as if in the key of D. The second voice follows in the manner of a tonal answer, entering by the customary interval of a fifth from the statement but with the hexachords rearranged to alter certain melodic intervals such that the "key" is preserved. The sense of there being a dominant key of D throughout this piece is often traceable to the handling of the z-related sets.