The Cat's Fugue
The first chapter (in its present, working stage) to Greg's book, titled The Art and Evolution of Piano Recital Programming. It's a comical synopsis of the evolution of the piano recital and programming told the perspective of an innocent, 300-year-old fugue. Footnotes have been removed from this version.
Prelude: The Cat's Fugue
by Greg Anderson
I would like to offer a presumptuously preposterous hypothesis, all in good fun:
1738.
Setting: An unoccupied music room in the Royal Spanish Court. In the corner stands a highly ornate harpsichord.
Enter, Cat.
Upon sight of the abandoned harpsichord, the feline’s curiosity escalates to an unbearable magnitude. She looks right, then left to verify her privacy. Gracefully she leaps up and tiptoes across the keyboard. A succession of utterly ugly pitches is heard.
CAT: “Alas! L’Art de toucher le Clavicin! Couperin would be so proud.”
The court composer Domenico Scarlatti, donning a gigantic hairpiece and a horrific expression, makes a dramatic entrance.
SCARLATTI: “What the hell!”
He scares the sensitive beast witless. She races off in search of regained pride, and in doing so, she extends her claws and razes the fine polish on poor Scarlatti’s instrument.
A blast of Inspiration strikes the music room of the Spanish Court that afternoon in 1738. The combination of dissonance and rage, induced by unnecessary destruction and the utterly ugly pitches produced by Miss Pussy’s paw, serve to ignite something truly brilliant within Scarlatti’s mind.
Domenico Scarlatti sits at his recently totaled harpsichord and begins playing. From within the wooden box emanates a masterpiece, thus immortalizing the cat’s stroll: a fugue with her footsteps as the theme.
And so entered The Cat’s Fugue into the keyboard repertoire.
