This week’s posting is a performance of Francisco Guerau’s “Folia.” In the baroque era, a folia is a dance in three with the accents on the first and second beats of each measure–as opposed to a jig, say, which tends to accent beats one and three. The folia also has a pretty typical harmonic structure that is repeated throughout the piece, which hopefully you can hear. It looks like this:
| i | V | i | VII | III | VII | i | V |
This phrase structure is then repeated, with a slight hurrying-up of the i-V at the end so that each section of music here can be marked with a cadence.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with Roman Numeral notation when referring to chords in music, all you need to know is this: there’s a repeating bass line throughout this piece. The entire thing is more or less a theme-and-variations, with the theme stated at the beginning.
Anyway, I’ve been working on practicing every day in 2018, and so far things have actually been going pretty well. Practice is fun, in that when you do it enough you can actually feel yourself get better. But then, it’s also not fun, because sometimes you don’t get that and it’s just an hour or so of hard work with no evident reward. In that way, I suppose, practice is a great metaphor for life.
Marshall Escamilla 