Prelude (music)
|
|
A prelude is a short piece of music, usually in no particular internal form.
Originally, an instrumental prelude was originally a short extemporised piece of music played before the piece to be performed proper. It developed out of the natural tendency to play a few notes before commencing. The term is also used to refer to an overture, particularly to an opera or oratorio.
The French harpsichordists, following Louis Couperin, developed a form of unmeasured prelude, in which the duration of each note is left to the performer. It was used until the first decade of the 18th century; Rameau's first printed piece (1706) is in this form.
In Baroque music, the prelude was often paired with the fugue. For example, Johann Sebastian Bach composed two sets of preludes and fugues in all twenty-four major and minor keys in a series called the Well-Tempered Clavier.
The prelude eventually became a recognised musical form in its own right. Other series of preludes in all twenty-four keys were written by composers for the piano by Frederic Chopin, Sergei Rachmaninoff, and Alexander Scriabin. Dmitri Shostakovich wrote a set of 24 Preludes and Fugues, as well as an earlier set of 24 Preludes for piano. Claude Debussy wrote twenty-four preludes, but they do not run progressively through the cycle of keys.fi:Preludi ca:Preludi de:Präludium fr:Prélude it:Preludio ja:前奏曲 nl:Prelude pl:Preludium zh:前奏曲