I’ve been in the midst of a deep exploration of Scarlatti’s sonatas, and there are officially 555. There is no other sonata we know about it. I was intrigued about how he did these things. So I wrote my own, thus “556”. If I can fool anyone into thinking he actually wrote this, that would be cool, because that was what I was after.

The rest of the story:

I had in mind pictures that were very athletic but a bit old-fashioned, perhaps like ballroom pictures. But last night I ran across some wonderful pictures of break dancers that fascinated me, so I thought why not use them here! Since my piece was something I wrote sometime in the last year, why not combine it with pictures from right now? So I did it.

Domenico Scarlatti wrote his last sonata somewhere around 1750.

So my composition is about 270 years late. But in my mind you can never have too much Scarlatti. His music is so invigorating and upbeat. No trolling piece would be complete without my troll!

At any rate, this was fun. In writing this I realized how much Scarlatti’s binary formula was very close to “sonata allegro” form.