Thursday, February 12, 2015

Eventide

The hymn-tune "Eventide," long associated with the hymn Abide with Me, has been a frequent target of my efforts. So for this week's hymn efforts, here is a reharmonization of it (perhaps handy for a final verse), a fauxbourdon because I like them (even when my harmony drifts to weird places), and a piece I've used as an improvisation for funerals, lenten services, and other similar quiet times. Since I've been doing this for a while, it feels like I'm finally putting down on paper something that's been in my repertoire for years. It's a weird feeling, to be sure.
Here they are!

When I see an accidental in the melody, I can't help but think "Key change," instead of "Leading tone." Forgive me, it only gets wilder.



Why yes, that is a cadence on the minor median resolving deceptively to the major median and sliding out from a second-inversion chord to a root-position tonic a tritone away. And yes, the harmony voices have a tendency to move in whole-tone scales from time to time.
Honestly, I'm not sure if the tenors would have an easy time with this one, melody or not. The urge to cadence out-of-key was strong, but resisted.
And as usual, the PDFs are here, and here's the license:


Creative Commons License
Harmonization and Fauxbourdon on "Eventide" by Mike Cutler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

And the Simple Meditation. The pages should cycle every five seconds.

PDF available here


This is the same improvisational pattern I used to write the Meditation in the Little Suite, incidentally.

Creative Commons License
Simple Meditation on "Eventide" by Mike Cutler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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