Meditation on Wondrous Love - new project going slower than anticipated

All it took to get me back in to things was a donation. How about that?

Naw, I'm kidding. I've been busy with a bunch of other projects, mainly performing ones, and I just haven't been on the ball regarding my weekly writing plans. I'll get back to it eventually... I hope! I may even catch up on the few weeks I've missed.

So! first of all, I need to send out a gigantic Thank You to Carson Cooman, who

- gave generously to support my ongoing projects (third weekly prelude book starting soon!)

- suggested the tune to write a prelude on; and

- mentioned in passing an interest in single-manual, small-pedal-compass organs, providing an interesting creative challenge for writing this work.

So here, then, without further ado, is the Meditation on "Wondrous Love" (click for downloadable PDF) - just in time for Lent, no less!

So thanks again to Carson, and hopefully I'll have more in the pipeline shortly!

Mike

Meditation on Wondrous Love by Mike Cutler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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Postlude on Hyfrydol: new year, new projects

Well! it's 2017 now.

Time to get back to the weekly work. New year, new project. Or, rather, getting going on an old project that was started but never followed through.

Last summer I got married (whoo!) and last fall I got very, very busy (also whoo!) such that I just didn't have the drive to continue my weekly hymn-based works. So that's my 2017 project - one a week, based on a hymn tune.

I have Richard Crossman to thank for his generous donation and his suggestion of using Hyfrydol. If you have a hymn tune you'd like to see given a treatment, let me know - and if you want to support my work in doing so, there's a link at the bottom of the post to my GoFundMe page. I'm still getting ready to start my third book of 24 free works, and a little extra money goes a long way towards making that happen!

So here's the Postlude on Hyfrydol (Click on this link for a PDF):

All the best to all in the new year!

Postlude on Hyfrydol by Mike Cutler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Your donations can help me keep writing these! Click to feed a composer! Help me fund my third book of free preludes!

Back in to the swing!

So. I have two new projects underway.

I'm vlogging!

My first NaNoWriMo project vlog (more below), followed by my second:



So there's also my NaNoWriMo project: a symphony for organ.

I detail the rules for this project in my first vlog post, but to summarize, I'm writing a

• multi-movement
• 15-30 minute
• solo organ
• motivically unified

symphony in the span of thirty days.

And in the three four days since the month started... I have a few sketches, and a full-bore theme for variations:

Not a bad start, I think, all told!

More to come as I do more. I haven't abandoned my other projects, just busy with other other projects and in recovery from a wedding and a vacation. Soon enough, I'll be back at it.

Cheers!

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Prelude recording #3

After a week-long illness followed by much business, I've lost a lot of ground on things I want to do. So before a weekend away, I was able to record the third Prelude:

The original post for this prelude is here!

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Prelude recordings - #1 and #2

I've begun recording my preludes!

The first two are here:

And here:

And the table of contents will be updated with links as I go!

Reminder: it's supporters that can make things like this much easier for me to do. GoFundMe is a great way to back me for making recordings and writing music!

Your donations can help me keep writing these! Click to feed a composer!

Bach-plus: what comes after the Pedal-exercitium?

A very kind person by the name of Victor Frost donated to my project; I asked him what he would like to see in exchange, and he mentioned the Bach Pedal-exercitium, and that he thought after my pedal study (Voluntary in D Major) that I should take a run at that work.
And while I completed the incomplete work, I'm not sure that the result is exactly what he had in mind.
Here's a PDF of the work, so you can try it for yourself.

So I started from the "completions" of the Pedal-exercitium I found through some research, and I decided that rather than continue in the toccata style, I'd add a new movement. I took the Exercitium to be prelude material, and added a second movement:

... a second movement for double pedal. But, as you can tell from the key (not the G minor we started in) and the open cadence at the end, we're not finished.

So I added a third movement:

... and created a Little Suite for pedals.

If you want to see the first and last pages, I recommend the above PDF; if you want to see more like this, I recommend the "donation" button below!

Thanks again to Victor for his kind donation!

Little Suite for Pedals by Mike Cutler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Your donations can help me keep writing these! Click to feed a composer!

Voluntary in G Major - Fun with sevenths

Here's a PDF!

It's a beautiful morning, I'm up early, and I just sent my partner to Toronto because she wants to learn to make more documentaries.

This is one that bugged me for a while. I've been living with this melodic idea for a couple weeks, wondering how to make it work. So this is an experimental effort - which, in reality, is the point of this project, not just to write more of the same, but to try on some different ideas.

I've long been fascinated by the major seventh as a piece of a melodic and/or harmonic language, looking for ways to make use of it. This piece is a little... heavy handed with it - the main motif outlines the major seventh chord, it cadences on the major seventh in several places (including finally), the harmonies make use of it - but even so, I like the sound of it. Maybe because it's a blissfully short voluntary.

Next week is my final "voluntary!" Then I'm on to the next project.

I would be happy once more to point to the tip jar below...

Voluntary in G Major by Mike Cutler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Your donations can help me keep writing these! Click to feed a composer!

Voluntary in B Minor - Harmonic games and twelve-tone rows

PDF behind this link!

So I'm reasonably sure this won't be as popular as last week's offering, but that's fine, I'm not doing this project for anything but my own edification, and this was rather edifying. Kind of fun, too!

The concept on this voluntary is very simple. There's a harmonic progression happening below, above, or around a constant note, and at cadential points there's a quick melodic turn through all twelve chromatic notes to land on the new pedal point. This voluntary is more about effect, something like a dramatic (hammy?) entrance, than it is about the notes themselves - not that the notes should be ignored, of course.

The processes in getting recordings set up are underway. Soon!

Legal stuff and a reminder: I'm almost done the second set of weekly pieces, which means I'm almost starting on the third set! If you want to throw me a little tip to make that process simpler, it would be highly appreciated.

{This} by Mike Cutler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Your donations can help me keep writing these! Click to feed a composer!

Voluntary in D Major - Pedal exercises?

We have PDF!

My forty-fifth weekly organ piece, and finally I get to a piece of pedalwork. I've tried it - it works. And by and large, it works with alternating toes. This was fun to hammer out, since I don't write at the organ; there was a lot of rewriting and testing, and making sure that it was possible. And it is!

It seems that I've only been able to write one sort of single-line piece for the organ to date, the moto perpetuo. I need to expand my repertoire in that direction a little bit, I think. I've written several pieces for the flute alone and they're interesting and varied (in my own not-at-all humble opinion). However, one of the more interesting things to do on the organ is to mess with textures, and when writing pieces that naturally limit textural options there's only so much that one can do.

I think to Dénis Bédard's Trois esquisses pour le pédale seul, which are three lovely and varied works, and I wonder if maybe I shouldn't be doing something like that. Another idea to file away for another time...

At any rate. Here's the Voluntary in D. Three more "voluntaries" to go, and then my next 24-piece project begins!

Legalities and handout button:

Voluntary in D Major by Mike Cutler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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Voluntary in F-sharp Minor - Fantasy on the Hexachord

Fantasy on a PDF!

So I decided that I would use the hexachord, kind of, for a voluntary. The hexachord is usually a reference to ut (or do) - re - mi - fa - sol - la, a six-note scalar pattern. I'm following on the centuries-old heels of my Renaissance-era predecessors, writing on a simple repeated pattern - although the pattern is transposed, stepping up with every repetition, and isn't really found in it's "natural" form except once, near the end.

We have here a four-voice work, with the bass (pedals) and the soprano reiterating this hexachord pattern up and down, and the alto and tenor getting slowly more and more agitated heading towards its final conclusion.

And speaking of final conclusions: Four more voluntaries to go, and I'll be done a second set of 24! D major, B minor, G major, and finally, E minor are all that's left to cover. I'm kind of excited!

The stuff at the end of every post is at the end of this one, too:

Voluntary in F-sharp Minor by Mike Cutler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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Voluntary in A Major - Dance!

If you want a PDF, here it is!

No April Fool's joke here. Because this post is going to exist tomorrow and the next day and for years after that. And because I'm half-deaf and grouchy and my ear hurts.

So this is a minuet. And why not? It's written almost entirely in hemiola - and, again, why not? - to enhance the fun, dancing character as much as possible. The harmonies are fairly conventional and consonant; I wasn't feeling all that experimental this week, what with the ear infection. Just like it's hard for me to think about what I want to write here.

It's time for some painkillers. Also some end-of-post stuff. I'm going back to bed.

Voluntary in A Major by Mike Cutler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Your donations can help me keep writing these! Click to feed a composer!

Voluntary in C-sharp Minor - I'm not really sure what this is

PDF hither!

I'm... really not entirely convinced of this. Mostly because I don't really know what exactly this is. I mean, it's sort of an ostinato, almost, which slowly slides up. And it's kind of polytonal... polytonalish, I suppose, in a couple spots. I'm not sure what it means, but I like it. I'm just not entirely certain as to what my composition process hath wrought in this particular case.

This is definitely a solid moderato. It shouldn't feel fast (or slow, for that matter), nor, I think, should it be loud (or too quiet). There's not a lot of need to make registration changes; the piece has a written-in crescendo as the texture thickens with each iteration. This feels like it's neither fish nor fowl, which I suppose means that it's ... beef? I'm not great with metaphor.

At any rate, we're nearing the end of my second set of 24 short organ works. I'm starting to think about what I might like to do for a third set. Suggestions gleefully considered. Suggestions with money attached even more gleefully considered... Hint hint.

Speaking of hints! Copyright info and also donation button!

Voluntary in C-sharp Minor by Mike Cutler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Your donations can help me keep writing these! Click to feed a composer!

Voluntary in E Major - Alto Solo

Here's some PDF for anyone!

Here's a short, gentle piece, kind of in the style of a Romantic trio, although it's more of a quartet. The idea was to write a four-part piece with an alto solo, something which can be kind of tricky on the organ without playing the right hand on two keyboards (although I'm sure we'll get there...)

So instead of a chorale-like setting, there's this option, of having the left hand played off the keys and taking care of the tenor and soprano. Or at least what might generally be considered soprano; the solo voice does cross over it from time to time.

C-sharp Minor coincides with Good Friday, which should be interesting!

Licensing and money request below!

Voluntary in E Major by Mike Cutler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Your donations can help me keep writing these! Click to feed a composer!

Voluntary in G-sharp Minor - Rhythmic intensity?

PDF presently placed in position, properly posted.

Once more I go to the well of techniques from the games of my youth, this week playing with a more repetitive, driving idea. The left hand can be very light, providing rhythmic intensity while harmonic tension comes from the legato chords in the right.

Of course, if this were proper '80s or '90s chiptune music, it would loop without end, but I think that my left hand would seize up before I could make it through a second repetition. Someone with a less-damaged left hand would do better, probably, but even then there are limits to endurance.

The piece is intended to be played on two manuals, but with only one the only overlap is in measures 35-36; I'd suggest just dropping the low B from the right hand rather than worrying about holding it through the repetition.

So that's that! Next week, E Major.

Copyright info and a reminder: I'm looking for money! I like money. It helps me buy food, which helps me continue to write music.

Voluntary in G-sharp Minor by Mike Cutler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Your donations can help me keep writing these! Click to feed a composer!

Voluntary in B Major - A little look back

PDF here!

After last week's rapid-fire fiasco, I decided to look a little bit backwards. My compositional roots are in game music - not that I've ever had any used in a game - so I thought it would be time to reexamine some of the techniques and constructions I used to use to write one of my voluntaries.

Musically and tonally, this feels like "village" music, calm and quiet, a break from the adventure, although not without some tension, both in the overarching structure and in some of the more dissonant harmonies. I could easily hear this on an endless loop fading into the background while wandering about the countryside conversing with the peasantry looks for the next hint.

Regardless. End stuff!

Volountary in B Major by Mike Cutler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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