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!
Your donations can help me keep writing these! Click to feed a composer!
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:
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!
So after last week's longer, more meditative piece, this week is a much shorter, more diatonic, and perhaps more functional work.
My writing project led me to open a hymnal and the first hymn I liked, I set. So this week, we get St. Petersburg, a Prelude (or suitable Introduction) thereupon.
Short, sweet, fun, and a bit tricky. Here's the score!
So this piece consists of a little pattern that the right hand plays three times over, derived from the hymn, which accompanies the tune in the left hand. In the video I use the softer Swell (coupled to the Pedal, as well) with 8, 4, 2, and Nasat, alongside the Great principle chorus up to the Mixture, which seems to give a nice, bright sound. I'd definitely use this to introduce the hymn, given the chance - why not? It can be used to set the pace, the tonality, and make everyone aware of the familiar tune!
If you would like to hear me try to tackle a hymn tune of your choosing, simply click the link below and send me a small donation towards my continued work. I'd love to hear from you and get some ideas for what people might like to hear from me!
So after a brief hiatus while I was busy preparing for concerts and writing things for a wedding and playing arrangements of Beethoven and generally being a musician and working to get recordings made... and looking at that, that looks like a lot more work than it felt like... anyway! After the aforementioned brief haitus, I've started to make recordings. I recorded the Prelude in C, and am working on more preludes.
And I needed a writing project.
For those that don't know, I'm getting married in August, which is occupying a lot of time right now, which is fine and wonderful, believe me! But it means that until that craziness is over, I don't want to start in on a weekly project with a defined end-date (no set of 24, in other words) and meanwhile, I needed something to fill in for the hymn tune project. So I decided to combine preludes with hymn tunes and start in on a project I hope people will find useful.
The dedication reads For Tom, "Cathedral Cadence" and all. My friend Tom Packham is a fan of what he calls a "Cathedral Cadence" as an extension at the end of a hymn - a slide up a semitone over a pedal point and back down, So this whole work makes much use of that idea, even opening (and, of course, ending) with E-flat over D.
So I also want to announce a new donation incentive. Give me money, and you can name a tune for me to write a work on and record. Further details will be coming as I figure out a good way to work it, but give me money, and I'll take hymn tune requests! Caveats exist - the tune must be in the public domain (in Canada) and must be something that's reasonably workable and usable. I do enjoy obscurities but there are limits!
One hymn a week (almost) for a year. Here's the last for this project; I may take it up again another time. But for now, that's enough.
For any who are interested:
- the complete list of hymn tunes (with keys and meters) is here
- the thirty hymns from 2015 are in one PDF collection here
- the twenty hymns of 2016 are in one PDF collection here
- and they're all in one big fifty-page PDF collection here
A fun ride. I've played with all sorts of different ideas and concepts and I'm mostly happy with the way things turned out. I think I've grown as a composer, and I hope that someday some of these can find their way into some use!
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!
Nothing special planned for it, but wow, nonetheless.
Thank you all!
Here's a little hymn tune that started as a planned setting for "Immortal, Invisible." Through the writing process, I decided that it fit a long metre better. It could be converted back to 11 11 11 11, if need be, but for now it stays as it is.
This is a long one, as is probably appropriate for Voluntary #24! So I thought I'd add some remarks before the images, instead of afterwards.
What an interesting project this has been! I've had such fun writing these Voluntaries, got some great comments, went a little viral with a pedal solo, made a bit of money (not as much as I would have liked... donation button at the bottom of the post to support the third set of 24!) and developed a lot of technique. I feel that after a year of writing music almost every week that I'm better disciplined, that my tonal language has expanded, and that I'm just generally better at what I do. I even think that my improvisations have been sharpened.
So it's time to shift gears. I have a project to complete for a donor, which I'll hopefully have finished next week to publish, and then I have a couple larger projects to deal with. I'm getting married in August! I'm writing all the much for the service! I'm going to continue to write an organ work every week, although they won't be quite as structured as this. I won't start my next set of 24 until after I'm good and married, because then if I have to take a couple weeks off, I won't feel like I'm falling behind a major project.
Thanks to all those who have been following along, offering advice and criticism, trying out my work, expressing their enthusiasm to hear performances and recordings. Which will come!
24 Preludes and 24 Voluntaries are complete. For your viewing pleasure - Voluntary #24 in E Minor.
Okay, so it's modeled after "Nearer, My God, To Thee." But you could also fiddle with it a bit to make "God Save the Queen" fit. Or any number of other tunes with that... admittedly unusual rhythm.
The heat was getting to me. And the deadline approached. So that's that.
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...
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.
I went a little bit viral last Friday. I doubt I'll have such success again for a while, but that's alright. Still, it's neat to see over 1,000 hits within a week. (pedal exercises are apparently good for business)
I asked a friend for a favourite hymn, she suggested "The Ash Grove." So here's The Ash Grove's meter, with a non-Welsh tune.
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!
Every so often I start to wonder: is this the week?
Is it this week that this toiling in obscurity, pumping out tune after tune, week after week, finally gets to me? Do I lose my mind and start doing some very strange things?
I think this might have been the week.
I guess that as I approach the end of this project, or at least this particular incarnation of it, I'm starting to get a little squirrelly with the melodies. And the harmonies. And just about everything about it.
