Hymn-a-Week 50 - the last! (for now)

Well, this has been a fun year.

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!

Cheers!

This hymn tune 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!

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!

Hymn-A-Week 49

Wow.

30,000 views.

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.

That's about it!

The usual stuff down there.

This hymn 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 minor - Introduction and fugato for a final voluntary!

It's a 4-page PDF!

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.

Voluntary in E 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!

Hymn-A-Week 48

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.

This hymn 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!