A New Project: Hymn Tune Preludes... #1 - Down Ampney

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.

And to go with that - I was able to record it.

Here's a PDF for the discerning organist.

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!

Until next week.

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

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