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!
