simple is not easy

In my post earlier today I spoke of a new piece of music I wrote this morning: simple, 4-measure-long repetitive bass line, a simple 1-measure pattern for the left hand, and a playful melody in the right hand. Did I mention the piece was written for organ? The feet do the bass line. It turns out that simple is not necessarily easy...

I had a practice session this afternoon for a wedding, so I brought my new piece along. I really needed to do this, since I am scheduled to play the piece on Sunday. Yeah, I know I'm doing it backwards: I first schedule me to play a piece that doesn't yet exist, then I write the piece and scramble a bit learning it so I can do justice to the music! I thought I had it made this time. I deliberately stayed simple. But it turns out that fitting simple things together--they occur concurrently--results in a sum that is more complicated than the individual parts would suggest.

I suppose that, if I just wanted to slop my way through, it would be no big deal. But I wanted the piece to be expressive, and on an organ that means that articulation--whether a note is played short and crisp or smooth and connected to its neighbors--is real important.

So it turned out that my simple piece (less than and hour and a half to write almost 4 minutes of solo organ music)...wasn't simple. I've known about that contradiction in other domains--a good children's book or other art for children can be quite challenging to create. Writing an interesting piece for a beginning musician is hard to do--you don't want to fall into cliche or mindless sound.

The piece sounds neat! (What else would I say?) It's better than the mp3 I made from the notation file. I'm looking forward to another practice session tomorrow, as I still have a couple of coordination problems (one hand plays smoothly while the other plays crisply as the bass continues its relentless step - step - step), but I think I'll be able to iron them out. I'll play the piece as part of my wedding prelude (generally 30 minutes of music before the ceremony itself starts) so that its official premiere will go smoothly; I would like to work out any first-performance jitters as well as offer what I hope will be perceived as something special--assuming that anyone even notices!

As usual, it's music to my ears...

Sunday's Coming

The dilemma of a church organist: Sunday's coming. There's always another Sunday, or a wedding, or memorial, or other special event to prepare for. And somewhere after Monday I realize I need another prelude (postlude/offertory). And there's not much time! Theoretically, of course, I practice weeks ahead. But organ playing is a rather practical sport, not long on theory.

I had this bright idea to ask a flautist in the congregation if she would like to play one of my settings of Jesus Loves Me. We're focusing on children this Sunday in conjunction with World Communion Sunday, and JLM is one of the hymns. She liked the idea, but the timing wasn't quite right in her life. In the meantime, I'd committed to JLM in the bulletin. So I got up this morning and wrote down what's really an improv on the tune.

I started with a walking bass. My example shows the first half of the pattern, which just keeps repeating. [Note to Dan and others who like to hear things: here's the link to the mp3 of the whole piece.] The left hand has a simple pattern based on the first four notes of the tune. It also keeps repeating. That didn't take long! Now all I need is a bit of melody.

I decided to ornament the melody a bit. Enough so the tune gets elaborated, but not so much that the tune gets lost in the lettuce. Or broccoli. Or salad dressing. Whatever. The tune starts quite simply, as my second excerpt shows.Except for the first two notes, this first piece of melody presents the tune pretty straightforwardly. In order to make things more interesting (at least for me as composer) I decided that each each chunk of melody would be responsible for four measures, even though in its original form it is only two measures long. And then I made the measures four beats long, rather than the two of the original. It meant I had to figure out how to fill more time, and yet make sure that the connection of the material I wrote to the original tune was clear.

There's an interesting musical problem inherent in the procedure I applied here: there's no real harmonic progression or direction. Or rather, the walking bass implies motion, as it heads down the scale, makes a slight turn, and begins again just as it reaches home. But while the bass suggests motion, the sustain note in the left hand and the short repeated rif suggest a kind of stasis. Even with all the motion of the bass, and a fairly active melody line, there's almost a timeless aspect to the piece.

The lack of harmony and constant rhythmic repetition of the bass and left hand places the responsibility for the shape of the piece firmly on the melodic line. I haven't had a chance to practice the piece yet, but I think that I'll have to focus on the melody to keep the piece moving--or is it enough that these elements are just there? Although my recording suggests only one tone color for the melody, I have in mind alternating between a flute and a reed sound.

I gotta tell you that it felt good to be doing this again: write a piece Friday morning that I'll play on Sunday (well, I got the left hand/bass ideas Thursday evening right before choir practice). I'd been a little down about the rather reduced organ I now play, compared to the instrument at my previous church. Clearly, size is less important than making use of what you've got...

Which is, of course, music to my ears.

North north, or finding oneself

I mentioned in my last post that my cousin Michael is in Norway. North Norway. As in there will be a lot of winter to shovel. I'm going to ask him if I can excerpt from a general letter he sent out recently: it sounds like a fascinating part of the world, and just a bit different from the San Francisco area. How did I get on this track? I actually wanted to comment on an ongoing project of sending him some of my pieces, since the group he is conducting, the Alstahaug Sangkor, liked Gospel 3:16 so well. And that led to an interesting challenge...

Where was my music? Not the hard copy: I have plenty of files, piles and even a stray box or two. I often have several different versions of a piece, sometimes including the original pencil manuscript (either pre-computer or at some stage in the process). I rarely throw any of it away. That would be like losing part of myself! So where was I, computationally speaking?

I've been using personal computers since our first Apple II plus (with the extra 16K card). Made some fun music on it. Switched to a Mac in 1985 with a decent music notation program and never looked back. Through generations of computers and notation programs I tried to bring my finished pieces along. I had to redo stuff when I switched from Composer to Finale. And then (sob) I succumbed to the importunings of a certain important person in my life and got a Windows machine.

I'd made the shift from floppies to CDs pretty well. A lot of stuff was archived on a whole bunch of floppies. Even with CDs I could still go back and retrieve something if I needed it. I had a neat little program that catalogued the contents of said floppies, so it was easy to find a file. When I moved to Windows I put as much as I could find on a CD while I still had my Mac (now a Quadra 660 AV--a neat unit) up and working. And then I had to redo the entire CD, as I found my rather loose way of labeling things didn't work in Windows, which still wanted dot 3 extensions. My own extension code wasn't recognized (duh!). How was I supposed to know that Finale files were ".mus," not ".fin?"

So I wanted to send some more music to Michael. My recent work was simple: use either my active file or the careful backup I had made to create a PDF file, upload it to my website, and give Michael the url. Fast and painless. Then I went looking for a couple of older pieces. The flotsam and jetsam of generatons of computers, media, and program upgrades was overwhelming. A unique landscape, rivaling the fjords of Norway with its convolutions. I couldn't find my Mac CD (the one I'd had to redo)! When I did, it wasn't the right one. Where's my music? My life blood? My...

When I calmed down, I noticed that I could find a workaround to open at least some of the stuff, but I may have to go back to the Mac once more (I loved my Macs, but never got beyond "like" with Windows). It'll be fun, if slow. One last time, file by file, floppy by floppy, grumbling has that spacious 20 meg harddrive fills up and overflows.

Or I could just forget it and copy the music over again. While I don't particularly want to face that music, it'll be great fun renewing acquaintance with some of the nooks and crannies of my creativity (don't go after dark!). I think, before I embark on this project, I'll go write some more

music to my ears.

Starting Over--Ready or Not

Unlike my last post, where I wasn't sure where the end of August had gone, I know quite well where the first part of September has gone. Like schools, the church year actually begins as September is reached. Liturgically the church year may start with Advent, but meetings, choir rehearsals--did I mention meetings?--all pile up in a joyous heap. Add to the mix the sobering results of Katrina and some rather poor communication, if not mismanagement, and life has been filled to the brim (and then there are all those other places in the world as well). I've had some minor creative adventures anyway...

• The Chancel Choir at John Knox Pres in Dublin CA sang the introit I'd written for them on Be Thou My Vision, which I wrote about in my last post. They did very well. There were some nice expressive moments. We had 26 in the choir which, considering an average Sunday congregation of 180, is very impressive (10 percent of the average attendance is a good rule of thumb--JKPC is definitely ahead of the curve).


• My Called By God, in a TTBB transcription from the original SATB setting, was performed at Lafayette-Orinda Pres. Church. I wrote the piece (a setting of LOPC's mission statement--not poetic, but with some universal elements that set well to music and resonated within me--both then and now) two years ago in anticipation of beginning my position as organist at LOPC. It's been sung twice before, which does my composer's heart good: second and third performances are not always easy to come by! It was nice to know I could be topical even in my absence.


• My cousin Michael Moreskine is in Norway for the year, playing organ and directing a choir or two toward the north of the country. He and I have shared compositions, and he's played several of my pieces, including a variation set on Bunessan (known by many as Morning Has Broken) for organ and cello (a wonderful combination I wouldn't have thought of if Michael hadn't shown me what the two instruments could do together). He also liked a duet I wrote called Gospel 3:16, a setting of a paraphrase of John 3:16. He had some modifications in mind, most of which I ignored (composer's prerogative, I guess--although his ideas were good). He tried the piece out with a Norwegian group he's conducting, and they liked it. So I spent some time this weekend creating an SATB version. I hope to comment on the piece and on the process of transcription in another post. As a tease: you have to be willing to give up cherished things in order to create a piece that is as idiomatic for the new ensemble as the old setting was for its own ensemble. (Composers HATE to throw notes away once they've been put into a pleasing order--but pruning is just as important in musical composition as it is in gardening).

That's music to my ears...

summer's end, or the "vision thing"

Well, it's September 1 and I don't know where the last couple of weeks of August went. I've written a couple of small compositions, but that didn't take long. I've started settling in to my new church position, leading up to my first choir rehearsal last night. I'd already met several times with the contemporary group; both offer some wonderful possibilities. So, as a composer, what else was I supposed to do but write a piece of music for each ensemble?

The Praise Team won't probably start on the piece I wrote for them for another few weeks, so I'll hold off on saying much more about that piece, other than that it has been a while since I've written for guitars and voices. It was fun, and initially easier than my more traditionally-based writing. But I keep tweaking things, working for a smoother chord progression, developing an arrangement of what is otherwise a pretty standard chorus/verse alternation. As is typical of this sort of writing, the piece won't really assume any final form until after the group has made it its own.

For the Chancel Choir I wrote a short piece setting Be Thou My Vision, usually sung to the hymn tune Slane. I decided to do this because I came across a neat organ piece on the tune by Eric Thiman (1900-1975), an English composer. Even though I'm playing a small, Baroque-oriented organ, this piece retains a nice combination of intimacy and grandeur that I just plain like. One of our musical groups usually does an introit or musical call to worship directly after the prelude, so the idea of following Thiman's piece with some sort of choral setting captured my imagination.

Finding the right way to start the piece was a problem, however. Thiman's piece provided a perfect intro (if you can have a 4-minute intro to a 1-minute piece!), ending simply and quietly. I envisioned the choir starting from almost nothing and then growing in texture and loudness. But the hymn tune harmonization is so well done that finding my own paraphrase wasn't working. I finally got the idea of moving the first couple of notes of the second measure up, rather than following the contour of the tune. An hour later, the piece was done.

It was great hearing the piece at rehearsal. The choir picked it up easily, even with a very spare accompaniment underneath. After going through the tune for a verse, the piece moves into a canonic treatment of my modification of the opening line. The organ provides a low pedal tone under the canon, with a descending 4-measure chord progression (that just means that there is a sense of motion, but also a sense of calm as the chord pattern repeats and the pedal tone holds things together in the background).

It may have been a little brave--or foolhardy--to write and program a new piece for a group I'd never rehearsed, but a look at the choir library gave me an idea of their ability. I'm quite pleased, and hope to be able to share this piece with some of my colleagues. I'm all charged up with summer's end, and looking forward to a productive, musical fall.