Month: August 2014

Longfellow

In the previous post, http://hiltonkeanjones.com/2014/08/23/new-anthem/, I had a link to the first of a series of choral pieces based on Transcendentalist poets. The two transcendentalists everyone knows are, of course, Emerson and Thoreau, but there are many more than just those two, and a surprising number of them are women. More than half of the poems I’ve selected are by these women transcendentalists.

The text of the first choral piece in the series, the one featured last week, is by a famous male poet, Longfellow. A friend asked if I was going to post a demo of the choral piece. I didn’t really want to do that–I think choral piece demos sound particularly cheesy (not that other things don’t). What I have done, however–and I intend to do this for every one of the choral pieces–is I reworked them, texturally, into orchestral pieces.

The group of pieces will be called Transcendentalists, and for the orchestral versions, instead of the poem’s titles, I’m using the authors’ names as titles. So, if you want to follow along with some notes, look at last week’s post. Eventually, I’ll post the orchestral score and edit this post to give a link for it.

Here’s the SoundCloud link for Longfellow.

New anthem

I’m working on a new set of anthems, all extremely easy, all on American Transcendentalist poems. These texts work very well for liberal congregations of any denomination, whether Protestant, Roman Catholic, Judaism, etc., in that they are theistic but not necessarily in an Abrahamic tradition, which also makes them appropriate for denominations such as Unitarian-Universalist or Unity. This is the first of this set of anthems.

I Look to Thee in Ev’ry Need

music by Hilton Kean Jones
words by Samuel Longfellow

2-part mixed w/divisi women

 (Click to open PDF.)

Amidst the city’s desolation, the Anima appears as a woman clothed in radiant white

I added a new track to The Geography of Dreams: Amidst the city’s desolation, the Anima appears as a woman clothed in radiant white.

There’s two kinds of programmatic music: what are often called “character pieces,” short pieces with a descriptive title, the music generally depicting the emotions and character of that description; the other being the “tone poem,” longer pieces depicting blow-by-blow actions of a story line. Late Baroque composers and were fond of the character piece and early 20th century composers of the tone poem (a generalization, of course…character pieces have been popular ever since they were invented, even into the present). This movement is closer to the tone poem approach.

The Geography of Dreams with two movements…more to follow.