With this one–All Bless the One–(video below) I think I’m finally caught up on having demos of all my choral pieces.
All Bless the One is an extremely easy but equally fun anthem to sing and play. It’s 2-part mixed so it works with the smallest of choirs. The text is my poetic paraphrase of Daniel 3:52-90. The accompaniment may be either organ (with or without pedals) or piano. This is one to keep in the choir’s folders for those Sundays when not everyone shows up…it’s an “emergency anthem.”
Here’s a link to a YouTube playlist of all my choral pieces to date: Choral and Vocal Music by HKJ. These were all written for actual use in the context of my job as a church music director or that of friends (such as Linda Ruescher who was responsible for my commission by the Academy of the Holy Names). I’m retired now, but I’m so grateful to the choir at Lakewood UCC for their patience in doing my music. It really helps to have a real-world purpose for writing a piece.
The recent flurry of posts is the result of my recent retirement from my position at Lakewood UCC, giving me the time and energy to try to complete demos of everything I’ve written. I’ve only a few more to do, then I can go back to being the dormouse in the Mad Hatter’s teapot.
Conditor Alme Siderum, is a Gregorian plainchant, translated as “Creator of the stars of night,” and is an Advent text. Nevertheless, the tune is familiar and I’ve made two arrangements of it, both usable and originally written for Easter but usually any time, actually.
The first is this one for SAAB choir to the text Awake My Soul and with the Sun by the anglican cleric, Thomas Ken. SAAB is a useful voicing for many choir directors of small choirs because, as mine did, they seldom have real tenors but plenty of baritones, and usually anymore, twice as many altos as real sopranos.
My other arrangement of Conditor Alme Siderum is for pipe organ, intended as an “Easter Fanfare.” You can see they’re somewhat the same. My harmonic language, generally, owes a lot to Erik Satie, which I unabashedly admit and which I have been repeatedly criticized for. Too bad. If you’re familiar with his Messe des pauvres you’ll see/hear it even in my approach to organ compositions. I have a recording of it I made at the Tampa Bayshore Baptist Church ages ago. Re-releasing it on BandCamp is on my ToDo list.
The Geography of Dreams consists of six programmatic character pieces scored for symphony orchestra. The dreams portrayed have stuck in my memory and occured over a number of years and all take place in a world that reoccurs very often in my dreams, ever since I was a kid. This dream world has a complete geography that is quite consistent and which I’ve explored over the decades. It’s a peculiar feeling to know that this other world exists. It seems to exist outside of this time stream…but it is very real.
This video is all six movements combined. It’s not a “real” video…just images to have on the screen. But, YouTube has been my most productive social media in terms of prompting people to buy my scores. No other platform even comes close. Digital album available at https://hiltonjones.bandcamp.com/album/the-geography-of-dreams-2.
Way, way back pre-1999…I don’t even remember the exact date, probably early 90s, maybe late 80s, I wrote a piece call Caprice for Piano and ChamberOrchestra. It was performed at USF, Teresa Rose, pianist. In discussing the composition’s future with my friend and USF faculty colleague, Robert Helps, he wisely said that short concerti for piano are seldom performed for a variety of reasons.
So, the piece lay dormant in the proverbial drawer and I didn’t pursue it. But sometime around 2016 I decided to resurrect it as a piece for harp and chamber orchestra. That resulted in this computer generated performance.
Now in my 80s, I’m tidying up the musical efforts of my life. Hence posting that here.
Most of the YouTube stuff I’ve done recently has been my short piano pieces and arrangements. They’ve sold a bit on the Hal Leonard self-publishing sites. For at least a decade I’ve not written for anything that wasn’t “useful,” short pieces playable by mere mortals and choral music for the choir at Lakewood UCC where I’m the music director.
Listening to this old computer generated orchestral piece has encouraged me to start writing “useless” music again—music that’s unlikely to ever be performed. I will probably start with orchestrating some of my piano pieces. Orchestration is fun.
As an undergraduate at the University of the Pacific Conservatory of Music, my composition teacher was Stanworth Beckler. I learned so much from him. As with all real learning it’s not the information that’s presented in lessons and lectures, it’s the off-hand comment, almost in passing that sticks with you and guides and comforts you decades later. Several of his stick with me to this day.
Beckler taught a course one semester that was the result of his own in-depth study and analysis of ALL of the compositions of Igor Stravinsky. What a course! For the longest time I carefully kept his handouts. But…life. I no longer have them. If there’s any Beckler students out there who have those notes I will happily pay for their duplication and postage. They’re priceless.
Anyway…After listening to the complete works of Stravinsky over a semester and hearing Beckler’s analyses, one day I had the distinct impression that Stravinsky’s oeuvre is his own self-instruction in how to write music. That may seem like a peculiar observation for someone who wrote The Rite of Spring; he knew how to write music! But, alas, you have to learn all over again, every piece, no matter how long you’ve been doing it, ever since we entered the non-common-practice period (pretty much post Wagner to the present day).
I too am still trying to figure out how to compose and each piece I try to chip away at a new skill a little bit. (No, I won’t tell which skill it is for this piece.)
I’m finishing up posting a digital album on BandCamp of piano solo arrangements of some of my favorite Appalachian/British/Irish folk hymns. I’m able to able to post videos of my playing the tunes on BandCamp that are also available there as well as mp3 files/albums for download and streaming.
This video is from 2021, we were in the latter stages of the pandemic. I was 55 pounds heavier than I am now, but I love this particular performance so much, it’s the one I wanted to use for this new digital album (The River Strong). More about that album soon.
In 1969, I became the first composition teacher at USF (also teaching theory courses and comp related courses such as orchestration). I created USF’s electronic music studio. Before, at Eastman, I had been the 1st graduate assistant assigned to build Eastman’s electronic music studio under my major professor and director of the studio, Wayne Barlow. Back in those olden days, my parent’s day (Leon Theremin, Tod Dockstader, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Schaeffer, Edgard Varèse) and then, in my day (Morton Subotnick, Wendy Carlos and others post the advent of synthesizers), it was all called “electronic music.”
Quite aside from the fact that all my current recordings use only sampled sounds, I would not consider it electronic music in the aforementioned sense. Mainly because I only use electronic sounds in lieu of acoustic instruments. I’m really writing for acoustic instruments that I can’t afford to record, so I use samples which I can.
I haven’t written any real electronic music since way back in the last century, about 1993. I’m trying to organize all the stuff I’ve written over the past years, and I keep uncovering things I’ve forgotten.
This post shares a digital album of “electronica” (see further discussion of terminology further down the post) I’d forgotten I’d done: Tales of the Laughing Wizards. That link will take you to BandCamp where you can listen to the tracks a few times free of charge. Also, I’ve given the links to the separate tracks below.
Above, I referred to Tales of the Laughing Wizards as “electronica.” These days of precise music marketing terms (which is such a bother), the term “electronic music” has come to mean club music: music you can dance to. Another term, “electronica” has come to mean music produced by electronic means that is not intended as dance music. It’s music to be listened to (ambient, theatrical, contemplative, melodic, music for listening to, etc.). So, Tales of the Laughing Wizards is electronica.
You may have noticed an acoustic piano in the background of my recordings. A couple years ago I bought what’s called a “studio upright” from the Clearwater Steinway Gallery. It’s a Boston, which is made in Asia but designed by Steinway, and a model with no plastic parts. The entire action is wood. I’m very happy with it.
I mention this because people may wonder why I don’t use that for my videos. Aside from not being a good enough pianist to record flawless videos head to tail without needing to splice together different video takes (keyboard recording permits occasional error correction…more on that in a moment), recording an acoustic piano is to my ear one of the hardest things to do well, especially for a classical sound.
The best of that I’ve ever experience was the audio engineer, John Stephan, when I recorded some of my pieces at his studio, Springs Theatre Arts & Recording, before he retired. I’ve worked in a lot of studios across the US, none compared to his technique, microphone placement, and audio environment. There’s no way I could duplicate that sound at home. I’ve got a few things I’m snobish about: authentic key lime pie, New York style cheesecake, fried fish, banana pudding, grits, and recorded piano sound.
As I mentioned above, recording tracks from a keyboard allows for a certain amount of editing without having to edit the video itself. If you look at about 00:42 from the beginning of the track, you’ll see my right hand momentarily “panic!” I had a momentary lapse of concentration. I mention this because non-musicians (unfortunately some musicians LOL) don’t know what’s going on in a performer’s head when performing.
When a musician (singers especially, but also brass instruments, pianists, conductor, everyone actually) plays/sings a note s/he must literally, mentally hear–in advance of actually playing the note–the note they’re going to play a moment later.
And if it’s a polyphonic instrumentalist like a pianist or organist or conductor all the notes being player together at that moment must be “pre-heard.” This is true even for solo instrumentalists in an orchestra. My favorite trumpet player, Don Own, talked to me once about playing in an orchestra, how an orchestra player hears their part as if they were in the audience, not from just their chair.
As you might imagine. That’s all quite a task. More than anything as I’ve aged, it’s the momentary lapses of concentration that get to me as a performer. I do silent meditation a lot. The focus required for performing music is like that. It’s why being a musician is so addictive. Few things match the rush.
We lived in an old, rambling two-storied* parsonage (my father was a Methodist minister) and we lived in the house owned by the church. I was in the first year or two of elementary school. Our house was big enough that there were front stairs descending into the hallway just inside the mudroom and stairs in the back emptying directly from my bedroom (!), down into the kitchen and continuing directly on down into the the basement (but that’s another story ).
Underneath of the angle of the front stairs was a triangular shaped little room with its own little triangular door.
I don’t remember if I ever actually ever even entered that room, or if I simply wanted to and fantasized about doing so. Memory is a very malleable thing. My emotional association with that room was not at all like the frightening little room under the stairs that Harry Potter was confined to. For me, the association with our little room under the stairs is warmth, comfort, books, a place to be away from the world and close the door behind me, a place all my own…emotional privacy.
I suspect that’s a false memory, built entirely of wishful fantasy.
Here’s a picture of me on the front porch of that old house, at that exact age, 8. You can probably intuit all there is to know about me just from that photo!
