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.
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.
The description there reads: I’ve given this Native-American morning song a reverential treat, with four statements, each with a different musical texture corresponding to the directions east, west, north, and south. For the student learning this piece, the issues to be confronted are controlling the interpretive dynamic and tempo arch of each of the four statements and of the four as a unit. The third statement also presents the opportunity to learn how to distribute the notes of the melodic line between to two hands in order to have three contrapuntal lines.
Robert Helps, a friend, amazing concert pianist, and several times roommate, told me once that when he hit a dry spell as a composer he moved to doing lots of accompanying of vocalists. Years in fact. It was part of a larger conversation about the unevenness of famous composers. He pointed out that the output of composers tended to come in clumps. They didn’t have a tidy schedule of releases as corporate pop groups do today.
I’ve hit a dry spell of my own. Partly being 81, partly feeling my way toward myself own compositional growth (that’s not a conscious process!), and partly feeling completely irrelevant in a TikTok algorithmic world.
I’m not the pianist Bob was by a long shot, but I do have my own skill set which includes enjoying arranging folk tunes (happens to be my best sellers actually), so while I wait for my unconsciousness to sort out where I’m headed compositionally, I’m devoting myself to arranging folks tunes. Here’s one that’s fun to sing with a choir.
The original folk tune’s range is an octave and a fourth; too wide for the average church choir singer. So, my main task was finding ways to fold the tune upon itself to stay within a 6th or 7th and still have it feel as if that that’s the way it always was! The accompanying optional instrumental obbligato has the tune in it’s original form (slightly embellished) if you’re curious about the details.
You’ve heard me mention the Hal Leonard website, ArrangeMe.com. I’ve been looking at my sales over the past 3 years and most of my sales have been my piano arrangements of folk music. These two arrangements are part of an desire to expand my trend into choral music. It’s the first time I’ve ever take advantage of the 6+million tunes Hal Leonard owns the rights to.
I picked these two tunes because their folk flavor, but mainly because Pete Seeger is an important part of the social justice conscience of America and America needs that message more than ever.
Both these tunes are arranged for SAB which makes them suitable for a public school choir. Even though Turn, Turn, Turn is based on Ecclesiastes, it’s still appropriate for a secular context. I’m fortunate that the church where I’m music director (Lakewood UCC) appreciates the spiritual messages reflected in many secular songs. The Lakewood choir has sung both these arrangements in services.
The sheet music for these two arrangements are available at…
I’m You can listen to demos of the songs at all those links as well as peruse the scores, entirely free. And if you want to perform them with your choir, you can download them right there!
I’m in the process of doing the necessary work to distribute three new digital albums to the various streaming services. Part of that is visiting the four previous albums of mine that are already distributed to see if they’re so awful I should just pay to have them deleted from distribution (it’s something that you can do). That entails listing to them with new ears.
While doing so, I realized I still like what I did on this album, in particular this tune, Resignation.
Here’s a link to the complete album you can listen to YouTube Music.
Hal Leonard, the world’s largest sheet music publisher, runs a site called ArrangeMe which gives composers & arrangers a vehicle to self publish their arrangements of pop tunes–Hal Leonard owns the rights to a vast number of pops songs all of which are available to arrange through ArrangeMe–and of tunes in the public domain. As well, it provides a self-publishing platform for composers of their original works. When there’s a sale, the composer or arranger make a percentage and Hal Leonard gets a percentage.
If you go to the Compositions page of my website, you’ll links to those two sites for almost all of my compositions that are for instrumental solos, piano solos, organ solos, and choral/vocal music. (I don’t bother trying to sell scores of my symphonic music and concerti since those are not really something people are shopping for.)
Pianists seem to buy my folk song and hymn tune arrangements and organists my original music although that’s not always the case. It’s not gonna pay my mortgage, but I do make steady sales. My videos on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/@hiltonkeanjones) are my main channel for promoting my music. There’s probably other ways that would increase sales, but I’m not business savvy. Suggestions always welcome!
I love this tune: Sweet Rivers. The composer of the tune is anonymous and the tune is found in William Walker’s 1835 Souther Harmony, and Musical Coompanion. I could play it over and over again. It makes me happy and makes me smile. Check out the words and various instances of the tune in different hymnals at https://hymnary.org/text/sweet_rivers_of_redeeming_love. This is real old-timey music at its best.
I’m kind of feeling my way right now. All I know is I feel the urge to make music as folks might have done it in my grandparents’ day, as a informal playing of music on the home piano and while folks sat around and kind of humed along. Or…maybe if i could be a busker I would. This is an assemblage of a bunch of Irish tunes, with almost no editing, just paying one after another, all under 90 seonds (except the very last one would is 120 seconds I think). I might peel these apart and make them seperate Instagram posts, or YouTube Shorts, or not…I really don’t know. Maybe I’m feeling the need to have a gig like Eric Satie did, playing in a bar, and Debussy and Ravel (separately) would come and listen to him. So, anyway, there’s the above video which is only by means of an experiment, that I don’t quite know where it leads.
This is another of my arrangements of a tune from Southern Harmony, and Musical Companioncompiled by William Walker and published in 1835. It’s a compendium of marvelous, mostly anonymous hymn tunes from American folk musicians.
My original settings of these arrangements featured solo piano but with the participation of two string instruments (a high and a low) and a treble woodwind which were written in such a way that they could be performed live by separate instrumentalists or covered by a second keyboardist performing on two, stacked synthesizers.
After I’d done two albums of folk tunes like this (the second one was mainly Irish tunes), I gave up on the idea of ever doing them live and began the task–only partially complete…many more to go–of rewriting them as solo piano pieces with no orchestral accompaniment.
As sometimes happens, you go back to things. I finally decided the practicalities of sheet music publication “aren’t the boss of me,” and I’m video taping them in their original form. I’m also publishing their sheet music as “keyboard duos” in case there’s some keyboardists out there who want to do them. I love concert grand piano, but I also love a good electric keyboard and these days I’ll bet there’s a least as many of those in homes as acoustic pianos.
One last tidbit: I love the string countermelody I wrote for this arrangement. (The Southern Music tune is the right-hand of the piano, NOT the string line…that’s mine!) I’m going to steal my own countermelody (from myself) and make it the main tune in a song of my own!
Learned a new tune, the harmonization, form, arrangement, and a drastic rewrite of the melody in the middle section of which are all mine, but it’s nevertheless a traditional Irish song about an immigrant who leaves his home for liberty in America. I tried to end the final word, “liberty,” with a musical question mark, or at least mixed emotion, or uncertainty.
This tune is sometimes titled The Green Fields of Amerikay (with that spelling). I chose to use the first phrase of the lyrics and add the explanatory subtitle.
