Category: symphonic

Starting to get caught up on the backlog

With the post, Working Musician During a Pandemic, I said that I would be posting tracks from my music director job as they occur (typically, that’s 3 a week) plus one a day on the other days until I’m caught up on all the things I’ve done or used for my job during the pandemic. I’m almost caught up! Once I’m caught up, I’ll only post the continuing ones (as I said above, typically 3 a week…Wednesday, Friday, Sunday).

On the music videos, I’ve been putting a title page and starting the music following it…in other words, the title page is silent. I’m only doing that because I don’t know how to superimpose the titles on a video itself. The problem with doing it this way is that if you want to listen to all the music videos (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUn2RmCFhW2vbOdz7n0Ez-FjHcbFoUMam), there’ll be a silence between every tune where the title page is. That may be a good thing, or it may be a bad thing.

If you’d like to hear all the stuff, just as music, with NO silences in between, then link to https://soundcloud.com/hilton-kean-jones/sets/music-at-lakewood. That’s not all my music, but it’s all the stuff I’ve used in my job since the pandemic began and my job became 100% cyber.

If you’re interested in more of my stuff, my SoundCloud site has almost all of it back to the stone age: https://soundcloud.com/hilton-kean-jones. That profile page spotlights a few pieces that I recommend for first time listeners. I’m listing those below plus a few others.

Fantasy for Harp and Chamber Orchestra
The Geography of Dreams
Meditations and Reflections for solo piano
Tales of the Laughing Wizards
Irish Tunes

Sunday Morning Music: Elephants Piss in Fear

The title of this movement from Time Grown Old – Images of the Mahabharata, that I composed back 1995, is a literal translation of an actual phrase from the Mahabharata. The entire four movements form a concerto for pipe organ, percussion, and electronic sound. This recording is me as organist, with the University of South Florida Percussion Ensemble, Robert McCormick, Director. It was recorded recorded at the Bayshore Baptist Church, Tampa, Florida.

To listen to today’s Sunday Morning Music, click HERE.

If you decide later you’d like to listen to all four movements, click HERE. Should you listen to the entire piece, please note that movement 2 begins EXTREMELY softly.

Wendeyaho

(original hymns, anthems, solo keyboard pieces, hymn-tune settings). Because of the corona virus lockdown, I’ve been doing all those same things, but for online posts by Lakewood. If those interest you, you can hear those posts at https://lakewooducc.org/category/posts/music/.

I’ve decided to post some of those here: the ones that feature original content by me. This post was originally posted on March 29, 2020 at http://lakewooducc.org/2020/03/29/wendeyaho/.

Screen Shot 2020-03-29 at 4.40.50 AMSomething different this morning! It’s not found in any hymnal although it should be; rather, it’s a Native American hymn traditionally sung to the four directions in the morning by the women of the community. The arrangements and orchestrations are my own. I’ve done several settings–orchestra, solo piano, and choir–the first two of which are presented here.

“Wendeyaho” is often described as a “Cherokee Morning Song.” However discussion of it on the Internet indicates that the word, “Wendeyaho,” is not contemporary Cherokee, although it may have its origins in an ancient form of the language. The translation I was able to piece together from various internet sources is as follows:

Translation – We n’ de ya ho
Freely translated: “A we n'” (I am),
“de” (of),
“Yauh” –the– (Great Spirit),
“Ho” (it is so).

First, here is my orchestral arrangement.

And, here is the piano solo arrangement. Feel free to download the 2 page sheet music PDF from THIS LINK so you can play it at home, yourself. You need to do some tricky shifting of hands to cover all the parts in the last two variations, but it’s doable, I promise.

Score and reorchestration of The Geography of Dreams



I completely re-orchestrated The Geography of Dreams. I like it much better. It’s limited to strings & harp plus 3 solo woodwinds (flute, oboe, english horn) and 2 solo brass (horn & trumpet). I got a much better mix and mastering this time, too, I think (well…at least, I think I think…).

Here’s link for  SoundCloud album: https://soundcloud.com/hilton-kean-jones/sets/the-geography-of-dreams.

 

As part of this re-orchestration I also finally (!!!) got the score done. For free download go to https://hiltonkeanjones.com/PDFs/The_Geography_of_Dreams.pdf, right-click and “save as…”