I wrote this arrangement of a traditional Irish Christmas carol, Curoo, Curoo (The Carol of the Birds) for solo melody instrument and keyboard (in this demo, trumpet and organ). Sheet music available at https://www.sheetmusicdirect.com/en-US/se/ID_No/1656611/Product.aspx.
Category: keyboard
Missa de Angelis (complete)
For this piece, instead of separate videos for each of the five movements, I made a single video of the movements played one after another as they would be in concert. I did this because, although the five movements each have their own form, as a group they form a larger, emotional structure that isn’t apparent unless they are heard together. For instance, the last movement, the Angus Dei, is my favorite movement because of certain rhythmic, harmonic, and contrapuntal things I felt pleased with having done. But, the movement by itself, doesn’t have the same meaning without being heard in the context of being the “coda” to the preceding four movements. As usual, the sheet music is available at sheetmusicdirect and sheetmusicplus.
https://www.sheetmusicdirect.com/en-US/se/ID_No/1084676/Product.aspx
https://www.sheetmusicplus.com/title/missa-de-angelis-digital-sheet-music/21996590
Madonna (a plainsong fantasy)
One thing every person in the arts learns–whether it be music, dance, visual arts, literature, whatever–is that there’s no accounting for what different people like or don’t like, including oneself. This isn’t one of my favorite pieces. It may be a surprise to people that people who’ve created something might not like it all that much. There’s a reason for that: when you create something, it’s not that you’re taking dictation from the Cosmic Radio or something, but you get lost in the process of writing and The Thing (in horror movie font) takes on a life of its own and It has a “way” it wants to be. Hard to explain. Anyway, as I was saying, this isn’t one of my favorite pieces, but for (to me) a surprising number of people, it’s the favorite of the pieces on the CD (Cantus) it’s from. For that, I’m grateful. It was hard to write and even harder to record. Nice to know someone likes it.
ROMA
Here are YouTube videos of the 5 movements of the suite of pieces titled Roma in performance order.
Attende Domine
Ubi Caritas
Salve Regina
Pange Lingua
Lauda Sion Salvatorem
1996 – Roma, all 5 movements, solo piano
AUDIO – Sheet Music Direct – Sheet Music Plus
Shortly, I’ll post a similar collection of YouTube videos, all in one blog post, of my setting of the complete Missa de Angelis and in another post a very long single movement piece that is a setting of many Marian plainchants, Madonna.
Thorny Desert
When my and my sister’s father was a kid in southern Mississippi, he learned music via the shaped note system. He was partial to the shaped note hymns in William Walker’s Southern Harmony, and Musical Companion.(I know that comma in there isn’t grammatically justified, but that’s the way the origiinal was, so I keep it there.) I’ve been writing a series of solo piano fantasies based on some of the tunes from Southern Harmony. I’d also done so earlier in an orchestrated version available on most streaming platforms such as Spotify.
The sheet music for this fantasy is available at Sheet Music Direct and Sheet Music Plus. I don’t write “serious” music anymore like the stuff I wrote back in the 90s and before. At my age now, like Matisse, I just enjoy writing the musical equivalent of his “simple” colored paper cut-outs. Amateur pianists keep buying my new sheet music which pleases me because it spreads the simple joy of making music oneself.
Sheet music available at
https://www.sheetmusicdirect.com/en-US/se/ID_No/1620072/Product.aspx
and
https://www.sheetmusicplus.com/en/product/thorny-desert-22865100.html
Ubi Caritas
The sheet music for the set of pieces, Roma, of which this movement is a part, is available at https://www.sheetmusicdirect.com/en-US/se/ID_No/1084675/Product.aspx and https://www.sheetmusicplus.com/title/roma-digital-sheet-music/21996588.
Attende Domine
Back in 1995 I wrote three sets solo piano pieces (Roma, Missa de Angelis, and Madonna) that I recorded and was able to release on an audio CD under a University of South Florida grant. I’m finally getting these, synced with their scores, on videos. The sheet music for the set of pieces, Roma, of which this movement is a part, is available at https://www.sheetmusicdirect.com/en-US/se/ID_No/1084675/Product.aspx and https://www.sheetmusicplus.com/title/roma-digital-sheet-music/21996588.
Rummaging through boxes…
I’m getting all my trumpet descants in one spot, and ran across this. Aa a working composer/arranger I keep unearthing stuff I’d long forgotten I’d done. I’m also trying to find the 8 or 9 descants I’d written for Don Owen for one Christmas Eve service. They gotta be here someone…LOL
#music
#trumpet
#christmas
The Voyage of Clouds & As the Universe, So the Soul
I finished a new piece: The Voyage of Clouds.
The sheet music is available at https://www.sheetmusicdirect.com/en-US/se/ID_No/1615969/Product.aspx.
It’s the fifth movement of this suite, As the Universe, So the Soul.
The sheet music for the suite is available at https://www.sheetmusicdirect.com/en-US/se/ID_No/1616244/Product.aspx.
Tocatta for Organ
I keep plugging away on adding pieces to my collection of single movement pieces for pipe organ, “Easy Postludes for Pipe Organ.”
I’m not being sarcastic when I say, “easy.” In organ music, the difficulty of a piece is primarily the difficulty of the pedal part. All of the pieces in the collection have minimal pedal parts. Even the part for the hands in this piece isn’t as hard as it sounds; it’s mainly just arpeggios and scales.