A productive weekend!

So I sat down this weekend with a small fragment of melody in my head...and decided to just run with it. What happened was a brand new piece for a cappella choir based on the Edmund Waller poem "Go, lovely Rose." The poetry is beautiful and unobtrusive, talking to a flower about the love of his life, who doesn't even know how special she is. This poem hits home especially hard with me, because of the love of my life, who rarely has time to stop and see how truly wonderful she is. I tried to play with different variations in harmony with the piece, seeing how different variations in tonal structure effect the overall tone of the words and shade the piece a specific way. I tried to fit the harmonies fairly close together, as opposed to some of my other works that really shift all over the vocal spectrum. I think the piece is fairly solid, and achieves the effects I was going for. I posted it to my myspace in the top spot. Enjoy!

When David Heard

Music for me is usually a happy thing, overflowing with positive associations and irrepressible effervescence. However, this is not always the case. I would have to say my favorite pieces of music come not from happiness, but from true and overwhelming sadness. My favorite genre of composition has to be the requiem, a mass sung for the dead. And while this doesn't always have to be a maudlin display of grief, there is a resolute sadness to the music (my favorite requiem is probably Faure's, which is probably more a feeling of release than a sigh of bereavement). So when I set to putting the text to "When David Heard" to music, I had a lot up against me. First of all, it's decidedly depressing, with a father mourning the loss of his son. Secondly, there are a bevy of amazing settings of this music (Eric Whitacre's version is hauntingly brilliant, and over 12 minutes in length to boot, which is impressive considering the text is basically 3 lines long) to contend with as well as compare in my mind. Thirdly, I've never felt myself to have a flair for writing in minor keys, my brain seems to like sticking to major tonalities which I feel I do well. So writing this piece was an exercise in expanding my creative boundaries in a number of ways. I feel the effort is solid, and posted it to my Myspace. The texts I overlaid quite a bit to create this effect of echoes, because in my mind I imagined David screaming at the top of his lungs into a large empty room, so all he could hear was his own voice reflecting back to him. He is a man searching for answers at this point, feeling lost and abandoned by his creator, and the only answer he receives is his own voice back at him. The text reads like this:

When David heard that Absalom was slain,
he went up into his chamber over the gate and wept and thus he said:
"O, Absalom! My son! Would God that I had died for thee!"

Life is the time spent between what you've done and what you've left to do...

OK, so a huge overhaul has taken place in my life. I am once again uprooted, this time from sunny DFW to beautiful Manhattan, KS. I got a teaching job at a local school district, teaching K-5 vocal music at two small elementary schools. I have spent the past 3 weeks moving, training, and generally being about as stressed as I possibly can be. But it's totally been worth it...sometimes you have to just take life as it comes and go wherever the winds are blowing. I'm hoping to continue updating at least once weekly to keep everything posted. I finished another song in my growing e.e. cummings cycle. This piece is "when god lets my body be" once again continuing the theme of the interplay between love and faith. I love the lyricism I'm discovering while studying cumminghs work...the words are simply leaping to life when put to music. I'm posting it on my myspace music page.