Dr. Wife and I had some errands to run last week, and while she was tending to a few things I jotted down today’s piece. I will sometimes keep little bits of staff paper open in my music journals for short musical sketches, and I had three glorious staves waiting for an opportune moment to do some hasty composing.

The result is this set of three chorales. I posted polls on Substack and Telegram asking for feedback about the instrumentation, but results were limited. I initially arranged it for a string trio—violin, viola, and cello—but changed to a woodwind trio of flute, oboe, and bassoon. I think that captured the sound I wanted better.

I imported the WAV from Noteflight into Audacity and applied a “Small Bright Room” reverb effect; an “Wide Synth Pad” chorus effect; and a “Tape” master effect. I then took the audio and pictures of the score and track artwork and imported them all into iMovie. From there, I imported the resulting video into YouTube Create, where I added my favorite filter, “Vaporwave,” and added one bit of text that reads “<–“(C# Locrian)” to indicate that the “A major” section in the handwritten score is, actually, in that highly unusual key signature.

“Three Geometric Chorales” is a set of three chorales for flute, oboe, and bassoon. Each chorale follows changing sets of logical rules, and each subsequent chorale is two measures shorter than the previous one.

Here’s the original, handwritten score, including my botched attempt at drawing a nonagon:

And here’s the album artwork, which does not include a nonagon, because there’s not an easy way to do that in MS Paint Classic:

What do you think of this set of chorales? Do the harmonies get too weird? Is it too repetitive at points? Or does it induce a contemplative state in you, dear listener?

Leave a comment and let me know!

Happy Listening!

—TPP