I’m hosting a FREE online listening party for Spooky Season on Sunday, 1 October 2023, at 7 PM Eastern Standard Time. You can RSVP here.
After the unusual success of “Skeleton Dance No. 1” on YouTube, I knew it was time to compose “Skeleton Dance No. 2.” As is often the case with sequels, “Skeleton Dance No. 2” is far more developed and fleshed-out (no pun intended) than its predecessor.
Spooky Season is upon us, and yours portly can’t get enough of it. Pumpkins. Ghosts. Skeletons!
So this Sunday, I thought I’d look back at the scant skeleton posts on this humble blog:
Happy Sunday—and Happy Listening!
—TPP
Other Lazy Sunday Installments:
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While working on Spooky Season II: Rise of the Cryptids (coming to Bandcamp on Friday, 6 October 2023), I composed a couple of tracks that only somewhat related, “Meandering” and “Plodder.” These were pieces I’d written snippets of in my composing journal, but which were more or less experiments in unusual meters and concepts. “Plodder,” for example, is written to be intentionally muddy—lots of low-end bass notes and tight tone clusters, producing something akin to the effect of a small child or a cat leaning on the low keys of the piano:
I added in tuba and bass clarinet (the latter is quickly becoming my favorite, spooky sound) to drive home that thick, sludgy low-end sound.
“Plodder” fits the cryptid theme of the album a bit better of these two “movement”-inspired pieces. One could imagine Bigfoot or some zombie (are zombies cryptids?; maybe some variations would be considered as such) plodding slowly through the forests, although all the “footage” of “Bigfoot” I’ve seen seems to indicate he’s a fairly fast fellow.
Regardless, I found these two pieces particularly unusual and unorthodox, and opted to share them with you, my faithful subscribers, ahead of the album’s release.
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I’ve been composing like a madman while I still have a free demo subscription to Noteflight. I’ve already composed Spooky Season, and have a sequel composed and set to release on 6 October 2023 on Bandcamp, then to all other streaming platforms on 13 October 2023. The sequel, Spooky Season II: Rise of the Cryptids, is ten tracks, and will be loaded with bonus features, including the videos featured in today’s post.
One of my favorite pieces from Spooky Season is “Bavarian Bop,” a short piece for small instrumental ensemble that I also rearranged for solo piano. It’s a little Oktoberfest-inspired bit of musical whimsy.
Ah, yes—another Tuesday, another edition of Open Mic Adventures in which I thwart Ponty’s dreams and feature a super short, experimental piano miniature instead of a gutsy, flabby live performance.
No worries—there will (probably) be more sweaty, robust live performances soon. But as we endure the heat and misery of August, I’m already looking ahead to the coolness and fun of Halloween.
So, what better way to get in the spooky mood than with a little skeletal gyrating?
By the time you’re reading this post, I should be about an hour or so into a long drive to Indianapolis, where I’ll be visiting my older brother for a week. We’ll laugh, we’ll cry, we’ll vomit—well, probably not those last two, unless I overindulge on the chicken sausage dogs he picked up for the Fourth of July.
In the spirit of keeping Lazy Sunday lazy, here are three more pieces of original music from Open Mic Adventures, the series that keeps on giving:
Happy Sunday—and Happy Listening!
—TPP
Other Lazy Sunday Installments:
June is nearly over, and July starts tomorrow. I’ll be hitting the road for a week in Indianapolis to visit my older brother, which means I’ll probably get another poorly-selling travel book out of the deal—maybe something like Midwestern Musings, Washingtonian Woes. Of course, I need to finish my series on the wild, stressful trip to Washington, D.C., from this March. For whatever reason, I just haven’t had it in me to continue writing that saga, even though the best (and, at the time they occurred, the worst) parts are yet to come.
But I digress. In the spirit of shameless self-promotion, here’s another edition if YouTube Roundup, in which I showcase some of my recent YouTube uploads. Feel free to follow my YouTube page. Watch a video, like it, leave a comment—whatever you’d like. I upload approximately once a week, sometimes more.
Ah, the glorious summer. I can already feel it slipping through my Vienna sausage fingers like the grains of sand in an hour glass, or the metaphorical sandbags I’m desperately stacking up against the inexorable tide of the new school year. I love teaching, but having mornings free to write and the like is glorious.
One perk of summer is that I can actually get out to open mic nights again. I’ve missed playing live, and I want to find sustainable ways to play during the school year. It’s difficult, though: I typically don’t get in from an open mic until 10 PM. That’s doable during the summer months, but during the school year, I’m usually zonked out by 9 or 9:30 PM, not hanging out with hipsters in some coffee shop.
Regardless, here are some recent posts featuring original pieces, two of which are open mic performances:
Happy Sunday—and Happy Listening!
—TPP
Other Lazy Sunday Installments:
Two years ago I wrote “Supporting Friends Friday: The Cinematic Compositions of Mason Sandifer” about the composing work of one of my student, Robert Mason Sandifer. Mason (as I call him) started distributing his music to all the major platforms (Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, YouTube, etc.) earlier this month, and he is directly responsible for inspiring me to put my old instrumental music on the same platforms.
Mason is currently undertaking an ambitious project to compose instrumental music that tells the story of the Bible, from Genesis through Revelations (or, as my friend Steve O would say, “from Genesis through Maps”). It’s an amazing concept, and he has executed it beautifully so far.
Thanks to the gentle prodding of Audre Myers, I’ve decided to upload videos actively to my YouTube channel. I’ve had this channel for almost fifteen years (apparently), but only used it to upload a short video from the video game Spore in 2008 and some footage of my old group Brass to the Future playing “The Stars and Stripes Forever” on Independence Day 2010.
I’ll mostly upload original music. There are plenty of songs I love to cover, but uploading those covers to YouTube without obtaining permission from the original songwriters is technically a violation of copyright law. I’m a big believer in the protection of intellectual property, and I’d rather not run afoul of the YouTube police, at least not for something legitimate.
That said, readers are welcome to cover my tunes, just let me know about it.
So, I thought I’d periodically post a digest of some recent uploads for readers who want to dive deeper into my music—for free!
The Portly Politico 