Yours portly has been uploading some more of his original compositions to YouTube. This week, I’m featuring three pieces that are part of (so far) a koi pond triptych of compositions. I’ll be adding to this trio of pieces, so it won’t remain a triptych for long, but that’s a good way of conceptualizing it for now.
I’ve really enjoyed these three pieces, which are all for small, unorthodox chamber groups.
The koi pond at our new house has served as a source of immense inspiration for yours portly. I’ve spent many late nights researching various species of aquatic life that can thrive in our little pond ecosystem. I’m most excited about getting some Japanese Trapdoor Snails for our pond.
In the meantime, however, I’ve added some ramshorn snails to the pond already. They arrived in a bag from an eBay seller in Oklahoma, clinging to the walls of their watery shipping compartment. I drove them up one frosty night and gently plopped them into the pond, which inspired today’s new piece.
It’s a quick Lazy Sunday this week as Dr. Wife and I hunker down in the cold. I’m casting my gaze back to two posts from earlier this week, one based in the coolness of the watery depths, the other in the fiery crucible of the modern restaurant industry:
Happy Sunday!
—TPP
I’ve been working hard on this week’s piece, “Koi Dance,” for about two weeks now. It’s a chamber piece featuring two flutes, bassoon, and piano, and draws inspiration from Bedřich Smetana’s “The Moldau”; that piece also features a flowing theme that depicts the movement of water.
I plugged the finished piece into Audacity and applied some additional reverb and a master effect, both of which I think have allowed the sound to “pop.”
Other than a quick piece I dashed off earlier this week, I haven’t had much time for composing. However, my koi pond adventures have inspired me—just in time to reblog this post about one of my favorite pieces of Romantic music.
That the piece is about a river is appropriate—while my koi are swirling about in a murky pond, the watery imagery is a source of inspiration for the piece that is slowly taking shape in mind.
I actually have an idea for the cover art for the album that will feature this imagined piece. I took a picture of these cool little koi tea cups that Dr. Wife got me for my birthday on one of the pianos at school:
Regardless, I’ve always loved this piece, ever since I read about it in Roger Kamien’s Music: An Appreciation, Brief 8th Edition (that’s an Amazon Affiliate link; I receive a portion of any purchases made through that link, at no additional cost to you) and listened to it with my students.
With that, here is 9 January 2025’s “TBT^4: The Joy of Romantic Music II: Bedřich Smetana’s ‘The Moldau’“:
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Now that it’s 2026, it’s time to make a few changes to the blog. One of those overdue changes comes to the long-running weekly feature Open Mic Adventures.
According to a hasty review of my records, I ceased playing open mics—and, indeed, most live gigs outside of private bookings—in 2025. I simply lacked the time and energy—and interest. I much prefer rehearsing my students so they can play live.
That’s been one of the big changes in my life in recent years. I enjoy playing live, but as I get older, going to open mic nights and playing songs I wrote a decade (or more) ago lost its luster. It’s also amazing how once I got engaged (and now married), my desire to show off in coffee shops plummeted. If I’m going to play to impress anyone—always a dubious proposition—it’s going to be for Dr. Wife.
That’s all to say that I’m not ending Open Mic Adventures, per se—there’s always that chance I’ll get that itch to play and get some good video in the process—but that I’m shifting it into something more accurate: New Music Tuesday. The “Open Mic” appellation ceased to be accurate for most of 2025, as I featured more and more of my original electronic compositions.
Of course, good ol’ WordPress.com makes it easy to put together these weekly, multimedia posts. One thing I’ve come to love about WordPress.com is how intuitive it is to upload all sorts of media.
For example, here is today’s featured track, “Herald,” uploaded as a beautifully lossless WAV file using the “Audio” block:
I found this brief piece scribbled on a red tardy slip I had in my desk. I apparently wrote it down on 8 August 2023, and finally put it into my music composition software this morning. It’s a very simple, quick piece, indicative of the kinds of etudes I was composing at that time. As such, “Herald” is a brief piano fanfare, suitable for players at most levels.
Christmastime is pretty busy for yours portly, which means my shaving routine tends to get disrupted. I usually find myself nearing beard capacity by the time Christmas approaches, so I always take the time to do a thorough shave before the big day.
That being the case, I made up a little song, “Clean-Shaven at Christmas,” some years ago. My nephews in particular love it, and will sing it—unprompted!—as Christmas approaches (I also taught them to wake up on Christmas morning shouting, “It’s Christmas! It’s Christmas!”).
So it was that I decided to piece together a YouTube Short of the phases of my shaving with my voice accompanying. There’s even a gross closeup of where I cut myself while shaving—gasp!
It’s Christmas! It’s Christmas! And it’s a Thursday, so yours portly is TBT’ing to a classic of yesterchristmas.
Back in 2019, I wrote this piece about Napoleon. It took off because it gained some traction on WhatFinger News, which came along after Matthew Drudge inexplicably went woke. The name of this alternative news aggregator always strikes me as vaguely inappropriate, but they ran my link and it got tons of views at a time when I was getting discouraged with the blog (a perennial issue, it seems—perseverance is a virtue for a reason).
Napoleon is a complex and intriguing figure. Whatever his personal and professional attributes, he indelibly changed Europe and the world. It’s hard for us to understand today, fixated as we are on the failed Austrian painter with the Charlie Chaplin mustache, but Napoleon’s impact was still being discussed actively in the early twentieth century. He totally upended the gameboard of Europe—for good or for ill—and the fear and/or hope of another Napoleon endured for quite awhile.
YouTube philosopher Agora made a great video linking the two figures—and warning about why those links miss some key differences:
The important thing to remember, however, is that humanity’s conception of “greatness” is false. Remember, Christ Was Born today as a simple baby in the most humble of circumstances—literally bedding down in a feeding trough for barnyard animals. He Died a humiliating Death on the Cross. He Rose from the dead and Conquered Death, and Will Return again!
No Napoleon could ever achieve what He Did.
With that, here is 26 December 2024’s “TBT^2: Napoleonic Christmas“:
Way back in January I featured the missionary hymn “From Greenland’s Icy Mountains” as part of “Open Mic Adventures CXV: ‘From Greenland’s Icy Mountains’” as a jingoistic tribute to the then-recent inauguration of President Trump, who had designs on annexing Greenland. Instead of singing the piece—a very old missionary tune by composer Lowell Mason, with words by Reginald Heber—I played it a few times as a bit of instrumental prelude music.
There this obscure piece of music sat until my September, when my pastor had the idea to pull out some lesser-known hymns for our church to sing during our fall revival services. My pastor shares something of my absurdist sense of humor, so when he stumbled upon “From Greenland’s Icy Mountains,” he half-jokingly proposed we sing it one night as our congregational piece. I enthusiastically agreed to play it, and so it became reality.
I took the opportunity to record a little bit of it and upload it to YouTube. Below is the church’s valiant attempt at singing a song that virtually no one in the congregation knew:
Here’s something a bit different for today’s Open Mic Adventures. I’m never one to let anything go to waste, and that includes silly, improvised cover songs that I send as voice texts.
One morning a couple of weeks back I sang a “cover” of “Riders on the Storm,” the song by The Doors, but changed it to “Murphy on the Storm.” I amused myself so much with my shenanigans that I texted a rendition to my older brother. I then took that audio and plugged into iMovie on my phone, along with a picture of Murphy.
The result is absurdist hilarity.
The Portly Politico 