I’m nearly done—I think—with Koi Dance. I’d like to write one or two more pieces for the collection, particularly one based on Japanese Trapdoor Snails. I should have fifty-five of the suckers arriving via airmail this afternoon, and I’m excited to plop them into our pond. They should clean up some of the murkiness quite nicely.
Today’s piece is a return to form for me, with the usual sort of counterpoint and tight harmonization I usually favor. The first section is particularly based on parallel motion between the two parts, but the second section features a multimeter fugal section.
It’s also the only piece based on a fish that doesn’t live in a koi pond (as far as I know). But when I heard what I’d scribbled down, it just sounded like a sturgeon!
After hearing how “Koi Chorale” turned out last week, I wanted to experiment more with music that, as one of my students put it, “sounds distant.” Tinkering with music that is bound by a set of semi-rigid internal “rules” has also been top of mind, so I attempted to combine the two into another piece—today’s feature.
The experiment this time was to see where a stepwise melody (moving in seconds) would end up depending on whether the notes moved up or down by seconds. Most of my composing of late has been some variation on this theme, so it’s nothing new, but that’s where I started. I also wanted one “hand” or part playing a sustained half note while the opposing “hand” or part moved in a quadruplet of eighth notes.
Having accomplished that, I kept the bottom “hand” consistent across the form. The top “hand,” however, moved either “down” or “up”:
Then on the third line, I combined the “up” and “down” movements, seeing where they would overlap.
From there, I added another part in Noteflight, which harmonized with the handwritten part. I added some low brass, too, which just moves in quarter note arpeggios starting on the first and fifth of the chord of each measure. Pretty straightforward.
I applied heavy pedal markings for all of the instruments, even if (like classical guitar, trombone, and tuba) they don’t have pedals (I think vibraphone, the lead instrument, does have a sustain pedal of sorts, but I could be wrong). I wanted the notes to “ooze” into each other in a thick, aquatic shimmer, like water washing amorphously into a contained space.
Finally, I plugged everything into Audacity and applied some heavy reverb and other effects, which really lend the piece the distant, melancholy, slightly creepy feeling of an odd dream.
As my former neighbor summarized the piece:
“It’s like a dream, slightly… creepy, but you don’t know WHY…. [it’s m]usic played in the background of your subconscious, which is hazy, fuzzy, and blips in and out, as a porcelain doll named ‘Polly’ requests that you play with her….”
Well put, my friend. And that is “Aquatic Geometry”:
Sometimes as an artist you create something that seems to stand apart from your other works. I’ll be the first to admit that some of the pieces I write are exercises in composing and musical experiments that don’t always succeed. Implicit to the concept of New Music Tuesday is the chance to workshop pieces and to see what catches attention. Some pieces seem to have their brief moment and then fade away, to the point that even I start to forget about them. Others, however, leave an impression.
Sometimes what starts as a musical exercise in form and restraint can lead to stunning results. Like poetry, restraint and structure and rules make the work better, not worse. Consider all of the free poetry you’ve heard or read. How much of it can you remember? But everyone remembers Robert Frost’s poems.
I’m not comparing today’s piece to the poetry of Robert Frost. I did, however, follow a (somewhat) strict set of internal rules when composing it. I never could wrap my head around formal counterpoint (although I was eighteen when I last tried, in an introductory music theory class at the University of South Carolina), but most of my chorales follow a set of self-imposed rules.
For example, the Oboe 1 part consists (until the sixth and seventh measures) of a whole note tied across the bar line to a half note, followed by a half note tied to a whole note. The Oboe 2 part follows the same pattern except in the first and seventh measures (each phrase is seven measures). Both parts must be stepwise in their motion.
I can’t remember off the top of my head what rules I imposed on the Bassoon 1 and 2 parts. They’re slightly different but follow a similar pattern. By forcing myself to stick (mostly) with these parameters, I ended up with some truly beautiful moments of dissonance and consonance. I especially love when the Bassoon 2 part—the final part to appear—enters in on the third time through the form. It enters on a haunting seventh interval interval, and it was fun bending it slowly towards a rich, four-part triad.
The piece starts with Oboe 1 and 2 playing through seven measures. Bassoon 1 joins on the second time through the seven-measure form; Bassoon 2 joins on the final section. Naturally, I had to add an “Amen” sequence.
With that, here is the double reed quartet chorale “Koi Chorale”:
Here’s the original manuscript, which just has the two oboe parts; note the mistake I made in the top line, which—because I wanted to stick to the rules—ended up changing the melodic line of the piece:
I may go back and try a different set of rules with that Oboe 1 part to see what I’d originally written sounds like.
Regardless, I am really pleased with how this piece comes out. My former neighbor, Across the Field Jerry, told me that it reminds him of the organ preludes at his old Lutheran Church. That made me happy—I love it when reeds, even digital ones, blend so well that they create an organ-like sound.
I added a “Cathedral” preset reverb effect and applied a mastering preset in Audacity to the track. The cool video effect is called “Vaporwave,” and is a preset effect in the YouTube Create app. The images were compiled in the iPhone version of iMovie, and come from our koi pond.
I had fun making the cover art (as always, in MS Paint Classic—ha!); I suppose I should have made it four fish:
The koi pictured is Cobbler, our blue koi. He is a big boy, and when it’s warm out, he loves to skim the surface of the pond looking for food. I thought his mouth looked like a fishy chorister:
What do you think of this little piece? Do you prefer writers, composers, etc., adhere to a set of rules and structure when creating, or do you appreciate less stringent creativity? Let me know!
Just a reminder that everything is still 90% off with promo code moving at my Bandcamp page.
While packing up for the big move I found quite a few fun little items and mementos: old notebooks from my childhood; photographs with friends in our doughy youths; doodles from former students who now likely have families of their own; bits of music I’d composed. One of the coolest finds was my old Yamaha PortaSound PSS-50:
This little keyboard has been in my family for as long as I can remember. I’m certain it was my older brother‘s keyboard, but through years of use it became “mine” in that way that childhood items do among siblings. The keyboard is likely just a few years younger than me, which would mean it’s been around for nearly four decades.
And it still works—well, mostly. The keys from the first F through the first D no longer play, but every key from Eb up to that third C work beautifully. It runs on six AA batteries, which I apparently changed out recently, because I was jamming on this little puppy before packing it.
In my early, lo-fi-because-I-didn’t-know-any-better days, I recorded quite a few pieces with this PSS-50 plugged into my brother’s Crate guitar amp with an old computer microphone dangling in front of the amp’s horn (I’m going to release those recordings one day). In the super early days, I’d record separate WAV files using Sound Recorder, then combine them using the same software, hoping everything lined up properly; Adobe Audition 1.5 smoothed that over for me, though.
I still remember some of the classic voices on this keyboard: “26” cues up an “Electric Guitar” sound which has this amazing distortion to it while still sounding clean enough to use melodically. The default “00” is a “Trumpet” that, to me, is the standard sound any synthesizer should have. Indeed, there is a more robust Yamaha synth from this era that someone donated to the school years ago, and “Brass 1” is the default voice when starting the keyboard.
That yellow “Demo” button played an instrumental version of the song “Venus.” My older brother changed the lyrics to “Booty, Booty, Booty, Come Home,” which he said was the theme song for my band, which he initially named “Booty and the Bootettes” before changing it to “Booty and the Flaming Booties.”
As you can see, dear reader, this keyboard and I share a lot of history together. If it ever stops playing entirely, I’m going to have to write to Yamaha to repair it. They’ll probably have to bring their last remaining 1980s consumer mini-keyboard specialist out of retirement/cryogenic freezing to do so, but I want this little guy handed down to (God Willing) my little guys!
So it was that I picked ol’ PSS-50 up and improvised a little hornpipe using “17”—“Reed Organ”:
My Middle School Music Ensemble students have been learning the iconic “Morning” (sometimes called “Morning Mood”) by Edvard Grieg in preparation for the SCISA Music Festival this Thursday, 12 March 2026. I began toying with the main theme and came up with today’s piece.
Yours portly is continuing to work on his collection of pond-based tunes, Koi Dance. I introduced some rosy red minnows to our koi pond about a month ago, which inspired today’s piece.
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I neglected to feature this week’s piece sooner, although it did show up in an addition of Phone it in Friday. Well, better late than never!
The structure of this piece is slightly unusual. It’s a string trio, but the violin doesn’t kick in until the second half of the piece, when it adds harmonies and a countermelody of sorts to the work.
I’m continuing to work on my pond-based pieces, and have a fourth piece completed. This duet incorporates whole tone scales, which possess a mystical, mysterious quality. The piece is broadly in Bb major, but the second and third sections feature some secondary dominants that, at times, push the key closer to D major. The whole tone scales also give a sense of atonality to sections of the piece, representing the mystery of moonlight.
