During my visit to see my older brother in Indianapolis, we spent a couple of days in Chicago. On the second day of our trip, we visited the Field Museum. The Field Museum is basically a natural history museum, and it features one of America’s biggest—and oldest—attractions:
Over the course of the last two years I’ve composed a ton of music. I treat composing the way the Native Americans treated the mighty bison: I don’t waste anything. That means I probably release a lot of “filler” tunes, but I find that pieces I think of as throwaways compositions are sometimes the most popular.
I do not know if the pieces shared today fall into that category. But for whatever reason, I like writing pieces with “Roll” in title. These are always based, in part, on food.
The first of these was “Orange Roll,” an odd little piece in 5/4 time. The “Orange” comes from the fact I used an orange pen to compose it; the “Roll” came from the rolling feel of the melody.
Later, I wrote “Tomato Roll,” a clarinet duet in 5/8 time. I wrote the piece mainly because I spent way too much time drawing a detailed tomato in MS Paint as a way to illustrate a concept to my Economics students during a couple of days of online learning.
Finally, I recently composed “Crunchy Roll,” which is a bass guitar in 3/4 and 4/4, but with lots of odd timing.
But enough of my yakkin’—let’s boogie!
It was a more musical week than usual here at The Portly Politico, so I thought I’d take today’s installment of Lazy Sunday to feature recent music-related pieces:
Enjoy this brief trip into the very recent past—and enjoy listening!
Happy Sunday!
—TPP
Other Lazy Sunday Installments:
I’m finally gearing back up the composing, and have a new-ish piece for y’all this week. It’s a crunchy groove based on a crunchy roll:
Well, here it is: the last piece from Leftovers IV that needs to be featured on this humble blog. I’m going to have to start writing new music again—or actually go back to open mic night!
After a massive output last year and earlier this year, I’ve been relaxing a bit. Part of it is that the inspirado hasn’t been hitting as frequently, but I also tend to slow down when summertime hits. My workflow is such that, when I have a ton of stuff to do, I actually get more creative work done, because I’m pretty revved up and running all the time. I work like a diesel engine: I can run a long time if I just keep running, but once I shut off, it takes me awhile to get back to peak efficiency.
I do have a couple of collections of older work waiting in the wings, I’m just tinkering with when and how I want to release them. When I say “older,” I mean really old—stuff that dates back to 2004 and earlier. Some of the pieces probably go back to the last century, even if they were only recorded years later. I also have several new pieces that need videos, a release, etc. Again, I’m contemplating how and when I want to compile those pieces.
But I digress. Here is the last track from that short EP, Leftovers IV. It’s weird piece and, quite honestly, I’m not entirely pleased with the results.
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Today I’m featuring the seventh track from Spooky Season III, “Rain on Halloween“; it’s one of my favorite tracks from the release, in part because it’s so different.
I often neglect to write percussion parts for my more classically-oriented pieces, as it’s not always top of mind for me as a wind player (and while I play piano, which is technically a percussion instrument, I don’t conceive of it as one that often). This piece is entirely percussion, and I had a lot of fun writing it.
The Portly Politico 