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.
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.”
Yours portly has three separate releases that I plan to now release in early September, as my distributor, CD Baby, usually takes about three weeks to approve releases for distribution. Two of the releases feature older works, but one will feature tons of new pieces.
This week, I’m featuring one of those new pieces, “Triple Deluxe”:
I’ve been catching up on composing and arranging some pieces that have been sitting in my music journal for a month or two. This week’s composition is one such piece, with a distinctly medieval feel.
Apparently, I failed to make videos for all of the pieces on Leftovers IV. Indeed, I neglected to upload a lot of the goodies that I usually include with digital purchases of albums; that has now been rectified.
So I am back to looking at some tracks from that short EP. This week I’m sharing a piece that’s a bit of a Celtic jig.
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I’m still brainstorming what my next music composition project will be, but I’ve been noodling around with a few ideas. Even when I am not sure of a thematic direction, I keep composing.
Composing is one of those things that scratches a very deep itch for me. I like to tinker with sets of music theory rules—some of my own creation—to see what kinds of sounds and ideas I can develop within fixed limits. The challenge of “solving” the problems these limitations create is part of the fun for me, as I tease out melodies and harmonies within whatever confines—arbitrary or otherwise—I’m set for myself.
One thing I’ve been interested in lately is writing trios consisting of three of the same instruments, or three very closely related instruments. It limits the palette of sound fonts I have to work with, but that also creates unique opportunities for music expression.
The piece this week is one of the first such attempts, a piece that explores the airy, high woodwinds.
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I’ve just released my tenth album of the year, Leftovers III. It’s really an EP, as it just contains five tracks, but it also contains the longest piece I’ve ever composed, “Hanging Gardens.”
This week I’m featuring the third track from the album, “Rainy Wednesday Morning Waltz“; it’s looking like tomorrow (Christmas!) is going to be pretty rainy, so it seemed apt:
The Portly Politico 