Tag: music

TBT^65,536: Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony

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I’ve been on a programmatic composing kick, which seems to happen every January.  I’m currently working on a collection of instrumental music inspired by my koi pond, which I’m tentatively calling Koi Dance.

Writing music inspired by God’s Creation is nothing new, but descriptive program music reached its height during the Romantic Era.  The great composer bridging the gap between the classical and Romantic periods was Beethoven.

Beethoven is known for many works, but I am partial to one of his less-appreciated symphonies, the Sixth.  It depicts a day in the countryside, and fits with the emerging Romanticism’s fascinating with the natural world and the countryside.

With that, here is 30 January 2025’s “TBT^256: Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony“:

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New Music Tuesday III: “Snail Drop”

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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.

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Lazy Sunday CCCXLXIV: Fire and Water

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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

New Music Tuesday II: “Koi Dance”

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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.”

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Open Mic Adventures CLXII: “I Found Love (Cindy’s Song)”

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Last week I made a big deal about how I’m shifting Open Mic Adventures into New Music Tuesday, and how it’s inaccurate to call these features “Open Mic Adventures” because they’re not really at open mics—blah, blah, blah.  All of that is true, but this week, I have a bit of a conundrum:  what do I do if I don’t have any new, original music, but have a cover of a song?

Well, my hasty solution is to use the old “Open Mic Adventures” label for those pieces that covers, as 1.) anytime I feature a cover, it’s me playing it, even if it’s not at an open mic night; and 2.) I don’t want to further muddy the waters with some other title, like “Saxophone Covers Tuesday” or whatever.  What a nightmare!

So, here’s how it’s going to be going forward:

  • Any performance that is a cover of someone else’s work will be an Open Mic Adventures
  • Any live performance will also be an Open Mic Adventures
  • Any original music—whether electronic or me playing a piece I’ve composed—will fall under the new New Music Tuesday feature

Shew!  Hopefully that’s all sorted.

With that tedious business out of the way, let’s get to this week’s piece!  A potential client is booking a saxophonist to play the BeBe & CeCe Winans song “I Found Love (Cindy’s Song)” for their wedding.  The piece will play as the bride walks down the aisle.  At the time of writing, I’m still waiting for the official booking (fingers crossed), but I recorded a quick, abbreviated version of the piece on my alto sax Sunday afternoon [read my full guide on buying a budget sax if you, too, want to start your saxophone empire—TPP].

Here’s my humble attempt at noodling out this smooth gospel/R&B classic:

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Christmas Gig Defeat

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Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive.  To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.  For a full rundown of everything your subscription gets, click here.

The past couple of weeks have been quite busy as Dr. Wife and I began the arduous process of moving furniture, personal belongings, and various bits of bric-a-brac and knick-knackery to our new home.  As such, I’m playing a bit of catch-up with these subscriber-only posts.  Apologies for the frequent delays over the last few months, and thanks for sticking with me.  —TPP

Back on 20 December 2025 I wrote “Christmas Gigging,” an optimistic post about how fun, easy, and profitable Christmastime bookings are for musicians.  Christmas music abundantly available and instantly recognizable; it’s also fairly easy to learn a lot of it quickly.

I was booked to play saxophone at a Christmas party that night, way down in Summerville, South Carolina.  I’d booked the gig through GigSalad, one of several booking services available to musicians, birthday clowns, jugglers, comedians, and all the rest of us carny folk.  Over the years I’ve used the service, I’ve only closed 5.4% of all gigs I’ve quoted to clients (or 5 out of 93).  To be fair, I’ve received a whopping 776 leads over the years, which means I’m only sending quotes to just under 12% of the leads I actually received.

Many of those unquoted leads are due either to scheduling conflicts (lots of nursing homes booking during the day on weekdays, for example, or gigs too far away to make after work).  Some are instances of potential clients never responding to basic questions about their needs (I don’t like to send a quote for events like weddings, for example, without at least touching base with the client about what they want).  Still others—more than I’d like to admit—are simply me not responding until it’s too late.

Regardless, even with gigs that are quoted, the vast majority—well, 94.6%, as you can see—go unbooked.  Only a handful of those are because the client has booked another professional; they’re mostly due to people never responding to quotes at all—and most of those never even look at the quote (GigSalad indicates when a potential client has seen a quote and/or message).

But I digress.  I had a bout of good luck with GigSalad in December, managing to land two gigs within a week of each other.  The first client was very pleased—I played for his proposal to his girlfriend—and the client for the Christmas party seemed pretty eager for me to play.

I had a bit of a bad feeling about this gig.

To read the rest of this post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.

TBT^16: The Joy of Romantic Music II: Bedřich Smetana’s “The Moldau”

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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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New Music Tuesday I: “Herald”

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Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links. If you purchase through these links, I may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.

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.

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Open Mic Adventures CLXI: “Clean-Shaven at Christmas”

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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!

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Open Mic Adventures CLX: Church Attempts “From Greenland’s Icy Mountains”

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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:

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