Tag: Péchés d’âge moyen

March Bandcamp Friday: New Release!

The Portly Politico6 Comments

After a lot of frantic composing and sloppy recording, it’s here: Péchés d’âge moyen, my short collection of twelve original piano miniatures.

My self-imposed deadline was today, the March 2022 Bandcamp Friday.  I made it—barely!

The total recording clocks in at just six minutes and thirty-five seconds, but I’ve jam-packed this release with bonus features:  videos, original manuscripts of each piece, and a PDF booklet detailing the origins of the project.  It’s not bad for $5 (although that comes out to approximately $1.43 per minute if you just listen to the album once).

I also had a blast putting this recording together.  The feel of putting pen to paper is just so satisfying, and each little bit of written music is like its own little work of art.  One reason I included the manuscripts with the recording is because they’re beautiful to look at—even with my poor penmanship.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Péchés d’âge moyen Sneak Peak

The Portly PoliticoLeave a comment

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.

This weekend’s edition of SubscribeStar Saturday will be a bit of a video and document dump, as I’m giving subscribers a sneak peek of my collection of piano miniatures, Péchés d’âge moyen.  I’m hoping to have the whole collection available by this Friday, 4 March 2022 on Bandcamp, but there are some technical considerations I need to work out first—namely, how to get a good quality recording of each piece, rather than videos taken on my phone at school while kids shoot hoops outside of the Music Room (which, sadly, opens onto the gym).

Of course, I may just end up extracting the audio from the attached MP4s and call it a day—ha!

Regardless, today I’m uploading every video I’ve recorded so far, as well as every manuscript of the pieces I’ve put together so far.  I’ll also briefly discuss my composing method, and how it’s changed slightly over the course of the project.

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

Péchés d’âge moyen

The Portly Politico29 Comments

During the last eleven years of his life, the great composer of Italian opera Gioachino Rossini, enjoying a sumptuous retirement after a successful career, composed a collection of 150 pieces.  He dubbed these pieces—intended for intimate and private performances in his home—Péchés de vieillesse, or “Sins of Old Age” (that title is actually affixed to only two of the fourteen albums, but later was applied to the entire collection).  The pieces are a mix of chamber, vocal, and piano music, all meant to be played in Rossini’s home.

Most readers will recognize Rossini from his memorable overtures—often written mere hours before the opening nights of his operas, much to the chagrin of theatre managers—which are probably better known to mass audiences than his operas.  Here’s the most famous of them:

Romantic Era music that even Audre Myers can enjoy!

Rossini was so successful as a composer, he basically spent forty years in retirement.  While music historians disagree on exactly why he stopped composing operas so young, I suspect it had to do with the fact that made so much money from them, he didn’t need to work anymore, and enjoyed a fun retirement (ill-health was likely a contributing factor, too).  He also exited gracefully at the top of his game, avoiding the common pitfall of overstaying one’s artistic welcome amid changing times and tastes.

As such, the Péchés de vieillesse are real gems, coming as they did from a great composer who had long retired from the craft.  Here’s just one example (of 150!), his “Prelude inoffensif” from Volume VII of the collection:

As readers know, I’ve been getting back into composing, and have been exploring composing by hand.  It is extremely satisfying to write pieces by hand (as opposed to a computer, which is certainly more convenient, but lacking in the same tactile satisfaction).  I’ve written a few short piano miniatures—some good, some desperately in need of revision—and Rossini’s “Sins” have inspired some of my own:  a small project I’m dubbing Péchés d’âge moyen.

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