The Christmas season is technically still in full swing until Epiphany on 6 January 2024, but I know everyone is now looking ahead to the new year. Still, yours portly isn’t one to let a video go to waste, so here’s my rendition of “O Little Town of Bethlehem.”
Christmas may have been yesterday, but as every traditionalist wag will be quick to point out, it’s AHKTUALLY still the Christmas season, through 6 January 2024, Epiphany (it’s also Boxing Day). So, why not continue the fun with some Christmas carols!
This week, I’m featuring a short video of myself playing “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” on piano. It’s a jaunty and rousing carol. With lyrics from Charles Wesley and George Whitefield and music from a Felix Mendelssohn cantata, this carol was destined for yuletide greatness.
I’ve actually featured this piece in Open Mic Adventures before (“Open Mic Adventures XIV: ‘Hark! The Herald Angels Sing’“), so we’ll see how this version stacks up to last year’s rendition.
We’re getting into the cozy part of the Christmas season, with plenty of cold nights spent bundled up by the light of the Christmas tree, sipping hot chocolate and wearing sweaters. It’s the hygge, and yours portly couldn’t be happier.
Naturally, all this cozy Christmas cheer gets me thinking about Christmas carols, and few carols capture the quiet peace of Christmas quite like “Silent Night.”
I haven’t been able to compose quite as much lately as I’d like, but I had fun with a little 5/4 composition that I wrote on 8 November 2023. It’s called “Orange Roll,” mainly because I wrote it with an orange gel pen, and I had fun playing around with the harmonies and variations on it.
I’m dipping back into the hymnal for this week’s Open Mic Adventure, from the same Sunday service as last week’s installment. This week, I’m featuring a short video of the hymn “‘Tis So Sweet To Trust in Jesus,” written by Louisa M. R. Stead and set to the tune “Trust in Jesus” by William J. Kirkpatrick.
In the wake of Anklegate 2023, I’ve been leaning on the Lord (and other people) more than ever. So it seemed appropriate to look back a piano performance of the hymn “I Need Thee Every Hour” from before the Sunday, 22 October 2023 morning service at my church.
Now that school is back in session, yours portly isn’t making it out to open mic night much, so I’m doing what I do best: mining the rich veins of my old, neglected works.
This week I’d like to share “Minuet for a New Moon,” which I composed on 9 February 2022 as part of Péchés d’âge moyen, the highly unpopular collection of lo-fi solo piano pieces I released largely as part of an inside Internet joke.
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While working on Spooky Season II: Rise of the Cryptids (coming to Bandcamp on Friday, 6 October 2023), I composed a couple of tracks that only somewhat related, “Meandering” and “Plodder.” These were pieces I’d written snippets of in my composing journal, but which were more or less experiments in unusual meters and concepts. “Plodder,” for example, is written to be intentionally muddy—lots of low-end bass notes and tight tone clusters, producing something akin to the effect of a small child or a cat leaning on the low keys of the piano:
I added in tuba and bass clarinet (the latter is quickly becoming my favorite, spooky sound) to drive home that thick, sludgy low-end sound.
“Plodder” fits the cryptid theme of the album a bit better of these two “movement”-inspired pieces. One could imagine Bigfoot or some zombie (are zombies cryptids?; maybe some variations would be considered as such) plodding slowly through the forests, although all the “footage” of “Bigfoot” I’ve seen seems to indicate he’s a fairly fast fellow.
Regardless, I found these two pieces particularly unusual and unorthodox, and opted to share them with you, my faithful subscribers, ahead of the album’s release.
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As I’ve delved deeper into YouTube, I’ve discovered the platform has a little blog for creators that points out the major Internet trends of the moment. The Internet is constantly evolving, with new trends and memes coming and going the shifting tides—but faster! Apparently, Gen Zers are running around calling charisma “rizz.” We have always been at war with Eurasia!
One meme doing the rounds is the “canon event” meme. The meme comes from Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023), where multiple Peter Parkers (or their equivalents) from multiple universes all experience certain “canon events,” which are (allegedly) unalterable: the bite from the radioactive spider; the death of a beloved family member; the loss of the love interest; etc. In meme form, YouTubers and TikTok(k?)ers will feature milestone or rite-of-passage events as “canon events,” often remarking, “I cannot interfere.” These events are typically something cringe-inducing or silly, like picking a weird name for PlayStation online.
I find the concept of “canon events”—what we used to call a “rite of passage”—interesting, and thought I’d hop on the Internet bandwagon with a little piano piece called “Canon Event.”
Ah, yes—another Tuesday, another edition of Open Mic Adventures in which I thwart Ponty’s dreams and feature a super short, experimental piano miniature instead of a gutsy, flabby live performance.
No worries—there will (probably) be more sweaty, robust live performances soon. But as we endure the heat and misery of August, I’m already looking ahead to the coolness and fun of Halloween.
So, what better way to get in the spooky mood than with a little skeletal gyrating?
The Portly Politico 