New Music Tuesday XX: “Chorale for Single Reeds”

Sunday morning I jotted down another chorale—I’ve been on a chorale kick lately—and decided to experiment with 9/4 time. I really just wanted to see how composing for longer measures might affect the final product. I did find that my “grammar” changed a bit while composing in this unorthodox time signature, with more subdivisions of three popping up.

I exported the WAV from Noteflight and imported it into Audacity. There I applied a “Large Room” reverb filter; a “Wide Synth Pad” chorus effect; and a “Lush High-Ends” master effect.

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Lazy Sunday CCCXCVII: Reedy Chorales

Yours portly is squeezing in a quick, post-cruise Lazy Sunday with some recent posts featuring reedy chorales:

Enjoy!

—TPP

New Music Tuesday XVIII: “Two Chorales for High Reeds”

Yours portly has been in a chorale mood, to the point that I was asking CoPilot about churches that actively commission original sacred pieces (it’s information was fairly dated, unfortunately, as the few leads it offered were from some years ago). I love playing around with little mathematical harmony problems, and seeing where long, sustained notes will take me.

When putting together last week’s piece, one of the proposed instrumentations I pitched to readers on various platforms was soprano saxophone, English horn, and oboe—a highly unorthodox blending of higher reeds. I ended up going with a more traditional woodwind trio of flute, oboe, and bassoon, but I wanted to try that other instrumentation for this week’s effort. I was pleased with the outcome.

The piece itself began as some jotting after Dr. Wife and I had our pre-breakfast Bible reading time together. I wanted to play around with writing a chorale in 6/4—something a bit different, which would also give me some more flexibility in moving the voices.

The process for mastering/mixing this piece was virtually the same as last week’s piece. I imported the WAV from Noteflight into Audacity and applied a “Small Dark Room” reverb effect; an “Wide Synth Pad” chorus effect; and a “Tape” master effect. The granular effects are probably slightly different, as I tend to tweak the chorus and master effects slightly, but listeners will recognize a similar soundscape as the one I shared a week ago.

I then took the audio and pictures of the score and track artwork and imported them all into iMovie. From there, I imported the resulting video into YouTube Create, where I added my favorite filter, “Vaporwave.” I got this one churned out quickly, as we were packing for our cruise (I took advantage of a Dr. Wife nap to hammer it out).

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Ancient Compositions II: Digital Sax

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I’m continuing to dig up ancient MIDI compositions (now converted to glorious, lossless WAV files) from twenty years ago (give or take).  This weekend I’m sharing some digital saxophone compositions with readers.

I probably intended these pieces to be played by an actual saxophone quartet/quintet/sextet at some point.  I played in a saxophone quintet in high school (two altos, two tenors, one bari) and a saxophone sextet in college (I can’t recall the exact instrumentation, but I think it had soprano, two altos, two tenors, and one bari), so I did quite a bit of arranging and composing for those groups.  I also arranged a ton for Brass to the Future, the brass quintet (with saxophone) that my brother and I played in for a number  of years in the early 2010s.

Now they exist as ghostly digital instruments, honking and squawking through the musical musings of a plump young Portly with a head full of dreams and a belly full of Cheez-Its.

“Saxophonic Organ”

I’m not sure what the original title for this piece was meant to be, but I do remember wanting to emulate the sound and rhythms of a 1970s classic rock organ in the context of a saxophone ensemble.  “Saxophonic Organ” is the result of that experimentation, and I rather like it.

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