More on the piece Joy, experimenting with an Irish Slide rhythm...

The saga continues! I was challenged by this same musican/performer to notate my piece as a Slide, in 12/8 with equal subdivisions of 3,3,3,3.  So I googled what Irish Slide means, and listened to some examples. I've played a fair amount of Irish fiddle music, but I don't think I'd ever played a slide before, so the research was illuminating.

Next I took my piece Joy and re-wrote it as a slide, although I'm not following the form as strictly as I should. 

Here's what the first 2 measures look like:

 

 After playing it through, I do think it has a cute feel to it, and it rips right along, which is one of the points of a Slide, from what I can tell!

However, it is a very different piece now, compared to my original Joy.

Fun experiment!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Actually opened Sibelius today

Image
I'm still hoping for a composing slot in my day soon, and to whet my appetite and appease it a bit all in the same step, I opened up Sibelius and my Water Flows round, which I recently re-wrote in 5 beats per measure.  It has four parts, and to sing along with it I select the first three parts to play, leaving me to sing the 4th part.  This is a good strategy to check out the reality of trying to sing it, from various vantage points, still being one person with one voice (haven't mastered the tuvan harmonic throat singing totally yet). Just in case you need help looking at the format of this round, each singer (total of 4 needed) enters at the beginning when the preceding singer reaches the second line, which starts with a quarter-note rest then "runs deep..."  So yes obviously someone has to start!  :)  The two measure ending doesn't make alot of sense in this format, sorry!  It is to be harmonized by all 4 voices, what appears here is only one part.  Yikes. 
Read more

Surprised by changes from minor to major when composing harmony line for “Grant”

Image
So I’ve been working on a piece to honor Grant McFarlane, the wonderful accordion player and composer in Paisley, Scotland that I’ve been emailing with and exchanging compositions.  Using the pitches that spell out “Grant”, I found myself writing in Am. I was struck by the similarity to another Name Music piece — yes, Anthony! They share some of the same beginning letters! So I tried out rhythms for the pitches that were DIFFERENT from what I had done with Anthony. The melody seemed to flow out of me easily, with an A section in Am, a B section in Dm, a natural-sounding structure of AABB, a waltz rhythmic feel, and all was well. I entered my hand-written notation into Sibelius right away, because I had arrows all over the place with the ideas for each section, it was not in very good linear order and I didn’t want to have to work too hard to re-create the order! Then, I worked on the chords right away. To do this I usually have my computer play the notation while I pluck the chords on
Read more

I need more memory!

Yesterday afternoon I suffered through yet another session of s-l-o-w while trying to work in Sibelius, my music notation software program.  When I'm composing I LIVE in Sibelius.  But it is nice to also be able to check my email, browse a little, maybe google something...  but NO, not with only 1 gig of RAM in my PC (running windows xp sp3).  So this morning I checked out Best Buy online to see if they had the memory I needed, then ran (drove) to the store, promptly picking up exactly the right stuff except no it wasn't the right shape a-tall, which I noticed once I got the case off my PC and took a look at the memory slots. It was for a laptop, and I have a desktop.  So then I returned it, went back online and ordered the *real* right stuff from crucial.  They even had a scan program that ran on my PC, said what I had, said what I needed to upgrade the RAM, and showed how much my performance would increase. Supposed to arrive on Wednesday.  Question to Self: "Will you be
Read more