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