Hello all,
I hope you all are doing well and staying healthy and positive during these difficult and trying times.
Since my last blog post nearly two weeks ago I've posted several new videos on YouTube, and I would like to now share them with you and tell you a little about them.
Rehearsing Thirty-Four (for Organ)
This is the first video I've made of myself performing at the organ - or any other musical instrument!
While taking a break from practicing a few days ago I was trying to play from memory some of my older compositions for organ; works I hadn't played in a long time. The only other person in the church heard my playing Thirty-Four and was very moved the music. He asked me what was the piece I had just played. I told him it was a composition of mine entitled Thirty-Four. He said "That piece was beautiful!"
This is not a perfect performance of the work, by any means. As I said before, I was trying to perform this piece (and the others) from memory. In the case of Thirty-Four it had been almost a year since I had last played it, so mistakes in performance were almost inevitable. Nonetheless, this being my first self-recorded video performance, this video holds special value/sentiment for me.
Thirty-Four was composed the day before my thirty-fifth birthday. The music describes my thirty-fourth year and how I was adjusting to major changes in my life: healing and moving on, etc.
Wind Quintet
My 2018 composition, Wind Quintet, is a professional, academic-style work. This video features three excerpts from the quintet. The audio is MIDI playback, but it also excellent MIDI playback (I wouldn't use anything less).
Pythagoras
This track features an excerpt from a soundtrack I created in September 2016 for a short audio documentary on the life and teachings of the ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras of Samos (b ca. 570 BCE - d 490 BCE).
Locrian
I love this composition. Locrian is a short and rather crazed rock instrumental I composed shortly after graduating college. It is one of the most complex works I've composed. As the title suggests, this piece is (mostly) in the Locrian mode. It also employs complex meters (such as 11/8, the meter in which the piece opens).
Starting Over
Starting Over is a recently recorded synthesizer improvisation. It was inspired by recent considerations on how sometimes, when life doesn't work out the way we hoped it would, better things come alone in place of those things of which we had to let go.