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Improvisation: Evening

After another late Summer hiatus, I’m back with a non-evening recorded Evening Improvisation. Actually, I’ve had a hiatus due to a number of personal life things including our car getting hit while being out of town. I have also been preparing a series of audio songs from all my travels this summer. A draft of one of them can be found here on Soundcloud. (I had a flight canceled and it wasn’t pleasant or fun.) I’ve punched that one up since that post and it’ll be a pretty fun release when I get there.

It took a moment, but now that the new semester has begun I had a moment to sneak into the awesome practice room next to my office and had a recording session with that instrument. I have posted a few other improvisations including this banger, where the instrument got horribly out of tune. Boy do I wish this sort of thing would happen more often! Micro tonality is not usually a musical element of the organ and I relish it when I have the chance to play with it.

As I pondered these things, it occurred to me in this session to set up two recording devices instead of one. In those other recording done in this practice room, I’ve added reverb to make it feel like it exists in some kind of real space, instead of a totally dry room. My logic in using two recording devices would be to pit them against each other in my DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) or at least have my phone recording be a background to the better recording device (it’s TASCAM portable recorder that I love).

And that’s what I did! In this series of recordings where I am testing things out with how I will potentially move forward with a more concise recording project involving and organ, synths, and audio manipulation, this was one of those tests. And I think it’s pretty understated – deliberately so; I will always err on the side of making things understated than over the top. “LOOK AT MY WEIRD STUFF!!!!1!” Generally, I’d rather these performances be up front and anything manipulated be in the background to the performance and that’s the case here.

Finally, this will all eventually end in some kind of album similar to the Aria with Nine Variations. I have a few other ideas to play around before I go forward with a 60 minute album. It’ll be coming soon though! Organ + synths + audio manipulation is something I want to get out there and this is one of those trials. Enjoy!

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Improvisation: Liturgical

Three liturgical improvisations in a row! I’ve had a good run with my improvisations during services this past month. A very long story short: we had a change of plans and decided to have an evensong on Pentecost as a sending off for the choir season. Because I was in DC the week before and I had to have three other pieces in my fingers, I felt that one more large work was a little too much. Honestly, I should have done more improvisations that Sunday because no practice for a week (well, lots of mental playing but not hands on keys).

But that’s the point of this post! It goes without saying that the most well known work based upon this chant is Maurice Duruflé’s Prelude, Adagio, and Chorale Variations on Veni creator spiritus (here is a link is to Johann Vexo’s superb performance of the piece). I have never played the piece fully but have learned parts of the piece individually – maybe someday I’ll give it a shot and play the whole thing. It’s 20+ minutes of musical perfection that has had a lot of influence on my compositions and improvisations. Check out the opening of my Sonata no. 1 where I try to do a simplified version of Duruflé’s opening to the Prelude. Not that it is an exact copy, it is its own thing but I never want to hesitate from whom I am stealing from.

This particular postlude takes its cues from the IV Variation at the very end of the work. Again, I was doing my own thing especially since it is an improvisation, but I wanted to give the toccata a full journey similar to the toccata in that fourth variation. I took an ABA like structure (my favorite) and I tried to use the same kind of tonal transitions that Duruflé uses in his compositions. The result is something I’m really proud of: an improvisation that is the proper length and moves when it needs to. A five minute improv is not always a part of a Sunday morning liturgy but this particular liturgy afforded me an opportunity to do something a little more epic. So here I present an improvisation from an evensong that was geared towards the music and the musicians making the music!

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Improvisation: Liturgical

It has been quite some time since I have presented multiple liturgical improvisations in my blog. A lot of that has to do with the gradual, but fairly dramatic deterioration of the organ at the monastery I use to work at (check out that improvisation here; it’s really noisy as the organ by that point was leaking so much air it was hard to get the recording to sound decent). The other piece is that I use to improvise five to nine liturgies over a weekend which leads to A LOT of improvising. Now it is a single service on a Sunday morning – not that I’m complaining by any means! Just a data point about the number of improvisations I have to choose from in a weekend.

BUT over the weekend of May 14th, 2023, also known in the US as a secular holiday as Mother’s Day! I implore you to check out the history of Mother’s Day as it’s a holiday I am typically NOT enthusiastic for, but this year something really struck me. There are a handful of projects that I’m still in the middle of (go check out the “Arranger” label on my IMSLP) but today’s improvisations will likely turn into one of those things. I’ve been working to arrange music by women and BIPOC composers and it occurred to me that my mother has a whole bunch of music in the public domain just waiting to be arranged!

Well, due to it being May and being tired from the end of the semester (and Easter), I decided to improvise on them rather than arrange them. When I prepare an improvisation like this I like to take pieces and aspects from the works to create the material. Granted, the material I was drawing from was simple (but excellent) music for beginning orchestra which meant that I needed to find ways to elaborate it and draw it out to a work for organ. The prelude was not too hard to elaborate on – I took a Satie-like approach to it. The toccata used the main melody as the toccata theme and I pulled the pedals from melodies found in other places in the piece. I had a lot of fun taking my mom’s music and turning it into something for the organ: be on the lookout for them to be turned into full fledged pieces on IMSLP! In the meantime, enjoy these Mother’s Day improvisations:

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Improvisation: Liturgical

The semester is over! Easter is done! And my summer is mostly beginning (still a few more weeks of choir)! Woo! Which also means I have allotted some time to come visit my blog and get a few things up and going. Meaning a few newer compositions here on the site and improvisations via YouTube. The latter is what I have to present today!

I had originally planned on playing a combo of Bach’s lesser Prelude and Fugues in C major (combine the prelude from BWV 531 and fugue from 553) but found out my friend Sydney’s birthday was that particular Sunday. For timeline clarity, that was from the first Sunday in May. So I decided to call an audible and improvise in Bach-ish/Baroque-ish style but using two distinct themes: a musical spelling of Sydney’s name and a nod to the Happy Birthday song.

When spelling someone’s name, you have two options to choose from. The first is the European model where you include Bb as a note (famously, Bach is spell Bb-A-C-B natural: B natural is the letter H) or what I like to call the American model where it is just the letters of the alphabet and sharps and flats can be added where needed (in that system Bach would be B-A-C-A where H restarts the with the musical alphabet). Edit: Okay, so the Wikipedia article on Musical cryptograms where it lays this out calls my “American” system the “French” system whereas the former system is the German one. I don’t have any evidence right in front of me but I know of several French composers that use the German system. It really doesn’t matter as that’s just lingual knit picking – it’s a cool article though, definitely check it out!

Since I have the American/French model memorized, I spelled Sydney’s name E-D-D-G-E-D. Since the there were so many “Ds” I improvised in the key of D for both the Prelude and Fugue. The Sydney theme comes in about halfway through the prelude and the at the end of the fugue. The fugue subject is, of course, a brief outline of the beginning of the Happy Birthday theme: sol-la-sol-do-ti. I kept out that dotted rhythm at the beginning because it is so distinct: my hope was to not make the theme wholly apparent. With an improvisation like this, I’m always hoping to trick enough folks into thinking that I’m stumbling through a Bach piece when I’m simply making it all up! Enjoy!

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Improvisation: Evening

Not too long ago, I posted an improvisation on an organ that was REALLY out of tune and boy did I have a lot of fun with it. If you haven’t listened to it yet, go check it out here. I think it’s an absolute blast as the organ so rarely is able to do anything microtonal. On a small note, the organ was tuned shortly after I made that improvisation and the folks that tune the organ said that they would be willing to make adjustments for me so long as we plan it ahead of time. This is not a spoiler, but I am working on and planning out another album with organ and synth and to have also a detuned rank of pipes as a possibility is quite appealing.

Over the past couple of weeks, it has been pretty cold here in Pittsburgh. Hovering between the 10s and 30s, this can cause quite a bit of havoc on the tuning of an instrument. And some ranks are more susceptible to going out of tune than other ranks. As I have been getting more acquainted with the organ at St. Andrew’s, I have discovered which of those stops go out of tune more regularly. WELL, there was one stop on a few particular notes that went REALLY out of tune this past week and after monkeying around with it, I arrived to the following improvisation.

I was being hyperbolic when I said the organ is not microtonal, it is in two general ways: the celeste stop and mutations. The problem with the celeste is that it is usually pretty quiet and the mutations are usually quite high and hard to fit into a more central tessitura and that’s if they are tuned to their fundamental. There are improvisations where I have tried to manipulate that in interesting ways and it is something always on my mind in the right circumstances. Combine that knowledge with a rank that has a few notes that are really out of tune and we have another cool improvisation!

This improvisation centers around a couple of pitches: E, F, G, and B, all in the tenor range of a 4′ stop – which is above middle C if you are keeping track. If you watch the video, my left hand is in that tenor range and the right hand in the octave above so the two stops are playing the same notes. Where I had fun is in using the mutations – those stops generally emphasize harmonics of a fundamental and at St. Andrew’s there is a Cornet stop on the Great manual that provided a nice contrast to the out of tune stops. Throw in some tremolos for effect and I think the improvisation is a lot of fun. Enjoy!

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Composition: Organ

I’m a little behind in getting this up as I usually write about the recording and video as I upload it. Let’s get to it then! In recent times, I have been asking on social media what hymn tunes folks would like settings of and one that was requested was ADORO TE DEVOTE. (The tune is also known as ADORO DEVOTE, at least in the Hymnal 1982.) The text that is commonly associated to this tune/text a communion text – something that Thomas Aquinas wrote. I should say here that I did not consider the text in composing the piece in any particular way; to be more clear, it was the tune that guided the composition more than any other consideration.

That all being said, I leaned on the meditative qualities of the tune. I devised a pretty simple rhythmic and melodic figure/motif that is used throughout the piece. What’s funny about devising something like that, I wonder if it will be interesting enough to last all three to four minutes of the piece. I also wonder if there’s enough in that figure to lend itself to mutations and adaptations. Ultimately, I think that this time, it worked!

If you listen to the piece or have the score in front of you, I would like to observe the repeat sign at the beginning. I mentioned that potential problem of an idea being too repetitive and a repeat sign is an easy way to accomplish that. This sounds silly but my solution was a simple one: add a dynamic change to the repeat. I think that gives the arc of the whole piece a nice trajectory and indicates that there will be all sorts of dynamic swells in the piece (pun intended). Funny enough, I used the same trick on Es Ist Ein Ros, only in reverse with the repeat being quieter. Lastly, I’ll just say that I leaned into a slight Messiaen like sound at the end which was a lot of fun. Go download the score here and happy playing out there!

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Improvisation: Liturgical

It has been a while since I have posted one of these improvisations and I check that too – the last time I uploaded a liturgical improvisation was about a year and a half ago. And before that, it had also been quite some time. Part of the reason was the decline of the instrument I use to play at the Monastery and for my current job, I just haven’t had the wherewithal to review the improvisations I occasionally do. BUT, this week was something special and fun and it was recorded by one of my choir members and I thought it would be fun to share my thoughts about it.

Quick story: for a short period last fall, I was playing a few weeks of Couperin’s music and during one of the postludes (Offertoire, from on of the Masses, I think) and a big ole cypher went off. Whenever that happens, the ear perks up and the brain is trying to assess what is going on and I remember pausing for the briefest moment, figuring out it was a C reed in the pedals, Tromba specifically, and then improvising in that key in that French classical style to undo the cypher. Then I cadenced and was able to continue into the next section without dropping a moment. The funniest part was telling folks that I had done that and no one really noticed! They all thought it was just a part of the music.

In my estimation, that one marker for a successful improvisation: fooling people into thinking that what they are hearing is the real thing. I won’t claim to be a master at this all of the time, but every once in a while I have been able to do so. That brings me to this morning: I forgot my score at home! When it came time to the postlude, I remembered that the Marchand was in D minor and like a lot of that French music, it uses a lot of suspensions. Outside off that, I used a simple tonal outline of D minor – F Major – D minor to get me from beginning to end. I think the result is pretty solid and I hope you enjoy it!

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Composition: Organ

The piece I am presenting today comes from another set of Chorale Preludes and Postludes that I finished recently – this set being for the Christmas season. I didn’t record any of the Chorale Preludes and Postludes VI, which I may get to at a later date. But for this more recent set, I had a rare compositional experience that I felt deserved a recording and a story. Or perhaps an explanation of a rarefied moment.

Depending on the piece that I am writing and the needs of the particular work, I most often work from both ends of the candle. I write the beginning, I composer the end, I make plans and things meet in the middle. This includes, but is not limited to, many of my improvisations, both weird Evening Improvisations such as THIS RECENT IMPROV, or even my more predictable works such as the Prelude, Adagio, and Fugue, which was taking queues from Bach’s version of the same set of titles. I often plan things out as a good composer/improviser should – the beginning informs the end and everything in between.

BUT, that does not mean one should not be open to the possibility of something unfolding in a chronological order – a friend of mine calls this discover writing. That’s a very apt title/name for that kind of composition and that is the case with this Chorale Arrangement. I personally think of this as a Prelude – a piece that happens before the actual singing of the hymn. I do not think that this arrangement is earth shattering by any means, but it is something I think that is worth consideration; meaning I think it holds up well against other arrangements of the hymn tune (I’m thinking of Brahms in particular).

It’s hard to talk about a piece of music that simple FLOWS out of one’s consciousness. Perhaps I’ll record the other Christmas Chorale pieces as both went through massive edits, but this one did not. Once it was finished, it needed no edits. That is a rare thing for me! I am usually pretty critical of my composing, and this REALLY applies to keyboard works, but this is a rare moment where the piece “wrote itself.” By that logic, I mean to state that the composition was written from beginning to end and it somehow worked out. This was not an improvisation which has that “unfolding” aspect – it was a composition that “unfolded” in a similar manner over several days of looking at the score.

Maybe someday, I’ll improvise on this German Chorale; but for now, let’s let this very nice prelude be a thing.

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Improvisation: Evening

It’s funny: last week I improvised on the practice room next to my office and I thought the outcome was pretty cool and interesting! I enjoyed the process so much that I decided to try to replicate the process where I record an improvisation in the room and then add the synth to it after the fact. Maybe a small amount of filtering and a reverb to give the organ a fake “space” in which it can exist like the prior improvisation.

Well, in preparing for this particular improvisation, I noticed that the 2′ Principle stop on the Great was REALLY out of tune. Not a little, A LOT; to the point that playing a chromatic scale does not result in something resembling an equal tempered chromatic scale. What particularly intrigued me were the notes that were slightly out of tune with one another, some of them being nearly unisons and even then, they weren’t aligning with A=440 tuning! The acoustical beating between two notes that are not in tune is something I LOVE to play with – that in part is the premise of this Organ + Synth improvisation series.

In the moment, an improvisation usually feels like applying metrics, tropes, techniques, things that I have done hundreds or thousands of times before. Every once in a while though, an improvisation feels fresh and new and this, for me, was one of those times. Unlike the previous one, this improvisation has no edits: it is presented as I recorded it in the moment. I tried adding a second improvised synth track to it but it never really added anything that wasn’t there already or simply detracted from the improv. Here it is, an improvisation with a bunch of out of tune notes, no edits, and an added acoustic!

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Improvisation: Evening

I’m back again with another Organ + Synth improvisation but this one is a bit different than the first. I’ll explain the details in a moment, but the short explanation is that I needed my practice time at St. Andrew’s for more pressing things and I instead recorded this at Duquesne. I also wanted control over more parameters than the first improvisation, which led me to cheat on this one.

Yes. That’s right, I cheated. First, the quite excellent practice organ that is next to my office at Duquesne has, well, terrible acoustics. It’s a practice room after all! I also, as mentioned above, wanted more control over more parameters, meaning more than two knobs that I can twist with one hand in the moment. I like to think of this as me continuing to figure how to use Pigments along side a live instrument. For this particular improvisation, I recorded the organ separate from the synth, spliced the recording, and then improvised the synth over that recording. It was a lot of fun to imagine the synth part while I was recording the organ part!

With this improvisation, I was trying to blend the synth with the organ in a way where you could not hear where one starts and the other ends. When I was playing the organ part, I discovered a really cool “periodic beat” in the pedals that set the stage for the rest of the improv. From there, I built up a series of composite sounds that I knew would work well with a synth later. To be clear, where I cheated with the organ part is that I cut up the recording to create an arc and then added the synth to those composite chord. It helps that they are both put through a reverb filter together, giving the impression that they exist in the same space. This project was a lot of fun and has definitely given me some ideas for the next one!