7 Jan 2008, #4. Ophelia - 9m27s

First, I want to say that this might be my favorite yet. It has a wonderful arc, and a lovely, swirling, sad feeling.

As with "Miranda," I came into this piece knowing the first few measures. I composed a piece a few years ago that started very similarly, with repeated downward arpeggios, with the same inversion of a major triad for the first chord. That piece had quintuplet arpeggios, so I thought I'd try quadruplets for this one. Both pieces are about changing one note at a time, very slowly moving through a harmonic spectrum. (Using arpeggios instead of block chords gives them, paradoxically, both more movement and a more placid feeling, because there are many more notes per second, but they all run together so that the sound does not decay unless I let it.)

In this piece especially, I really just followed my fingers.

I spend the first 6 minutes almost completely above middle C, and the drop down is a relief, almost a comfort although the harmony is quite unsettled. The relief doesn't last long. This section (the last 3:35) feels utterly connected to the first six minutes, but it's completely different. I am no longer wandering from harmony to harmony; I've found my chord progression, and settle in to embellish and exhaust it. You could think of the last two or so minutes as one long Picardy third.


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Recorded on January 7th, 2008, at Peace Church of the Brethren, in Portland, OR, with a Zoom H4 Digital Recorder. Edited with Audacity music software.

New layout

I wanted to quickly thank Felicity J. Mackay for the wonderful photograph of my fingers that now adorns this blog! (Hopefully the new look won't turn too many people off.)

7 Jan 2008, #3b. Juliet, part II - 6m38s

I was almost embarrassed and disgusted with myself for playing something so cheesy as "Juliet, part I," so I wanted to continue and play something purposefully strident. I'm thrilled at what a tempestuous result I got, just from being actually angry and not holding back.

I could only keep up the pounding for so long, so I reined myself in and recalled the later tune from the first part, but reharmonized it sounds wonderfully pained and wistful.

(By the way, what I write here is usually not what I was thinking as I was playing. The ideas just come out of my fingers, and sometimes I don't even realize when I tie pieces together. They are wonderful subconscious accidents. Here at the blog I explain how those accidents must have happened.)


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Recorded on January 7th, 2008, at Peace Church of the Brethren, in Portland, OR, with a Zoom H4 Digital Recorder. Edited with Audacity music software.

7 Jan 2008, #3a. Juliet, part I - 6m46s

My third goal was to improvise while thinking about something specific (holding a specific picture in my mind - I'm not telling what). After two experimental starts, my hands just have to play something calm, normal. And so out comes this. Terribly sappy, isn't it?

Midway through I came up with a great groove in 5, but when I'm improvising, it's hard sometimes to remember that I'm in an odd meter, and my fingers got confused a bunch of times.


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Recorded on January 7th, 2008, at Peace Church of the Brethren, in Portland, OR, with a Zoom H4 Digital Recorder. Edited with Audacity music software.