Thursday, June 30, 2016

Prelude recording #3

After a week-long illness followed by much business, I've lost a lot of ground on things I want to do. So before a weekend away, I was able to record the third Prelude:






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Monday, June 20, 2016

Prelude recordings - #1 and #2

I've begun recording my preludes!

The first two are here:

And here:



And the table of contents will be updated with links as I go!

Reminder: it's supporters that can make things like this much easier for me to do. GoFundMe is a great way to back me for making recordings and writing music!



Your donations can help me keep writing these! Click to feed a composer!

Friday, June 17, 2016

Hymn Tune Preludes #2 - St. Petersburg

So after last week's longer, more meditative piece, this week is a much shorter, more diatonic, and perhaps more functional work.

My writing project led me to open a hymnal and the first hymn I liked, I set. So this week, we get St. Petersburg, a Prelude (or suitable Introduction) thereupon.


Short, sweet, fun, and a bit tricky. Here's the score!


PDF can be found over here!


So this piece consists of a little pattern that the right hand plays three times over, derived from the hymn, which accompanies the tune in the left hand. In the video I use the softer Swell (coupled to the Pedal, as well) with 8, 4, 2, and Nasat, alongside the Great principle chorus up to the Mixture, which seems to give a nice, bright sound. I'd definitely use this to introduce the hymn, given the chance - why not? It can be used to set the pace, the tonality, and make everyone aware of the familiar tune!

If you would like to hear me try to tackle a hymn tune of your choosing, simply click the link below and send me a small donation towards my continued work. I'd love to hear from you and get some ideas for what people might like to hear from me!

Until next week.


Creative Commons License
Prelude on St. Petersburg by Mike Cutler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.


Your donations can help me keep writing these! Click to feed a composer!

Friday, June 10, 2016

A New Project: Hymn Tune Preludes... #1 - Down Ampney

So after a brief hiatus while I was busy preparing for concerts and writing things for a wedding and playing arrangements of Beethoven and generally being a musician and working to get recordings made... and looking at that, that looks like a lot more work than it felt like... anyway! After the aforementioned brief haitus, I've started to make recordings. I recorded the Prelude in C, and am working on more preludes.

And I needed a writing project.

For those that don't know, I'm getting married in August, which is occupying a lot of time right now, which is fine and wonderful, believe me! But it means that until that craziness is over, I don't want to start in on a weekly project with a defined end-date (no set of 24, in other words) and meanwhile, I needed something to fill in for the hymn tune project. So I decided to combine preludes with hymn tunes and start in on a project I hope people will find useful.

And to go with that - I was able to record it.


Here's a PDF for the discerning organist.

The dedication reads For Tom, "Cathedral Cadence" and all. My friend Tom Packham is a fan of what he calls a "Cathedral Cadence" as an extension at the end of a hymn - a slide up a semitone over a pedal point and back down, So this whole work makes much use of that idea, even opening (and, of course, ending) with E-flat over D.

So I also want to announce a new donation incentive. Give me money, and you can name a tune for me to write a work on and record. Further details will be coming as I figure out a good way to work it, but give me money, and I'll take hymn tune requests! Caveats exist - the tune must be in the public domain (in Canada) and must be something that's reasonably workable and usable. I do enjoy obscurities but there are limits!

Until next week.

Creative Commons License
Meditation on Down Ampney by Mike Cutler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.


Your donations can help me keep writing these! Click to feed a composer!