Both are available (full scores and parts) from my store. I've also refreshed the recording of Ding Dong, adding in the choir parts. It's available from the playlist.
New photos ...
Having suffered relentless derision from friends and family about my photos ... I got professional help from Master Photographer Thies Bogner ... and Lo! there I am, thrice afresh atop my home page!
(OK, so it's been a pretty slow time, musically speaking ... ;-)
- Spring/Summer 2010 -
That was a Piano concerto, that was ...
During spring and much of the summer I worked night and day on a Piano Concerto (... at least, when I wasn't watching games of the football World Cup, or stages of le Tour de France, that is ... ;-). Unfortunately, it was all to no avail as the half completed work disappeared into the black hole of a failed hard disk!
The irony (or tragedy, depending on your perspective) is that losing the computer file containing the composition was not for want of making regular back-ups ... as a matter of rote I auto-save every 15 minutes in the music software, and back-up the resulting files every week (I even make mirror copies of the back-up files and put them on a separate hard drive!). As a result I had a back-up which was taken after the last time I worked on the file.
So, when the hard drive started to show symptoms of catastrophic failure I was so pleased with myself for sticking with the back-up routine ... until I checked the latest back-up and found that all my toil had been for naught. The new composition wasn't there! And I had already overwritten the mirror copy of the previous back-up.
So what did I learn from all this? Not to trust computers or back-ups? These days that's not an option for me. I think it's just a case of sometimes bad stuff happens despite best efforts ... and the good news is that I still have my original sketches to help in reconstructing the work.
- Winter 2010 -
In Glorious Colour
What, you might ask, is one to do during winter here in the Great White North? Well you can ski (or other outdoor pursuit of your choice), hibernate (if you're a bookworm or a bear), watch the Winter Olympics ...
Or, in my case, I also wrote three new collages of film music inspired by a legion of epic movies!.
Why, you may ask? Well, in the beginning there was I, watching a restored version of Lawrence of Arabia on my widescreen TV ... occasionally eying the DVD sets of Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Lord of the Rings and so on, all awaiting my winter re-viewing pleasure should I choose.
Now, you may not agree that all of these are epic movies, but surely they all have epic music, n'est-ce pas? But I digress ...
Eventually, with the music of El Orance fresh in my mind, my thoughts turned to my "fragments" file. Now this is my repository for any musical ideas (bits of themes, harmonies, rhythms, etc) I have along the way, that might be useful for future projects - a musical odds and ends drawer, you might say.
It so happens that many of this file's contents are (to my ear) cinematic in nature. So, I thought (yes, here comes the eureka moment), perhaps I could take a bunch of these bits and fashion a gloriously colourful new piece from them.
To cut a long story short, I took a few days to sift through my "fragments", and gradually the plan for the new piece took shape. Then, a break for the Winter Olympics, a few weeks more of midnight oil and Lo! it was born.
I have my own thoughts on the "screenplay" unfolding in the music, but the neat thing is that you can let your imagination roam and decide for yourself. I'll also leave you to decide if the piece really is In Glorious Colour .....
