Old Crappy Music

[mandysee_mandydo]

ne of the wonders of moving and going through stuff is that I occasionally rediscover old music scores with stuff I composed or started to compose or jotted down in a hurry because it was stuck in my head or needed to compose for a class. I downloaded the latest Finale NotePad and got to preserving some of the more interesting bits so I could throw out the paper score sheets and make room. Some of it (like my first ever super-crappy organ pieces) are just getting tossed because they're quite honestly rubbish. That's not to say what I'm about to share is really all that great, but in comparison... well, at least it resembles music. And it's amusing.

So anyhow... you've heard this before, but I found it and played with it and in the process decided to end it with a Picardy third thrown in. Yes, how very thrilling. It's that same old four voice chorale. I made the MIDI with organ because it sounded cool (especially the bit with the pedal tone!) but also with piano so you could hear the passing tones and such. This was written (sans Picardy third) for one of my Musicianship classes in college.

four voice chorale with picardy (organ)
four voice chorale with picardy (piano)

More Musicianship pieces! We had to do a couple of pieces practicing putting written words to music and getting the rhythm and phrasing of speech translated to melody. First, a joke:

no nose

The lyrics are: "My dogs got no nose. How does it smell? Awful!"


Next a compelling request for alms for the poor college music student:

check please!

The lyrics are: "Pay to the order of Jamie Cadorette one thousand dollars. Amen!"


In the last one of the set, I imagine James T. Kirk, with all his odd pauses, singing a couple of lines of Emily Dickinson's poetry:

james kirk sings dickinson

The lyrics are: "A bird came down the walk. He did not see I saw. He bit an angle worm in halves and ate the fellow raw. Bones!"


This one is... yeah. I don't know what kind of drugs I was pretending to be on at the time, or what could have possibly inspired this next partial piece. It's either complete genius or utter crap, but I'm leaning heavily toward the latter. Be warned: lots of weird dissonance in this one.

untitled for two guitars and piano

That was started for a 12-string guitar, a 6-string guitar and a piano, though there's a section where I just never composed a piano part for something like six or seven measures near the end. Then at the end it obviously falls apart rather quick and there are plenty of empty measures. I can't explain it. I don't know where I was going or what I was thinking or feeling, but there it is.


Finally I found once again the partial score for Terra Mortis, which was going to be my big four movement piece for guitar ensemble and piano. It was actually coming along rather well but then I lost my inspiration and motivation. I ony got the piano part composed for the first movement and it's crazy dissonant and doomy-gloomy and dark and angry. Very cool. I already had what I had composed partially transcribed using NotePad but not enough that I want to post it here. I will finish transcribing it at some point and post a MIDI file, but I noticed uponm listening that there are a couple of errant notes (yes, even among all the dissonance I could tell) and I want to figure out how I managed to notate it wrong and see if I can remember what the notes were supposed to be. I do have all of what I composed for the second movement transcribed so I made a MIDI file. It's done in the MIDI as four acoustic guitars but it's really for four electric guitars overdriven and dry a la Brian May. I just couldn't tolerate the horrid sound of MIDI electric guitars. Yuck! Also I didn't hand transcribe the repeats so just pretend the first nine measures repeat. I don't know why Finale NotePad wasn't coded to play repeats. It's annoying.

terra mortis - second movement

So there you have it. It's a glimpse into my musical closet. Please pardon the cob webs and piles of junk precariously stacked and ready to topple.

"The aim of music is not to express feelings but to express music. It is not a vessel into which the composer distills his soul drop by drop, but a labyrinth with no beginning and no end, full of new paths to discover, where mystery remains eternal." - Pierre Boulez