Music and Programming
Subject: Sanctus, by Aaron Giles
Woohoo! My first original composition.
It started off as a composition project for my Music Theory class, which meant that it had some constraints on it. I’m not yet sure whether working under constraints is good or bad, but in this case I think it worked out well.
Subject: SATB + descant harmonization of Ecce, Deus by Alfred E. Fedak.
Interestingly, I did not first encounter this hymn tune in its original form. Instead, the music was set to a different text (“Mary Heard the Angel’s Blessing”) and published in Voices, Found, a supplemental hymnal that focuses on texts written by women.
I gravitated to this piece because we elected to sing it in Advent, and it was in a minor key. Personally, I love minor key Advent/Christmas music, and also really loved the 3/4 lilt of this relatively simple tune.
Subject: SATB arrangement of The Face of Christ, originally written by Susan E. Bloomfield.
So in the time leading up to Advent this year, we were handed this simple piece to sing as our gospel acclimation (if you visit the link above, you can download the lead sheet, at least as of the time of this post). I think the idea was to choose something that both our choir and our praise band could sing, to create continuity between two services that typically have vastly different music.
It’s been a couple of months now — time to give this blog some kind of purpose.
When I signed up for my Music Theory class last summer, I knew I wanted a few basic things out of it: to improve my sight singing; to do some formal interval and dictation training; and to gain a better understanding of the structure of the music I’ve been singing.
Now, after two quarters, I’ve found that: sight singing is coming along nicely (though I really hate Solfège); interval training is kicking my rear (dictation is going ok); and, as it turns out, I am totally loving the study and analysis of music structure.
This naturally led me to seriously consider composing something of my own.
Over the years I’ve written a lot of code. Quite a lot of what I’ve done has been incorporated into the MAME project, but there are some straggling utilities and other bits and pieces that have been sitting on my machine forever.
As luck would have it, MAME moved over to using GitHub to host the project’s source code in January, and thus I was forced into creating an account.
So given that I now have this account (also linked in the buttons at the top), I’ve decided to start uploading some of my old sources.