Here is a version of Wildwood Flower I recorded this evening, arranged by Russ Barenberg. Russ plays this arrangement much faster and with a swing feel, I slowed it down a lot and played it straighter as it sounds prettier to me at a slightly slower tempo. the recording is not perfect, but I feel pretty good about it.

I’m playing with the Blue Saracens @ Swing 46 saturday night, 9:30pm til late. I really like playing with this band, and there are some great swing dancers at Swing 46 so it’s usually fun. come on out!

here is the PDF score and a MIDI recording (I wish I could play harpsichord) of a study I just wrote. the top melody in the second eight bars came really fast, I pretty much sang the whole thing to myself and then just wrote it out. I love it when melodies come that easy, it’s a great feeling. as composers, we spend so much time struggling over one or two bars and revisiting things, it’s so great when it just flows out of you exactly the way you want.

being relatively inexperienced in the bach style, my general tendency is to avoid dissonances like perfect 4ths or 7ths on any downbeat. I was a little surprised to discover that bach actually does this kind of thing all the time, but he resolves these dissonances into imperfect consonances (6ths or 3rds). so for example if he has a D quarter note in the bass, and a C eighth note melody, he’ll move that note to Bb in the next eighth. this opens up a lot more possibilities in terms of writing, as these dissonances are often a pain to avoid, especially in cadences.

another “rule” in the way bach resolves dissonance is that if he uses a dissonance, any note that can be resolved by a half step, should be. this means that in two voice writing, if you have C and F, the F should be resolved to E. for B and F, B goes to C and F to E. always resolve by half step if possible.

I rarely compose imitative pieces, but I got a book from the juilliard library on writing counterpoint in the style of Bach, so I spent a good chunk of today writing a 2 voice harpsichord piece which attempts to do that. The mp3 is here and the score is here. the mp3 is just sibelius playback, which actually isn’t terrible for pieces like this.

this was pretty interesting to write in that I had to make a lot of choices I would not have usually made to try and stay with the style of the piece. the modulation from C major to G major strikes me as very baroque, it’s the first time I have written a tune with a modulation of a fifth like that. there is also a brief foray into A minor in the first half of the tune. once I was in G, I found it trickier than I thought to get back to C.

all voicings are spelled low to high:

Dm7 – F E G A
G7 – F Eb Ab B
C – E D G A

ran across this because I was practicing moving 6th chords voiced root 6th 3rd 5th with a barry harris style sixth diminished scale. I use that voice with the bass note on the low E string all the time, but never with the bass note on the A string, which can sound really nice and doesn’t get in the bass player’s way either. going to have to practice these some more.

here’s a transcription (listen here) of Peter Bernstein’s solo on “Jeannine”, off of Melvin Rhyne’s wonderful CD “Boss Organ”. This solo is interesting, Pete lands on a D natural over the Am7 almost every time he plays over that section. The diminished scale in bar 34 is a classic Pete lick, he does it quite a bit over dominant chords and it was one of the first of his “licks” that I learned. you can start from anywhere in the diminished chord and resolve it all sorts of ways.

I can’t make heads or tails of measures 38-39, it sounds good and I’m pretty sure the notes are correct, but I can’t figure out the logic behind this pitch collection. it doesn’t seem to sit well on guitar, either, maybe I am fingering it wrong or something.

anyways, hope you enjoy!