A new piece for your consideration. My title is more whimsical than usual (hint: what does a ‘new moon’ look like? <grin!>)

The tune is played on the glass armonica. When the tune is repeated, the armonica  is doubled two octaves lower by a bass clarinet–a fun sounding combination, if I say so myself!

Here’s the first 20 seconds

Here’s the whole piece (4:11)

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With this piece I’m just having too much fun with a symphony orchestra!

The second section of the piece, by the way, is a ‘canon’, which is fancy music-jargon for a ’round’ like “Row Row Row Your Boat” (although ‘canons’ can also take other pretty interesting forms). For you music readers, music world has a ’shorthand’ for notating canons–’Row Row Row Your Boat’ would look like this:

In other words, the first group starts with line 1. When group 1 reaches the end of the first line, they continue with line 2, at which point group 2 starts with line 1, and so on. When the first group reaches the end of the last line, they continue with the first line.

Here is my canon (in the second section of the piece) in this standard canon notation (with my apologies for the alto clef but with either the treble or bass clef there are WAY to many ledger lines):

Here’s the whole piece:

Tales of the Laughing Dragon (mp3)

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As always, MP3s are on the ‘honor system’–if my music does something for you, do a little monetary something for me and

I wrote these some time ago–at the time there was the possibility of a performance for glass armonica and soprano. Alas, the performance never came to pass.

So here’s the set of pieces I wrote: Four Prayers. They were inspired by a verse in the Bible about how “the Holy Spirit intercedes for us with groans too deep for words.” I always thought that was an interesting idea–maybe we’re not bright enough to know what to pray for (speaking for myself); maybe words are inadequate for prayers. . .

Along similar lines there’s an interesting little book called The Cloud of Unknowing, by an anonymous 14th century Christian mystic. The most interesting idea to me in this book was the ‘one word prayer’. His idea (and I’m paraphrasing) is that when you’re in a crowded theater and fire breaks out, you don’t yell “Attention everyone! Uncontrolled combustion seems to have initiated in this entertainment establishment…”. No, instead you yell “FIRE!” Or if you’re really in trouble you don’t yell “Please come to my assistance”, instead you yell “HELP!” Along similar lines the author argues that some of the most powerful prayers (with groans too deep for words?) are the shortest. “Help!” or “Thank you!” or…

So these Four Prayers have NO WORDS. They are all on vowels (like ‘ooo’ and ‘ah’).

As you can see, these kinds of musings get the Muse all excited and my composing fingers itchy, and here’s the result.

One of Walt Disney’s “inventions” in the early days of animation was the ’story board’ — where they do mockups of how the film will look before they actually make the film. I make my own mockups, especially when there are other musicians involved, because rehearsal time is incredibly precious and I want to make sure (as best I can) that there are no problems before any rehearsals.

So these are the mockups. The armonica is real, the voice is a synthesizer (it’s a mockup, right?) Maybe someday I’ll be able to do a proper recording!

1. Confession (3:46) mp3 20-sec sample score
2. Adoration (3:31) mp3 20-sec sample score
3. Supplication (3:26) mp3 20-sec sample score
4. Communion (3:18) mp3 20-sec sample score

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As always, MP3s are on the ‘honor system’–if my music does something for you, do a little monetary something for me and