Thursday, June 28, 2007

baroque lute alarm clock madness

Recently I've gotten in the habit of using the music I'm working on or being haunted by as my alarm clock. I record the music into my cell phone and then set it as my alarm sound. It's kind of the reverse of the normal process. Usually I'll be haunted by a certain melody or chord progression for weeks or months as I'm writing a new piece, and when I'm finished the piece the haunting melody or idea will have been exorcised or at least trapped on staff paper or cd. It's as if I'm re-haunting myself.
The music I'm using now is the last movement of a four movement work I wrote for baroque lute, a 300 plus year old instrument which has about 16 strings. It's called "Farewell"
Here is the piece in it's entirety

I Initiation

II Puzzle Piece
III Toy for Luka
IV Farewell
The titles of the first and fourth movements are self explanatory, but the second movement, "Puzzle Piece" refers to the idea creating a musical or rhythmic picture piece by piece, so that what you start out is not exactly what it seems and becomes part of something much bigger than itself. "Toy for Luka" is sort of a pun, as in baroque music and earlier there was an actual type of piece called a "Toy." It's the first movement of the four that I completed and I wanted to dedicate it to my son who was constantly around me when I wrote it.

3 comments:

Melanie Gray Augustin said...

Haunting... love it, wouldn't mind being woken by that instead of the awful options on my mobile.

Melanie Gray Augustin said...

Hey! Happy birthday! Hope you're having a great one!

Jason R. Taylor said...

hey! thanks!!!

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