Thousands of Suns

Unlike the first two arrangements in this collection which nearly wrote themselves, Thousands of Suns required deeper listening.  The first time I took I Have Nothing to Offer Thee to a keyboard, an accompaniment played itself, gathering notes from all the gigues I have played before.  When I first encountered Thousands of Suns, the song did not immediately draw past experiences to it.  It took a while for a keyboard arrangement to grow out of the melody.  I had to consciously investigate:  what did the song want from me?  What elements of my world were compatible with the bhajan and where did I have to explore new ground?  There was no dramatic collision of opposing worlds but there was noticeable friction around the edges.

The chord symbols in the Yasodhara songbook raised the question of whether or not to adapt the harmonic rhythm of the passage "thousands of suns and moons from Thy body do shine.”  I have become accustomed to working in a very academic, simplified version of eighteenth century style.  At first I experimented with smoothing out the harmonic rhythm, placing chord changes on strong beats and particularly at the beginnings of measures.  This resulted in some beautifully characteristic dissonances, but something was lost too; the expansive night sky would be viewed through the symmetrical frame of a window.  In the end I left the harmonic rhythm as it is indicated in the songbook, choosing to view the suns and moons from the freedom of a forested mountainside. 

As for the “Pachelbel” sequence in the first line – yes, I “went there”.  It required just the slightest departure from the chord symbols in the songbook and was simply irresistible – a connection with home during a voyage to a new land.  The harmonic sequence nicknamed the “Pachelbel sequence” is most familiar from that composer’s Canon in D major.  In the Canon, the bass line is repeated over and over as the other parts play variations above it.  In Baroque music, this is called a “ground bass.  I love that this bhajan, about seeing the night sky as Divine Mother’s body, also implies this groundedness.  The sections with the “Pachelbel” bassline alternate with the more free-floating sections:  feet on the ground, gazing at the stars.

General Pause

It has been over a year since my last blog post.  2017 turned out very differently than the year I had planned.  Near the end of the year I packed up all of my belongings once again.  Most of my scores are currently inaccessible, buried deep in a storage locker. 

Among my goals for 2018 are to expand this website and also to learn how to maintain it myself.  I do have the Baroque Bhajans with me, as well as drafts of the remainder of a series of blog entries about them.  Over the next few weeks I will attempt to get that material onto this website. 

Baroque Bhajan: Jaya Kali, Jaya Tara

In terms of baroque dance, this bhajan is “bourrée-ish”; the characteristic pickup enters in the second phrase.

In this arrangement I wrote out a lightly-varied repeat, mainly in order to achieve more convenient page turns in a printed collection of five bhajans.  Inserting a blank page would have done the trick but why leave a page blank when one can ornament?  I wonder how many structural or notational choices in other works have their origins in such practicalities!

When I took my pile of loose pages to the print shop, the woman who was helping me made one copy to check before making more.  All was fine except that two pages appeared upside down.  Kali, Tara, and Durga were doing headstands!  And they were a very determined group of goddesses.  The photocopy clerk was flummoxed at why the machine kept rotating just these two pages when the rest of the booklet was right-way up.  Eventually Tara showed her compassion and convinced her friends to come down.  Jaya!

I Have Nothing to Offer Thee, part 1

One of the things I learned at Yasodhara Ashram was that I have the power to create and destroy worlds!  Sometimes, though, it felt that I was not so much creating my world as having it trail after me in the manner of Pigpen’s cloud.  While I was sitting in Satsang at the ashram, singing or playing the harmonium, a few of the bhajans clicked into places that were already established in my mind.  From the first time I encountered I Have Nothing to Offer Thee, it was simply impossible not to hear it as a gigue.

A gigue was one of the most common types of Baroque dances.  A lively dance, the gigue is related to the English folkdance the jig.  Gigues were often also included in music that was not intended for actual dancing.  For example, they typically provide a lively ending to a keyboard suite.

The movements of a suite have sections that are repeated.  In the Baroque period, it was common practice for performers to add ornaments or improvise small variations when repeating a section.   In this bhajan arrangement, I wrote out an ornamented repeat.  Initially this was a discipline, a way to help me keep up the ornamentation through the entire repeat.  All too often I start off a repeat with a flurry of trills and then default to the unadorned notated version when my hands get tired or my concentration wavers.  I decided to include the written-out repeat in the typeset version in order to share it with players who may be similarly distractible or who might not be accustomed to adding their own ornamentation.

Baroque Bhajans

The first few pieces that I post will be my most recent work, scores from the very top of my big cardboard box of compositions.

During 2015-2016, I spent several months at the Yasodhara Ashram in BC.  One of the tangible things that I brought with me from the ashram was a copy of the Yasodhara Ashram Devotional Songbook.   The largest section of the songbook contains bhajans or devotional songs.    What is written down are the words, melodies, and chord symbols.  For some of the songs, the composer or source is identified but many songs are anonymous.  For a few, there is a little bit of explanatory text about the meaning or significance of the song.  The songbooks are used every evening at Satsang. 

When a bhajan is sung at a Satsang, it is normally sung several times over.  It might be repeated to last as long as a ritual which it accompanies and that will vary, depending on the number of people present.  Or a bhajan might go on just as long as people are enjoying singing and playing it.  Most of the singers use books that contain only the words and not any musical notation.  Instrumental accompaniment is optional and if there are instrumentalists involved, their parts are mostly improvised.  In practice this often results in continuous variation.  In some of the livelier bhajans, each repetition is sung faster than previous one until the music is "really cooking".  This is a very different musical world than the one in which I usually live and work. 

Adjusting back to life away from the ashram is taking some time.  One of the things that is helping me to re-settle is exploring how my different musical worlds might interact.  After not playing the piano for nearly a year, it felt natural to start playing with the music that was currently in my mind.  Without planning to do so, I found myself integrating the bhajans I learned at the ashram with my long-time interest in composing in eighteenth century style. 

Before I went to the ashram I let go of my old piano.  I do not currently own any instrument but I am using a digital piano kindly lent to me by a friend.  The keyboard has a number of different sounds, including a harpsichord setting which I am enjoying playing with.

So without further ado, let me introduce what may well be a brand-new musical genre:  Baroque Bhajans! 

Introduction

This is the first offering of my new music blog.  Actually, this is my first blog entry ever!  My intention is to post pieces of music here with a bit of commentary when I have something to say about them.

I do not really think of myself as "a composer".  During the past year, though, I moved house and I found that one of the heaviest boxes turned out to be a large one full of the music I have written.  The scores are not doing anyone any good sitting in a box so my project for this year is to unpack, typeset my old hand-written scores, and then release them into the world.

This will be a process of discovery, for me as well as for anyone reading this blog.  The large box was not one that I had to pack anew for moving.  It had been sitting up in the attic of my old house, open but seldom used except to accept an occasional new folder. 

The music was composed over a period of nearly thirty years and for widely varying reasons.   Some of the pieces were assignments back in my student days.  Some were “work” projects, written to fulfil a specific purpose.  Some came into existence for no reason at all except that they showed up and asked to be written down.  A few pieces have appeared in print, most of them anonymously.  A few have been performed publicly but most have not. 

For now I have set the big cardboard box on the floor in my new studio, in a prominent place where I cannot ignore it.  Time to start unpacking!