Week 1: Setting Sails! ⛵
Welcome to the Main Thread for the first week of the "Music YOU Love" practice challenge!
↓ Happy Sharing! ↓
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After several failed takes, I was starting to get a little frustrated. I hit record again, just as my daughter was encouraging me from the other room that I can do it! 😁 Listen for that at the beginning of this recording.
This is just to show I've been working on the song "Down by the Salley Gardens". I'm making progress, but still nowhere near where it's going to be. The most difficult measures are 11 into beat one of m. 12, especially the G+9 chord into the C#o chord.
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Finally recorded the first part of Choros no 1. It is still messy and out of tempo. It was as hard as I was expecting, and my left hand thumb is aching a little bit, so I will rest a couple of days before jumping into the B and C sections.
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Simple Gifts (arr. Frederic Hand)
It does not get any more traditional American folk music than this. Simple Gifts is a song coming from the Shakers, an early American religious sect. The melody was very famously used by Aaron Copland in Appalachian Spring, but I mostly remember it from singing it in church since my youth (and no, I am not a Shaker 🙂). Here are the lyrics:
'Tis the gift to be simple, ’tis the gift to be free
'Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be,
And when we find ourselves in the place just right,
'Twill be in the valley of love and delight.
When true simplicity is gained,
To bow and to bend we shan’t be ashamed,
To turn, turn will be our delight,
Till by turning, turning we come ’round right.This arrangement is by Frederic Hand, whose music I have been exploring recently. I love the introspective introduction and conclusion. They sound so modern, yet they work so well with his treatments of the melody in between.
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Hand - Elegy for a King (Mar 14)
Here is another update. I feel like I am plateauing a bit on this piece, but I do still love playing it.
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here's my first attempt at recording G. Sanz Las Hachas
