My Actifit Report Card: February 16 2020

Yesterday was Lithuanian Independence Day so we raised our flag and @laputis' parents came over to us to watch official speeches, celebration ceremony and the high Mass from the Cathedral on TV. Also it seemed like a perfect day to compose something too. So I chose the Passion choral tune, O Sacred Head, Now Wounded because my subscriber Maureen Woodhead sent me an email asking for some advise on finding suitable organ music for Holy Week. I wrote to her that there are of course chorale prelude from Bach's Orgelbuchlein (not on this tune though) but I also felt the urge to create my own rendition as well.

I first notated the tune in my Sibelius software in the soprano voice leaving a few measures of rests before, between and after chorale phrases. Then I made a canon from this tune in the pedal part. At first I thought about a canon at the distance of 1 measure at the octave but settled for lower 5th instead. To spice things up, as usual I used various numbers of accidentals for each choral phrase - 0 accidentals, 4 sharps, 4 flats and again 0 accidentals.

Then came the hard part - to create two middle voices for the left hand out of snippets of chorale melody. The voices imitate each other. Here the challenge was on multiple layers - to let them move between the outer parts and not cross them, to keep the resulting harmony sweet yet spicy enough and to make the overall result not boring because as soon as canons and imitations are introduced they can quickly become predictable. Therefore, I ended up cutting a couple of measures between each chorale phrase.

I wrote the following registration suggestions:

Right hand: Oboe 8' and Flute 8'
Left hand: Flutes 8' and 4'
Pedals: Principal 16, Flutes 16 and 8

The piece has to be played legato but I also indicated the phrasing with some breathing in the canon parts.

After this was done, I created a new product as Op. 71 in my Shopify store. Will print it out and make a video of myself playing this piece at the church. My friend @contrabourdon was excited when I sent him the photo of the music and said he would record it too and promote it with his affiliate link.

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