Hatikvah (Traditional)

This is a choral arrangement of Hatikvah I wrote for my a cappella group, Techiya. It's mostly a reharmonization. I think I'm starting to have a style to them. It's homophonic, generally, and I generally go for complex harmonies rather than simple ones. If the last four bars sound like Grainger, by the way... Well, let's just say I have learned the importance of the b7 in major. (:

Listen to Hatikvah (right-click to download)

Carinhoso (Pixinguinha)

This was made as a present to someone wonderful. (: You can find more information on this song here, since I also made an arrangement of it for a flute quintet (where, following Classical convention, "flute quintet" denotes a clarinet quartet -- three soprano clarinets and a bass -- with an added flute). The present version, however, consists of me singing all of the parts, and I actually wrote notes on paper this time instead of just improvising it like Basic Blues, so it sounds much better. Also, it has words in Portuguese! It's a bit annoying that my singing range and my whistling range are incompatible in this song, but it doesn't actually hurt anything. All of it was sung (or whistled) directly as you hear it in the recording, except, like in Basic Jazz, for the bass notes, which were kicked down an octave, and the bass drum, which was kicked down two octaves. There is one run in the bass that kept getting really distorted when transposed, so that run was recorded a fourth higher than it ended up instead of an octave.

Listen to Carinhoso (right-click to download)

Basic Blues

I named the album this is in (well, in the ID tag, not in real life) "Alkaline Jazz", because I suck. Basic Blues is just that. It won't take a proton, but it is basic. It's a 12-bar blues, because I figured that would be the easiest thing to put together. A couple of hours later, possibly less than one, actually, out came this piece of crap. I clearly wasn't listening too well to the metronome (Garage Band is cool like that and has a metronome) on the cymbal at the end there, but I figured that being totally off-tempo then rushing to catch up gives the piece, uh, authenticity. Consider this a demo of a cool thing you can do using a recording program and a microphone (my Mac is cool like that and comes with both). By the way, the bass is my voice down an octave, and the bass drum is my voice down two. Everything else is totally acoustic.

Listen to Basic Blues (right-click to download)

Beren and Luthien

soprano, tenor, piano

This recording is missing the words. Beren and Luthien is a duet for soprano and tenor, accompanied by piano; the text is J. R. R. Tolkien's poem about Beren and Luthien Tinuviel sung by Aragorn in Lord of the Rings. I finished it in June 2006 and started it in the summer of 2005. It was originally meant to be a duet for myself and someone else, but the someone else lost interest and the piece wasn't finished until I picked it up again the following summer. I revived it as a work dedicated to the Harvard-Radcliffe Science Fiction Association. It will hopefully be recorded one day by HRSFen. If that happens, I will post the live recording here, of course. If you will be in the Cambridge area and want to help me record this, email me.

The poem is nine stanzas long, with each stanza containing eight lines of iambic tetrameter. That's a lot. The melody, then, is sung about eighteen times, but it's different every time: the embellishments vary, the shape varies, the chords vary, the mode varies, etc. The piano part is mostly tonal, though not always, making this one of my first successful uses of atonal material. When listening to this, I recommend also reading along in the poem. There are no repeated lines, though occasionally the singer not singing the text will sing "Tinuviel!" or "Beren!". There is also little melisma, but almost every iamb is a full beat (eighth quarter) in 6/8, so the 16th notes in "ri-i-i-sing la-a-ark and fa-a-a-al-li-ing rain" are somewhat clear. This poem, by the way, can be found at this site.

Listen to Beren and Luthien (right-click to download)