This summer while attending the RSCM course in Tulsa, Oklahoma, I had the opportunity to write a piano duet for the talent show on Saturday evening. While it is filled liberally with quotations from the choral repertoire for the week, I was able to put it together in the wee hours of the night working on my laptop in my room at the sorority house where the men were housed for the week. (Yes, all the men were staying in a
sorority house.) The video taken with my iPhone can be found below.
Because I was able to turn out a keyboard piece (or two depending upon how you count) in just a few hours in Tulsa, I've considered making my next composition project a set of keyboard pieces. While
I know
Charles Tournemire did not write his
L'Orgue Mystique cycle on a deadline one week at a time as the weeks rolled by, once it was completed, the cycle was still meant to be useable on a weekly basis for the parish organist. With the psalms almost completed, my question now is what could I produce on a weekly basis (or at least for weekly use) for today's church musician. Tournemire provided organ music. Bach wrote cantatas. With so many different styles and forms of worship now, it's not so easy to identify a consistent format that I could compose. For those of you currently working as church musicians, what would be most useful to you?
Send me your ideas and needs!
And now for your entertainment, here's the Prelude & Fugue on Themes from RSCM Tulsa:
