This is one more post about a music project that’s ongoing. This one was on hiatus for a long time, but finally is close to done, with all input completed and only dynamic markings needing to be added to some of the pieces.
It was back in 1995-96 that I composed some program music for the T.S. Eliot play Murder in the Cathedral. The music I actually composed never got performed—it was too tough for the voice to handle given the amount of rehearsal time we had when I gave them the music. (That’s on me: I didn’t budget enough time for copying stuff, and they got the score only a few weeks before the curtains were to rise, and I overestimated their ability to learn it that quickly.) The result was that I never really heard it except through my own awkward plinking out of the parts on the piano.
Hooray, Musescore’s playback finally let me get a slightly clearer idea of what it would have sounded like, and I’m honestly surprised how decent some of it actually was, or is. Some of this program music was actually pretty good pseudo-Renaissance choir music, and it’s a shame that instead we had to improvise some Gregorian-chanty-sounding stuff with droning parallel fifths in the background.
This is another thing for voices, albeit just for a group of six singers rather than a choir. However, unlike with “Oh Day Away,” I’m not really willing to pay anyone to sing the parts, as it would add up to a lot of work. This is one reason I’m eyeing that Composer Cloud trial membership: the low price of free would allow me to get the thing done up in a DAW and maybe I could do a decent recording of it for free, with voice synthesis that can sing the lyrics. (That, or maybe I can get someone to do it up in Fluffy Audio’s Domine? I sure as hell cannot afford it myself! That’s especially true since—recent projects nonwithstanding—I’m not really into writing for choirs.)
We’ll see, but trying to do it with Composer Cloud’s freebie trial period means I wouldn’t lose much time and it’d cost me nothing, so it seems like it’s worth a shot, when I have the time.
For now, though, the MIDI will have to do. Here’s an excerpt I actually like quite a bit, and am willing to share:
If you’re thinking, “That sounds very churchy,” well… good? The play is about Thomas More, is titled “Murder in the Cathedral,” and is mostly set in a church, so that’s what I was going for. There are other snippets that are more interesting, but they tend to be interspersed among bits of Gregorian chant-ish stuff, so I decided to share this one.