I have been up working on editing compositions. I now have a completed version of the Little Recessional Dance ready. I want to let it sit a bit to see if I will continue to feel like it’s ready to submit to the Greater Kansas City American Guild of Organists organ composition contest. Here’s a link to the PDF of it I put up on my music page if you’re curious.

I received permission from my boss yesterday to use my setting of the “Holy, Holy” this Sunday. It’s in a sort of faux Jazz style and I thought it would be fun to do with the musicians who will be there.

I have thought of changing a note in this piece. I think my original melody presents some problems for a congregation to sing.

If you look at the “Hosanna” above, you can see that the word is repeated. I think the melodic twist in the second Hosanna might be too much change from the first one to be as user friendly as I try to make congregational music these days.

A friend at church agreed with me about this. She may even have been the one to point it out to me. Last time we sang it, I mentioned to her I was contemplating changing the note. She had changed her mind and told me I should leave it.

Then there’s the problem of changing something on the congregation after they have learned one way.

Fuck it. I’m going to leave it.

I had fun at my piano trio rehearsal yesterday. We played through the first movement of Faure’s Opus 120 twice.  We all liked it. Then we played through some of the Tchaikowsky piano trio.

At first our tempo was much too ambitious. We started over and did it slower with more success.

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Ray Bradbury, Science Fiction Master, Dies at 91 – NYTimes.com

Not news I’m sure, but this is a solid obit of a good writer.

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The hard truth about political compromise – Boston.com

Haven’t read this, but it looks interesting. It does annoy me when a site does not provide an option to read an article on a single page. The way I read I often refer back to sections in an article. Searching through three or four URLs for something can be frustrating. In face, I usually skip articles that don’t allow the single page option. In this case, I thought it might be worth it to bit the bullet and click through.

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What your Facebook picture says about your background

They are actually doing research about this? Who knew?

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No Recall – NYTimes.com

Ross Douthat observes that America is no longer in the position it once was of being able to provide benefits for parts of the population without shortchanging other parts. He quotes this article which I have bookmarked to look at further:

The Politics of Loss > Publications > National Affairs

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