054 - Three Pieces from 2012

Hora #2, Untitled #8, Waltz #9

Today I’m posting three pieces from 2012 that were composed one after the next and adjacent in the first Tuna Day collection. These were numbers 56, 57 and 58 respectively.

The first two pieces, Hora #2 & Untitled #8 were both composed on the same day. I did this so often that the first collection topped out with 428 tunes.

Hora #2 was re-arranged to become an interlude for mandolin and kazoo as part of the song cycle Bukowskiana, a collection of songs for soprano / kazoo & mandolin based upon texts by Charles Bukowski. A few other works from this collection also made their way into that song cycle.

I probably didn’t think I’d done enough work for the day with just this one short piece so I dashed off another in 7/8. Not wanting to spend time pondering over a title I untitled it:

This waltz from the next day was definitely composed as a guitar solo despite the vibraphone sound used here (because the guitar sound available from easyABC is really cheesy). The repeated offbeat e’s in the B section are played on the open 1st e string while the 6ths on the beats are all played on the 2nd & 4th string despite the range they cover, a technique known as bariolage when used on the violin as Bach does in his E major violin Partita. It too earned a generic title, but I did that a lot then because my interest at that time was primarily stimulating my composing chops and I never though any of these would see the light of day anyway: