UPDATE: We’re getting close now: each psalm has a text, each text has a tune, and all but three of those have been typeset! That said, there is still a significant amount of revising and editing to do before the volume is ready for printing, but I’m still clinging to my goal of having a book in hand by Christmas. Onward!
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I’d like to share another of the new tunes that will appear
in the collection, this one written in honor of a singer many of you know,
Tarik Wareh. Tarik had made a comment on a Facebook group or another electronic
medium wondering about the use of organum-derived compositional techniques in fasola music.* This was something that I
had also wondered about in the past, but had not devoted the time or energy to
exploring. I took the occasion as an opportunity to tinker a little bit, and
the tune below is what I came up with.
I had originally intended to write a three-voice tune,
treating the tenor as the cantus firmus and the treble as the organal voice.
However, I had a difficult time wrangling the ranges of the voice parts in that
approach, and decided to shelve it in favor of a slightly more manageable (if
somewhat watered down) technique in which the bass, tenor, and alto voices are
freely composed, and the treble voice acts as a sort of organal voice to the
alto. To facilitate harmony more idiomatic to the fasola tradition, a further liberty has been taken in somewhat
freely vacillating between parallel fourth and parallel fifth organum, with the
changes happening at the four primary structural points in the tune’s phrasing.
Although the final product turned out significantly
differently from the original intent, I think it serves as a(n unsurprising)
proof of concept that organal techniques can indeed be used to convincing effect
in fasola composing. Tarik took the
tune to the weekly Schenectady, NY Sacred Harp singing and they were kind
enough to sing through the tune. Below are a couple of recordings Tarik managed
to grab of the tune...what do you think?
*I’m pretty sure George Jackson uses the term “folk organum”
in White Spirituals but the thesis is
still too raw to consult my notes or the book and confirm it.
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