J'ai complété les chansons françaises! Enfin!

My new set of French songs is done and finished and off to the musicians at Chapman University's Conservatory of Music to work on! That is a load off my mind and I'm really excited to hear them.















I ended up calling the set Chansons de la Vigne ("Songs from the Vine") because, for some reason, 3 of the 4 texts I selected mentioned wine in them. That wasn't an agenda I set out with when I initially chose the poetry but it 's nice to know that there is a unifying theme throughout the 5 movements other than just the language.









The entire cycle should clock in just over 11 minutes and every movement has its own sort of character.

1. Ma Bohème ("My Bohemian Life") is the only one that uses a text by Arthur Rimbaud. It's a funny little thing with flat-out jazz chords near the end and a ton of metrical switches. I've been wanting to write something in 7/8 ever since I performed Berstein's Chichester Psalms years ago and, with certain passages in this piece, I think I finally put out something I'm happy with.

2. This was the first one I wrote way back in December. I can hear some Poulenc influencing some of the harmonic gestures in it but, frankly, this is no surprise given the fact that I was reading a biography about him and listening to a lot of his music at the time. Baquet de vin translates to "Bucket of wine."

3. Pitiè de moi ("Self-pity") is the only one that doesn't mention wine by name. The choir sings an ostinato throughout with a soprano soloing over the top of the entire thing.

4. La table et les deux verre ("The table and the two glasses") introduces the piano with a single A-flat in the left hand followed by an explosion of sound from the choir. It uses the first half of Guillaume Apollinaire's "Poem for the Marriage of André Salmon".

5. Chanson de Mariage ("Marriage Song") uses the second half of the poem from the previous movement and finishes out the set with a piano part that starts up with constant 16th notes and barely lets up. This one was a lot of fun to compose and is probably one of the more melodic things I've written.

So that's that. I spent a solid 4 months getting these pieces from a blank concept in need of a text to the finished product. The only casualty was my old computer (more on that later but see the previous entry for an explanation). Rest in pieces, my friend.

And to finish this entry off with a bit of funny business, I typed "Joshua needs" into Google and came out with the following:

• Joshua needs to crawl
• Joshua needs the Kwik-E-Mart
• Joshua needs to collect information about the kinds of stress pilots undergo
• Joshua needs a haircut
• Joshua needs glasses.

My personal favorite, however, was the first entry it spit back at me:

• Joshua needs a disciple

Uh, duh. Everyone needs a disciple. I think I would make an awesome leader of some sort of band of people. Benevolent and fair. Merciful and just.