SKU: A0.1230517

Piano solo. Usually when I arrange Muse songs, I use the official sheet music. However, the official Black Holes and Revelations book doesn't have Glorious, so it may sound a little different from my other BHAR arrangements.

SKU: A0.697730

Simple Gifts Goes Baroque is an Intermediate Piano Solo based on the Shaker tune, Simple Gifts. Shakers were an early Protestant Christian denomination that was known during the mid-19th century for an Era of Manifestations that produced dances, drawings, and songs inspired by spiritual revelations. Baroque is a style of artistic expression from the 17th Century that had complex forms. In music, baroque includes melodies moving together and in contrast. Suggestions for fingering are included.

SKU: A0.1029561

This musical piece is comprised of two twelve-tone rows, atonal music based on synthetic scales unique to each composition, which are based on medieval plainsong chants whose systemization was begun by Pope Gregory I during the sixth century AD.

 A simple explanation of this composition is that it is the world's oldest notated music combined with modern 20th-century music theory that eschews traditional melody and harmony for synthetic scales unique to each composition.

The music is complex and dissonant, although the conversion of the two plainsong chants to twelve-tone rows retains a semblance of a tonal center at given points throughout. Still, the entire piece of music is that same melody utilized harmonically: just forward, backward, upside-down, backward and upside-down, rhythmically altered, transposed, displaced up or down, or split into smaller cells and then reprocessed in the same way mentioned above.

I have also borrowed the Baroque Period techniques of the two-part invention and four-voice fugue combined with serial musical techniques that may offend the average listener's traditional musical sensibilities but make logical structural sense.

I used the Dies Irae (The Day of Wrath) and Tuba Mirum (The Last Trumpet Call). The authorship of the chants has been attributed to many saints from Gregory to Thomas of Celano but probably evolved from early Jewish psalmody carried forward by the earliest Jewish converts to Christianity, which further developed into trochaic metered poetry by successive monks. It was set to memorized plainsong heralding back, in part, to Jewish worship.

The text of the Dies Irae is very similar to Zephaniah 1:16​. The last trumpet call that raises the dead in Christ is comparable to the Apostle Paul's account written in his first epistle to the Corinthians Chapter 15 and first epistle to the Thessalonians Chapter 4. The two epistles may, or may not, be related to the Final of the Seven Trumpets bringing God's Judgement on the earth spoken of in Revelation 11. The relationship of the trumpet mentioned in the epistles to those written about in Revelation divides theologians, but I digress into unrelated matters.

Despite the modern theory, the music is still movingly visceral because of its conceptually descriptive nature. It is full of aural symbolism following the Dies Irae and the Tuba Mirum, making it a type of program music ala Hector Berlioz of the Romantic Period. The music is, therefore, genuinely eclectic because it has blended qualities of several musical periods. The final section of the video explains the symbolism.

The music difficulty is virtuosic, extremely taxing to play.

SKU: A0.1450566

Shall We Gather at the River
Robert Lowry, 1864
Easy intermediate PIANO
From the author/composer of How Can I Keep from Singing, Low in The Grave He Lay/Christ Arose, All the Way My Savior Leads Me, We’re Marching to Zion and I Need Thee Every Hour comes this classic hymn of longing for heaven, worship and fellowship by Robert Lowry, 1864.
On a ministry visit to a grieving family he was asked, “Pastor, we have parted at the river of death. Will we meet again by the river of life?” Lowry assured her from Revelation 22:1 they they would. Then, later that afternoon he wrote both the words and the music of Shall We Gather at the River.
The arrangement may serve as well as an early goal for a progressing piano student as for an intermediate to advanced player this coming Sunday.
The intro announces the tune and calls the first line of the chorus to mind. After setting the meditative mood the first stanza is presented in right hand melody with left hand accompaniment that only occasionally
is rhythmically active beyond beat three. Then, the easily playable key change takes the vision to the bank of the “shining river” by way of a brief, flowing left hand figuration. A few easily-managed major seven chords and an expressive dotted eighth note or two later the “melody of peace” concludes with echoes of the intro, bringing both heart and hands to rest.
All this from the places you go for the best in downloadable resources:
Sheet Music Direct
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Sheet Music Plus
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As well as via Hal Leonard InStore™ retailers.
Also…be sure to check out other titles from East of the Altar/Artist of Note, Inc.
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