By John Bladen and others
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The organ
recordings marked ‘JB’ were played by myself on a
fairly typical English 3 manual organ of fairly poor sound quality, but
generally good reliability. The flute recordings marked ‘JB’ were played by myself on a Miyazawa 201 flute. The recordings marked
‘synthesiser’ were made using the Yamaha DS-XG
synthesiser inside a Toshiba laptop. Feedback to js.bladen@ukonline.co.uk
Warning! I have no formal composing training
and each of the compositions were written in under 2
hours! I do however like improvising and many of the pieces are just
improvisations that have been written down. Also, see the home page for
information on my limited experience of flute playing!
A lightweight, cheerful and very pleasant fugue. Harmonically it is not a daring
piece (as with many of Bach’s C major compositions) and this put me off it when
I first started learning the organ. However I came across it a few weeks ago and
decided that I quite liked it now and so decided to learn it. This is my first
attempt to record it. After 90 minutes of experimenting I decided not to add pedal
trills to the dotted quaver in the fugue theme (to match the manual fugue theme)
as I could not get them to sound clear enough on this instrument. The trills
are (as usual) not marked but normally I do match the manual part with the
pedals. I might change this in future if I can get my feet to articulate these
trills better!
A
delightfully simple but nevertheless tricky fugue that was always my Dad’s
favourite.
Even though
I must have played it a dozen times or more, I still love playing this piece!
One of Vierne’s earlier works, this piece really shows off the energy of the
organ. Best heard live – and on a better instrument!
This can
best be described as liturgical fairground music. Enjoy it!
This is the
last composition by Cesar Franck, and is one of my favourite pieces. It was
recorded the day after Christmas Day 2001 - partly to try out my newly acquired
Sony ECM-MS907 microphone and partly to avoid a freezing cold walk in the snow
with the rest of the family! Apart from several retakes of the third section,
it was completely unrehearsed, and I’m not happy with the end of the middle
section. However I enjoy listening to it, which is why I have included it here.
Peter Hurford (my favourite organist) once said that if you enjoy listening to
a recording you’ve made, it’s the sign of a good recording. I do intend to
rerecord the piece when I have rehearsed it properly. I think I would omit the
badly tuned swell mixture next time – and preferably find a page-turner to save
the ‘whip crack’ sounds at page turns! Sorry about the file length, but at
lower bit rates the organ sounds even more shrieky
that it does already.
This was
one of my first ever compositions (Sept 2001), which I wrote when trying out
various scoring programs. I guess it is part German and part French in style,
and though a relatively simple piece has proved to be quite popular, even with
people who aren’t normally organ music enthusiasts. The middle section was
intended to be a fugue, but degenerated into a simple imitation when I found
that fugues were actually quite complicated things to write!
One school afternoon
during our A levels this piece was born. And if I remember correctly, a small
but nevertheless significant amount of alcohol was involved. Adrian Cook was
responsible for the basic structure of the piece, and I was responsible for
trying to impose a degree of musical discipline. The piece is said to be an
acquired taste – one that clearly hadn’t been acquired by Mr Andrew Parnell
(organist at St Alban’s cathedral) when he informed us that the music
department was for music so just what did we think we were doing? He also
showed distaste for the impact this piece had on the new school piano.
Nevertheless he tolerated the piece, and in the course of a year it matured and
became a regular feature of the music department at St Alban’s School. In order
to make the score readable, many notes present in the original have been
omitted.
Minuet from Flute Sonata No 4 in C major by J S Bach mp3
(JB) (snippet)
OK – I’m
still very much a beginner so I’m a bit embarrassed about my flute playing –
but there it is! This was part of some test recordings when experimenting with
different acoustics and microphone positions. I’ll record the whole thing next
time I have the microphone out.
This was an
attempt to arrange the fugue from the famous Toccata and Fugue in D Minor by
Bach for solo flute. I’ve heard that it has been arranged for solo violin,
though I’ve not heard it or seen the score, and the violin has the advantage of
being able to play more than one note at a time! Though tricky to play in
places, this version works quite well except for the last couple of bars of
thick organ chords, when the flute is unable to do anything to rival the
intended power of these chords. I suspect that the only option is to completely
change the ending.
Variation on Twinkle twinkle little star by John Bladen mp3 (synthesiser) score
This is an improvised
descant that I play when my young kids sing this song – which is most of the
time. Everyone seems to like this piece!
This was
written as an educational piece to demonstrate the use of three notes from the
SolFa scale. The flute and piano are free to play what they want but the choir sing
only notes B D and E (Mi So La from the G major scale). Actually, you can see
from the music that I probably don’t understand SolFa at all! I don’t know what
should happen when the piece modulates – and whether you move the root of the
SolFa scale for every harmony change. The whole solfa thing seems kinda crazy
to me, because by the time you have the ability to understand all the harmony
changes in a piece of music, and hence extract the harmonic root, you can
probably also just hear the notes in your head - so you don’t need SolFa. And
if you use a fixed root for SolFa, then you’ve made no progress from using the
notes names C D E etc. I can see it working for very simple pieces, which are
essentially based on just one chord. Do let me know if I’ve misunderstood
something!
When attempting
a flute recording to send to a friend, my 18 month old son insisted on banging
his brick cart, full of bricks, against the radiator downstairs. When I sent
the recording I apologised for the banging in the background. My friend
suggested that I composed a piece called ‘Conversation No 1 for Flute and Brick
Cart’ and so before breakfast that day, that is what I did. At the start the
brick cart bangs a crazy rhythm. Then the flute plays a flowing melody. The
brick cart comes back in and interrupts the flute, knocking out notes as it
goes. Gradually the flute and brick cart adapt their parts until they manage to
play along together. They perform a dialogue, then a duet, before coming to a
gentle conclusion – or what would be a conclusion if it weren’t for the resumed
impatience of the brick cart – now rattling it’s
bricks in fury. The flute scolds the brick cart from on high – as a bird scolds
a cat. The original brick cart rhythm returns, now with cymbals mimicking the
bricks sliding in the cart. The flute dashes for the finishing line and
finishes with a triumphant arpeggio. But the brick cart is there – waiting to
have the last say! For those of you that don’t know – that is precisely what it
is like having young children around the house!
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Updates: This web site is brand new and much
more music will be uploaded as soon as possible. If you wish to be advised of
updates, please send an email to js.bladen@ukonline.co.uk
with the subject ‘Music Update Request’.
Playing mp3’s: Many of the mp3
files are at a high bit rate (e.g. 128 kbps) and you are strongly advised to
save the files to hard disk prior to playing them to prevent interruptions due
to connection bandwidth. You can however preview the files without saving them
to disk first provided you recognise the limitations.
pdf
files: Please download Adobe Acrobat Reader from www.adobe.com. All pdf files are designed for
A4 paper. They should work adequately on
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Copyright information: All mp3 are free
of charge and may be freely distributed provided (a) no charge is made and (b)
the performer information is not detached from the files. All score pdf files
are currently free of charge and may be used for either personal use or
performance, provided (a) they are not redistributed and (b) no composer,
author or copyright information is removed from the files.
Performance: If performing
from the scores, please send an email to js.bladen@ukonline.co.uk with the
subject ‘Score Performance’ describing the event (e.g. recital / church service
etc).
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