39.) Two Suns January 27, 2014

PDF SCORE

Soundcloud came up with a nice new widget as you can see.  It's especially nice this week because of this great photo, which was taken by my brother Jake Stacken yesterday at his farm in southern Minnesota.  It shows a phenomenon called Perihelia.  Blowing snow gives the illusion of two suns.  Pretty amazing.  The temperature was -13 degrees Fahrenheit, with a -25 windchill.  That's winter.

Two Suns uses Messiaen's mode three over Rhythm Changes.  For you non-jazzers out there, "rhythm changes" refers to the chord progression of Gershwin's I Got Rhythm.  There is a tradition of jazz musicians writing lines over this progression.  Here's one to add.  At first I had thought of disguising the progression by not playing chords, which is why I didn't write them on the score.   But as I began learning to play it, I felt like it was nicer to play them.  On the bridge (measures 17 through 24), I cycled through all the transpositions of mode three.  The rest of the piece is all in the same transposition.