Tim Rohwer: Composer

I recently finished a new arrangement and uploaded it to Free LDS Sheet Music.org .  It is an updated version of an old arrangement I wrote of "I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day."   Come check it out!  There are also some of my other arrangements and original hymn posted there, along with many other neat resources.  This site is great for those who are looking for something for their ward choir or for a musical number in sacrament meeting or a fireside. As always, you can also find these here on my blog.

After coming back this week to work on the fugue that I had originally started last week, I found that somehow it had all been erased except the first measure.  I was a little flustered and frustrated by this, until I realized it could be an excellent opportunity to start again with some fresh ideas and some new insights.  So, here is a newly updated fugue with a completely different subject.  Again, the subject was one that I wanted to be something you would be okay hearing again and again throughout the piece, and the counter-subject something to match it in enjoyable-ness, and yet not to be too "overbearing," to drown out the subject. Thinking as well about last week's attempts, I realized too that a 4-voice fugue for piano would have to be carefully crafted to include all four voices in such a way that no voices were lost, there would be little to no crossing of voices (lower voices going higher then higher voices and vice versa), and this would all need to be c...

I've been thinking about grad school and some of the essential knowledge and skills that I'll need, and one that has come to mind is counterpoint.  Since I began learning about counterpoint, I have been fascinated with this compositional technique.  In High School, I began to write two part inventions for piano, and ended up writing about 26-28 of them.  I don't exactly remember because somehow in throwing out some old school work, I must have managed to throw these out as well.  It's probably just as well since I had a limited understanding at best of harmony, of counterpoint, and of music theory and composition in general.  My guess is that they would have ended up sounding quite gross, to say the least. However, my fascination with polyphony continued, and I eventually wrote a fugue that took as its theme the Mario Brothers theme, changed a little to sound a little more classical.  In the end, I came up with a very classical sounding Fugue on a Theme...

I've recently reworked an arrangement for choir and piano I did several years back of "I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day."  The result is in the Hymn Arrangement section and will also soon been on www.freeldssheetmusic.org (if you've never used this site, it is so excellent for finding nice arrangements of hymns and original music as well!) Also, I should soon be able to continue more on the weekly warm-ups and give updates on some of the other compositions!  There may even be an opportunity soon to have one of my compositions performed, but we'll see how that works out.  Thanks, everyone!

Having lacked time and energy, my plan to weekly spend time writing at least part of something fun as a warm-up to stretch my composing abilities has suffered considerably.  However, things have somewhat settled down and I've been able to do some composing and have a new short snippet to post, and here it is: Light-Hearted My goal with this was two-fold: 1) Write something in a compound meter (something which I haven't used quite as often).  In this case, I used 6/8 2) Write something that is happy, fun, and light-hearted (something I also haven't done as often, at least lately) The result I felt was quite pleasing.  What I tried to do to add to that light-heartedness was to make the tempo very jaunty and almost dance-like.  I also used a lot of chromatic non-harmonic tones to help add to the almost silly feeling.   I originally had the melody in the Viola (partly from personal bias, partly from necessity), but felt that brass could more effectively...

The player from Open Drive that I've been using for my blog has encountered some problems with iPad, iPod, iPhone, and other Apple type devices.  The Canon in D now has a link to stream the music directly.  See the  Viola  section under Educational Resources.  I've tested it out on an apple device, and it is up and running. If for some reason it is not working on your own device and you would like to listen to something in particular, leave a message for me, and I'll figure out how to get it working or how to get you the file.  :)

A new accompaniment has been added to the Educational Resources of the blog.  It is an accompaniment of Canon in D transcribed for Viola.  Check it out in the Viola section of the Educational Resources.