Product Description
The Bach Chorales are ultimate examples of melodies creating harmonies, the parts coming together to form a whole. They are also great examples of a musician taking a melody and making a new arrangement of it, like jazz musicians do today. This piece is a combination of two chorale melodies that Bach arranged, originally based on hymns by 16th-century composer Paul Eber. For context, Bach set the melody around 200 years after it was written, and I re-worked the melodies with my own harmonies nearly 300 years after that.
The first job I had when I moved back to Ottawa from Boston was as a church pianist. At one point there was a two-month stretch where I was in charge of programming the instrumental music we played, and I challenged myself to come up with new arrangements every week- the way Bach would have in his time, just on a much smaller scale. This was a terrific creative outpouring of music for me, and it renewed my enormous respect for the church music community and the work involved.
For this piece I took two seemingly unrelated chorales (they are actually from the same Cantata, BWV 127) and attached them, using their distant keys of A Major and F Major to set up an interesting modulation halfway through. I had to actively try out some more modern harmonic progressions to take the overall sound of the piece further away from Bach's version. One of my favourite moments is when you finish the C major resolution and then repeat back into F# Minor at the top for improvising. In the solo piano version this surprising cut doesn't occur unless you take a second pass through the piece, so I encourage you to try repeating the piece even if you don't feel comfortable embellishing or changing anything the second time around.
This product was created by a member of ArrangeMe, Hal Leonard's global self-publishing community of independent composers, arrangers, and songwriters. ArrangeMe allows for the publication of unique arrangements of both popular titles and original compositions from a wide variety of voices and backgrounds.