I was inspired by Ferkungamabooboo's "Wouldn't It Be Nice" to post one of my own pieces, which I slipped into a reply to his post. But apparently no one has heard it? So I'm starting a thread of my own. This one is among my first batch of piano compositions I consider complete, composed between May and July of this year. I've composed another ninety-seven since then, all of them short, but in the aggregate they total nearly four hours' worth.
Some facts about me: I'm 54, no doubt older than most here. I never composed anything before this year--this eruption of a melodic gift is rather inexplicable to me, but I gladly accept it. I can barely play--I can plink out "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow," badly, but that's as far as I got in my beginning piano class that ended in May, and, being five songs behind by the time of the final recital, had to take an Incomplete. The pieces I'm composing are created mainly with the Piano Roll mode of Anvil--I also look at Staff mode, but my sight reading is still so poor that using Piano Roll is far easier for me. Partly because these pieces were created without playing them, except for a few exploratory phrases on my 49-key Casio keyboard, I created them without any particular regard for how difficult they would be to play. My fondness for unisons and chords spread across octaves probably make some of these impossible to be played by one person, and some might actually require two keyboards in a dual effort.
Since I can't actually come close to playing these pieces myself, I haven't given their technical difficulty much thought. My goal was to create MIDI files that satisfied my musical sensibility, within the limitations of the medium. I still haven't figured out how to achieve dynamics or legato, so everything, with a few exceptions, sounds staccato and moderately forceful, never extremely soft or extremely loud, and not very connected. So apparently by taking the easiest avenue offered by the Piano Roll mode, I've taken away the piano's original reason for being--it's capability to be variable between soft and loud. I need to master the capabilities of my program, but studying that sort of thing is not very interesting to me, I must admit--I'd much rather compose another new piece. So they all suffer from certain limitations, but that also imposes a unity of style, and that can be a good thing.
Anyway, here's the one I posted in response to "Wouldn't It Be Nice."
"He Wished They All Could Be California Girls, But His Soul Was Weighed Down Heavily By The Awareness of Tragedy."
He_Wished.mid
I'll post the notational text version soon, but I warn you, some of these things are a mess when you look at them!
Be honest, but be kind. I'm new at this. Thanks.
Walter Rhoads
Sacramento, California