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Bluesy Bach – Opus 1 (Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring)
Bach’s music intimidated me at first.
It seemed too complex, massive and like a river or the jet stream, an endless spaghetti bowl stream of notes. But, yet in spite of that I somehow ended up working out my own arrangement of Bach music!
So now I’m off on a new adventure to blend 300 year old classical music, or more accurately, Baroque music, with the Blues. Some might say, “If Bach ain’t Baroque, don’t fix it.” But I said, what the heck…..To give it my own interpretation and flavor, being a fan of the blues and R&B in general, I set out to look at Bach through blue colored glasses. Or should I say, a blue ear piece.
My first venture into rearranging Bach to take on a blues groove is with his, “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring”. Per Wikipedia, it “is the most common English title of a piece of music derived from the 10th and last movement of the cantata Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben, BWV 147 (“Heart and Mouth and Deed and Life”), composed by Johann Sebastian Bach in 1716 and 1723.
Bach scored this piece for choir, trumpet, violin, optionally oboe, viola, and basso continuo. My arrangement is scored for electric guitar, electric bass, fretless bass, double bass, piano, timpani/percussion and drums with the guitar playing the violin 1 melody and the double bass playing the choir lines.
Here it is: I titled it, “Bluesy Bach – Opus 1 (Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring)“. I decided to tag it as “Opus 1” to leave the door open for some future bluesy Bach explorations. You can grab a high quality (320 kbps mp3 or flac file) from my Music Store page, or if you are into streaming, just listen on Spotify when it appears on my artist page in a few days. You can also buy the song on Amazon.com.
The common English lyrics are as follows:
Jesu, joy of man’s desiring,
Holy wisdom, love most bright;
Drawn by Thee, our souls aspiring
Soar to uncreated light.
Word of God, our flesh that fashioned,
With the fire of life impassioned,
Striving still to truth unknown,
Soaring, dying round Thy throne.
Through the way where hope is guiding,
Hark, what peaceful music rings;
Where the flock, in Thee confiding,
Drink of joy from deathless springs.
Theirs is beauty’s fairest pleasure;
Theirs is wisdom’s holiest treasure.
Thou dost ever lead Thine own
In the love of joys unknown.
ECO Spring Concert
The Evergreen Community Orchestra (ECO), of which I’m a member and play double bass, is having its first of two spring concerts this month. This concert will have somewhat of a children’s theme to it as our main piece that we will be playing is “Peter and the Wolf” a ‘symphonic fairy tale for children’, is a musical composition written by Sergei Prokofiev. Narrating Peter and the Wolf will be Emmy winner, Tim Noah. Tim’s bio says of him:
Tim Noah is an Emmy award winning songwriter and producer, nationally acclaimed recording artist and star of stage and screen. He has appeared on HBO, The Disney Channel and the BBC.
His musical journey has taken him to the high Himalayan villages of Ladakh, India and to Lincoln Center in New York. His captivating performances touch the hearts and minds of all ages and inspire them to dream.
Along with Peter and the Wolf, ECO will also be performing “Russian Sailor’s Dance” and Themes from “Scheherazade” and “Flight of the Bumblebee” by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov.
Here is the concert poster:
Sheet Music for Angeline the Baker
I released the sheet music score for my arrangement of Angeline the Baker today.
Here’s a preview. If you want the full 38 pages, you can get it from my sheet music page for a paltry $3.95 or only 10 1/2 cents per page.
Angeline the Baker Ringtone 2
And here is the link to Angeline the Baker ringtone number 2. If you want to help support independent music creation, you can also go to the music store page, and buy ringtones (or song, or videos)! All payments may be done securely through PayPal. Thank you!
Angeline the Baker Ringtone 1
For your ringing pleasure, here is Angeline the Baker Ringtone 1. I will post ringtone 2 separately.
Update on How to Add Ringtones to the iPhone
In an earlier post I talked about how you can add ringtones to your iPhone. Today I discovered while working on creating ringtones for my newest song, Angeline the Baker, that somewhere along the line, probably in iTunes 12, Apple removed the ability to manage ringtones easily in iTunes. There is no more Ringtones or Tones option or icon available in iTunes. Looks like a control-freak issue on Apple’s part. As you can see in the screen shot below of iTunes 12.7.x, the “tone” options and icon have vanished.
However, all is not lost. I did a little research on the issue and I discovered that it is still possible to put custom ringtones on your iPhone, you just have to do it manually. To put ringtones on your iPhone it’s a matter of dragging and dropping the ringtone file from your computer onto your iPhone while it is connected to iTunes. If you connect your phone to iTunes (connect it via the lightning cable) and click on the iPhone icon you will see a list like this. And if you have existing tones on the phone there will still be a Tones icon.
To add new custom ringtones to your iPhone you must first select the option “Manually manage music and videos”. Once you have selected this, click on the Tones icon and simply drag and drop your ringtones onto your phone. They should appear in the tones list on your phone immediately.
