![]() The 2 of diamonds was my jiuchi rhythm, te ke, for each beat and I had only one Joker that represented the rhythm do don ko for one out of 40 beats. My Song 22 playing cards dealt was recorded on my phone as I tapped the jiuchi on my journal with a multicolor pen rattling in the crease and rapped the rhythm patterns on the wood bench upon which these items were sitting. What are the odds that I would get a masterpiece while playing this game? I think I'll need to cheat a bit, or change the rules, to make that happen haha! Although I was tempted to change things around at first, in the end I played the cards as they were dealt. For this composition, I dealt myself one card for the jiuchi base beat and 4 cards for each of 10 measures. Deal with it! That's what I told my taiko students who were working on a 4 beat measure solo using 4 playing cards I had dealt them, each one representing a different rhythm or rest to include in their pattern. You have everything you need right in front of you. Don't worry about whether you could get something better. The melody is derived from a family favorite tune called Snowflakes from the show Winter Dreams by In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre in Minneapolis ( Because winter snow is like the opposite of summer rain, I invert the note pattern and switch to a major key plus slow it down to create the appropriate seasonal and emotional effect. ![]() My Song 19 sleepy Rain (lullaby) is played on acoustic guitars in Garageband. If only our human babies would fall into a slumber so easily! This sleepy song comes on a rainy summer day when doggos like our senior rescue dog #SmokeytheMinPin prefer to nap all comfy and cozy inside. I think that if they knew about any gamelan classes for children, they would have signed us up. Later in the US they took their kids to see gamelan performances at the University of Michigan. My connection to gamelan music starts with my parents who met and married in Bandung where their families were immigrant Chinese in Indonesia, and they actually had a gamelan ensemble and dancers perform at their wedding. For an alternate arrangement in this piece, I created six taiko drum tracks in GarageBand to combine with the gamelan track which is a 2005 recording of Joko's demo of the song melody on a single saron/metallophone for my kids' Sumunar Youth Gamelan class back in the Twin Cities. In a gamelan ensemble, there is one drummer and an array of other players on various melodic percussion instruments. Sounds of Japanese taiko drums drop like rain on top of the melody line of Sanguniro, a Javanese gamelan song by Joko Sutrisno of Sumunar in Minnesota. For Us, the piece has four sections that increase in tempo from "Moderately slow, Expressive" (reminds me of the Russian Folk Melody, Dark Eyes, in my children's piano book), to "Distinct Rhythm" (sounds distinctly like gamelan melodies to me), to "Moderate" (violin part sounds like GOT soundtracks at first, then my fave part is when the pizzicato notes come in on the variation), and finally ends in a "Lively" fashion, all done amusingly with no respect for limitations on my musical sense and composed when I was the age that my fourth and youngest child is now! For now, I excitedly entered the original score (with no edits except my current interpretation of the tempo markings) into Flat.io online music notation software and played back the audio which lets me listen to and respect my 20-year-old composer self. ![]() For violin and piano, I remember writing my Final Project so that it was easy enough for us to play together on our respective instruments. of Michigan, even though we were respectively pre-med and earth science majors that Spring term of '87. For fun, Larry and I took a music composition class at the Univ.
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