music2work2 - it works

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Key Words: Orchestral, cathedral, friendship, peace

When one of my favorite people told me she was getting married, I offered to write some music for the occasion. It was intended to be a much longer piece and I started it almost a year ago; I missed the wedding and nearly missed the arrival of Twins! At just over 5 minutes it is long enough to give an idea of where I was going with the piece.

When I first started to develop these sessions, I would get people to give me two numbers; one between 45 and 200 and one between 2 and 13. I used these to set the tempo of the piece and the time signature. As I started playing with different numbers I started to use any combination: birthdates, meeting dates, age, etc, etc to come up with a tempo and signature to start with. This session's tempo and signature were set by combining the birthdays of the happy couple and then applying a "Top-Secret" algorithm.

When I think of wedding pieces, I am heavily influenced by the traditional church ceremonies I experienced growing up. As a Cathedral Chorister I loved the big sweeping sounds the church organ would make and the sheer size of the pieces that we would sing. When writing this piece I was thinking of how this would sound in a huge space played by a large orchestra - the keys that come in at the end are an indication of where the piece was going.