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New Music Monday
Piano and pipe organ Epiphany improvisations
Happy Monday and happy new year! After a much-needed retreat to BC’s Southern Gulf Islands, I returned refreshed (and unpracticed) to play several Sunday services. Improvisation in a service setting always feels a little like cheating to me—all those hours of missed practice make the work seem illegitimate—but it is nonetheless such a joy to structure and perform on the fly.

Canada’s Southern Gulf Islands, from the top of Mount Galiano
Photo by Ben Dobyns
The organ piece begins with a modern, 12-tone phrase that leads into fast runs in the super-Locrian scale, before quieting down into reharmonized quotes of several classic Epiphany hymns. Atonal harmonizing in the right hand supports a left-hand melody with a lydian sensibility. The dissonance builds into a melodic statement of a new 8 8 8 8 theme in classic hymn harmonies before resolving into a final statement in F of another classic Epiphany hymn. - Performed at Shaughnessy Heights United Church
The piano piece states a simple theme in the key of C in an AABA structure, building into modes of the jazz melodic minor in the B section. The structure is then repeated for a gentle jazz improvisation over the same chords, before returning to a final restatement of the melody at the end. - Performed at St Brigids at Christ Church Cathedral