I know—two posts in one day!

I’ve been cleaning up both my study and my hard drive, rearranging both to be more efficient.  One thing I’m doing on the hard drive is to update all my old music files into the new Finale so that nothing gets left behind. Some pretty old stuff in there, too!

One of those items was the Symphony No. 1 in G major.  I was asked to write it by the strings teacher at GHP in 2007 to be performed the following summer.  (I won’t name him here since I don’t want to embarrass him, since he should already be embarrassed about never playing the Cello Sonata Stephen Czarkowski!!)  When he decided to not to return to GHP for the next summer, I abandoned the work.  I was past the point of putting that much work into something that would never be performed.

Now that I’m retired, however, things are different.  Who cares if it’s never performed?  If it’s worth finishing, then it will give me something to do.

And I think it’s worth finishing.

Here’s the third movement, Allegro gracioso, which I had finished the day before I abandoned the work.  It’s rather nice.

And then there was the fourth movement. Problematic, resistant to completion or even to persuasion, it was a problem child.

But my, there’s some lovely stuff in there. I will post it here, but you have to realize that it’s a pastiche, just stuff I was throwing at the wall to see what stuck.  You will hear passages with just a piano; those are sketches for what might come next or bridge a gap.  You will hear gaps: my method was to skip a few measures and plop some new section in and worry about getting from point A to point B later.  There is no ending.  And Finale is its usual less-than-subtle self in translating an old file to the new format. But there is some nice stuff going on.

IV. Lento; allegro mp3