ORPHIC ENDEAVORS

New Tune... The Angel Gabriel.

*Holiday songs*

And finally, we want your holiday songs! Download.com Music will run a feature this December highlighting the best and most festive songs of the coming season, and we encourage everyone with original or legally licensed holiday tunes to submit them ASAP. Make sure to choose one of our holiday music categories as the main genre for your song or artist. And even if we don't highlight your particular song in the feature itself, it might still get included in our holiday music list, and it will certainly gain additional attention from users who search the site specifically for such music.

So, that inspired me to stop working on "Breath" for a few days and work on that Christmas music I keep saying I'm going to work on. I've never been happy with how my "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen" came out and I couldn't figure out why. Now I know what's wrong so I'm working on the tune in Finale and it's turning out much better.

The other thing I've been working on is a traditional Basque Christmas carol called "The Angel Gabriel" or "Gabriel's Message". I found some sheet music online and I worked out the tune in Finale, hated it, looked for a different piece of sheet music, did that one in Finale, hated it, and then found one last version, tried it, liked parts of it, so I worked on it for a couple of days and got it where I'm satisfied with the result and I just submitted it it CNET. Then I realized that the sheet music I used contained a section of harmony written by a contemporary musician! (No one I've heard of, but still...) So I went back and made sure my version did not sound like the playable version on the guy's website and it doesn't. I changed it around quite a bit unintentionally and it sounds very little like the source material. Of course the traditional melody is there and is very recognizable, but the other parts are thankfully quite different than that guy's piece. I actually couldn't get the notes to do right in Finale and that's why it's so different. Then I decided I liked the different sound and went with it. Turned out to be a good thing all around. In any case, it's not like I'm making any money doing this anyway. All I could do if it was too much like the guy's sheet music is take it down from the sites.

So, with that long-winded and unnecessary tale of musician's angst, here's "The Angel Gabriel".

Thanks for downloading and listening!
-Bonnie