My lovely wife picked up a degree from Harvard today—good Lord, I can’t possibly deserve a woman this smart—so we took in the entirety of Harvard commencement, which is kind of like the academic version of a live Ring cycle: long, sometimes fascinating, sometimes boring, but worth experiencing at least once in your life. (I mean, one of the comic highlights—no kidding—was an oration in Latin.) Wynton was awarded an honorary doctorate—


—and played a little (you can hear a bit of his “America the Beautiful” here).

The big advantage of attending Harvard commencement as a family member instead of an actual graduate is that you spend hours on end sitting around instead of hours on end standing around. I used my downtime filling the margins of my program with a reharmonization of John Knowles Paine’s “Harvard Hymn” that would probably have gotten me kicked out of Harvard by A.T. Davison back in the day:

(Click to enlarge; MIDI here.) I love doing four-part writing this way: just sort of let the voice-leading wander like a curious dog on a long leash. (This is why it took me multiple tries to pass the chorale section of my doctoral comps. “Resist the temptation to be interesting,” the department chair finally told me.)

I’m a big fan of varied academic regalia, and Harvard’s faculty provides some prime robe-spotting opportunities. The best regalia we saw featured round hats covered in fringe, kind of like this:


According to the Internet, this—the birrete—is a Spanish thing. I think it might be worth my while to get a degree from the Complutense just so I could wear one.

Guerrieri: Steel Flea Rag (2009) (PDF, 4 pages, 236 Kb; MIDI here)

Not surprisingly—that is, if you know me at all—the rag-a-month project (previously: 1, 2, 3) is now a month behind, for which I will not apologize, since it’s all free. Anyway, this month’s entry is a left-hand only rag, just for fun. I will admit that, one-handed, this one is pretty hard—and the difficulty is compounded by my reference point being my own grotesquely gangly paws (seriously, if Lurch and Thing had a baby, it’d be my hands)—so go ahead and use both if you want. It’s the thought that counts.

Anybody wants to start a pool as to when I actually get back on schedule, you can put down ten bucks for me on 2011.

Guerrieri: Now Once More (2009) (PDF, 2 pages, 122 Kb; MIDI here)

I’ve never ended up hiring trumpets for Easter, since I’m always miffed at how much they want to gouge me. But a very nice person at my church had the wherewithal to recruit a couple players from the local high school this year, so I wrote an introit for them. I’m not sure I like it as much as our usual Easter introit, but when life gives you trumpets, make trumpetade. (Plus, the first line makes a good Beckett-like title.)

In other news:

• Geoff Edgers profiles one of the best musicians I know.
• President Obama’s gift to the Queen of England—an iPod loaded with showtunes—was actually rather spot-on.
• “ACCESS TO QUALITY MUSIC EDUCATION SHOULD NOT BE ONLY FOR THOSE WHO CAN AFFORD IT. THE BENEFITS ARE TOO GREAT.” Emphasis Linda Ronstadt’s.
• Andrew Lloyd Webber, anti-piracy crusader! The original Phantom of the Opera is public domain, right? Puccini as well? Just sayin’.
• Although I would certainly not turn down some of that filthy lucre in order to bid on an original edition of the Kandinsky/Marc Der Blaue Reiter almanac, including facsimiles of song manuscripts by Schoenberg (“Herzgewächse”), Berg (“Warm die Lüfte”), and Webern (“Ihr tratet zu dem Herde”). Christie’s gives an estimate of $40,000-70,000. (Compare that with the number quoted in the first item in this list.)

Guerrieri: Clog Dubh Rag (2009) (PDF, 4 pages, 264 Kb; MIDI here)

This month’s rag (previously: 1, 2) celebrates St. Patrick’s Day in typically loud and chaotic fashion. The Clog Dubh Phádraig, the “Black Bell of St. Patrick,” is now in the National Museum in Dublin. William Wilde (Oscar’s father) described it thus in his 1867 book Lough Corrib, its Shores and Islands:

It was believed in the locality that this bell was a present from an angel to the saint, and was originally of pure silver, but that it was rendered black and corroded, as at present seen, “by its contact with the demons on Croaghpatrick, when the Apostle of Ireland was expelling them thence.”

One legend connects the bell with Patrick’s driving the snakes out of Ireland—the snakes were so persistent in their harassment during Patrick’s mountaintop hermitage that he finally threw the bell at them, which scared them sufficiently that they didn’t stop slithering until they were in the sea. (Hence the C strain, which makes liberal use of “Banish Misfortune” from the Petrie Collection.)

Guerrieri: Epitome Rag (2009) (PDF, 5 pages, 313 Kb; MIDI here)

This month’s rag (previously) honors February’s oddball brevity with 28-bar strains in place of the usual 32. It also gets awfully MGM-esque towards the end, which I attribute to a lingering excess of Valentine’s Day candy. (I think Valentine’s Day is a bit of a scam, but chocolate-covered torrone is OK by me no matter how sketchy the pretenses.)

(Word builder: the original title was “Brachylogy Rag.” I am a big nerd.)

Guerrieri: New Year Rag (1995/2009) (PDF, 5 pages, 267 Kb; MIDI here)

That’s right—the original version of this one was written at the beginning of 1995. But now the notation is cleaner and it has a better ending.

Writing ragtime is one of those things that, for me at least, the more you do it, the longer it takes. As a result, I have a folder bulging with unfinished bits and pieces. One of this year’s resolutions is to finish them all up, so I think a new rag every month ought to go a long way towards that. (Seriously—there’s one that’s been stuck in the same harmonic cul-de-sac between the C and D strains since 2000.)

Anyway, this is probably the closest to “classical” rag style that I’ve ever gotten, the D strain feint towards the Neapolitan notwithstanding. Yes, we’re ringing in the new year with an old piece in an older style—along with the promise of future installments. The present is so elusive, isn’t it?

Post title via James Weldon Johnson.

Guerrieri: Divino Nombre (PDF, 70 Kb; cheap MIDI rendition here)

I’ve noticed that somebody perusing this space might think that all I ever compose are sacred choral pieces. Not true—they’re just all I ever finish anymore. I’m ridiculously deadline-driven, so unless there’s a performance on the calendar, most things just remain lazily hanging about in the notebook. I may not be very religious, but I suppose that makes me at least somewhat millennial.

Anyway, here’s a little introit for the coming stretch of ordinary time. This would work just as well up a whole step or so, but I love the sound of a full choir laying into a low B-flat; I always find the difference between middle C and that B-flat like the difference between lowfat milk and heavy cream. Poetic, no? I’ll regret it the first Sunday I only have six choristers show up.

It’s Lent already? As of last Wednesday, yes. For those of you who got to play outside rather than go to Sunday School, Lent is the 40-day period of preparation for Easter in the Christian calendar. It coordinates with Passover, which corresponds with the lunar calendar, which means it moves around a lot. (Trivia: the last time Lent started this early was 1856.) Then, of course, Orthodox Christians figure their Easter a little differently; and they’re split between old calendrists and new calendrists. This was much easier when I was in Catholic school—one day they’d haul you off to church in the middle of class, which was usually the first inkling you’d have that Lent had started. Once you become a church musician, you actually have to plan for this sort of thing.

Which is why this year’s Lenten introit was finished the day of rehearsal. (I have become more deadline-driven than Edmond O’Brien.) Download it for free—for free—and you can decide for yourself whether the nuns would have given me a gold star or sent a note home to my parents.

Guerrieri: I Wait for the Lord (2008) (PDF, 74 KB; MIDI here)