D. Lee Jackson

Words and Music

Something Completely Different: Classical

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Anton BrucknerI hope you enjoyed that Heavy Metal interlude, because we’re going back to Classical for a bit.

I’ve been very busy with a program called Dorico Pro. It’s a music engraving program that lets you prepare professional-looking sheet music and scores. I’ve taken several of my much older pieces of music that I’ve meant to do something with one day and I’ve finally done something with them, inputting them into Dorico and getting scores and parts. One woodwind quintet is in the hands of an ensemble, who has played through it already! (They’ve got some work to do, so no, I won’t be releasing the recording.)

The most ambitious work I had on my back burner was an arrangement of Anton Bruckner’s Symphony No. 6, 1st Movement, for Concert Band / Wind Ensemble. Mr. Bruckner is the gentlemen in the portrait that comes with this post (said portrait in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons). I first bumped into his Sixth Symphony, 1st Movement in 1988, while waiting to get into one of the performances during Drum Corps International’s World Championships week in Kansas City, Missouri. My wife and I heard it on a classical radio station (she no longer remembers, but she urged me to arrange it). 

My first goal was indeed to arrange it for Drum and Bugle Corps, then for marching band (I may still do that one day). However, once I had Dorico, I decided to go the whole nine yards and do a fully-faithful arrangement of the piece for Concert Band / Wind Ensemble. I did not “simplify” anything about the original work: it’s still in the key of A, it’s still in its original meter, most of the original accidentals are retained, and very few other things have been changed aside from the fact that there are no strings in this arrangements (my apologies to the Saxophone section in advance).

I have rendered a recording through NotePerformer 4 and posted it on Soundcloud. Please go to the following link if you want to hear it:

https://tinyurl.com/y263tn6f

I would appreciate your feedback on this after you hear it. Please leave a comment below.

My next job, of course, is to get an ensemble to play it. I’ve got some ideas. If you’re reading this and you have ideas, contact me!

Thank you for reading!

New Song – “Pavane” – On Bandcamp

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Lee Jackson - "Pavane" CoverFor the first time in nearly a year, I’ve got a brand new song finished and up on Bandcamp! The song, “Pavane,” is a slow, melancholy, electronic dance, although many have described it more as “spooky” than anything else. In any case, it’s been getting really good reviews, so I hope you’ll take the time to grab a copy for yourself at this Bandcamp link.

The version that’s on Bandcamp is actually the second revision of the song. I posted the first version up on SoundCloud as a test to get feedback. Like I said, I hadn’t written a new song in almost a year, mainly due to the number of illnesses and hospitalizations I’ve had to deal with, and I wanted to make sure my composition chops were in shape. Sure enough, I’d made a few errors that required a new mix and a remaster, which I got done along with the cover art just in time for April’s Bandcamp Friday post by Cherry Audio (they’d promised to include me in their social post and their Feature post for the week). The reason they included me was that I composed the song using nothing but Cherry Audio’s Mercury-6 synth – ten instances of it, mind you, but still. 🙂 

(If you haven’t figured it out by now, I like Cherry Audio synths. And you should too.)

In any case, “Pavane” is still up for sale on Bandcamp, and I encourage you to buy a copy. Proceeds will go toward getting more music written. 🙂

New Music Collaboration In The Works

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Agony logoA contest has just concluded over in Facebook involving the Bass Guitar player from the San Antonio-based Nü-metal band Agony and myself. The Bass Guitarist, Alan Wehrmann, would toss out a one-liner from Duke Nukem 3D (specifically from E1L1, “Hollywood Holocaust”), and then I would post a riddle to accompany it. The idea was to point people toward what the two of us were cooking up: a secret collaboration between his band and myself on a Nü-metal version of “Stalker,” the music from E1L1 of Duke Nukem 3D. We declared a winner early this morning.

So now, the cat is out of the bag. Agony and myself are cooking up something we hope will be worth listening to, at least if you are a fan of the heavier of the heavy metal genres. It’s going to be very loud, it’s going to be very crunchy, and it’s going to be very growly – very much unlike the original “Stalker.” I’m stoked.

The whole thing started off when I saw Alan post something about music on Doomworld in the “Everything Else” forum. I learned that he was with a band, listened to their music, and issued him and his band a friendly challenge: remake “Stalker” in his band’s style. Agony talked it over, and Alan told me they decided to go for it.

Right now, my role in the new version of the song has been limited to consulting from afar. Soon, however, I hope to attend a rehearsal with my MIDI setup and possibly contribute to the sound. Maybe. They may not need me – only time will tell. Regardless, this is going to be fun, and I hope you will enjoy it, too.

New – “Song of the Weekend” Archive Online

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There’s a new feature available here on my website – the Song of the Weekend Archive!

You see, starting back in 2019, I used to do what was called the Song of the Weekend over in the Lee Jackson Audio Community Discussion Group on Facebook. Every other week, I’d let the members vote on a group of three of the songs I’ve written to choose which one would be the Song of the Weekend. I would do a write-up on the winning song, including history, anecdotes, musical analysis (where possible), and any other information I could come up with. This went on until the Spring of 2022, when I started getting too sick to post it regularly.

Anyway, the write-ups from the Song of the Weekend winners are now available for reading in PDF form from my website! No need to dig through a Facebook thread anymore. Simply go the Song of the Weekend Archive top page and choose if you want to browse by date or alphabetical order. It’s not a complete discography of my works, but it’s a pretty big collection. Please take a look today!