Just for fun - my first attempts at concert music

[fusilierb]

Just today, I got a couple of CD's in from LSU's library that had some recordings of performances of some of my first pieces. I just found their on-line search and have located a bunch of performances of things I wrote when I was in college and am going to be ordering em all up. I haven't even heard any of these things in 15 years. Some make me cringe, but some aren't bad at all. I wrote all these when I was 17-19 years young. Unfortunately some of these recordings have digital artifacts at places where I'm guessing that the signal to the old DAT recorder got too hot, but for the most part the recordings are surprisingly clean. I'm posting this just cause it's fun to hear these old things and nice for me to hear real instruments playing my music. Been nothing but fakery since I started writing again, not as much fun IMO.

http://www.reverbnation.com/tunepak/2150974

La Visita
This was my first commission and I was really flattered that my fellow students were starting to ask me to write things for them to perform. This is a trio, mezzo-soprano, piano and viola. I wrote a few things for this group and can't wait for my next order of CD's to come in to remember what they sound like. Sarah, the mezzo would bring me some text and I set it to music for her. I'd never tried to do anything like that before, came out pretty good.



Variations in Motion - Piano, Sax
This one is much more modern. I was learning set theory and really hated the sound of atonal music at the time. So I wrote a set of 6 pitches that stacked up into semi-consonant chords, made a matrix and wrote this. I only include it because the Saxophone professor at LSU performed it for me and the dude is an incredible sax player. I don't know why he didn't just slap me for writing some of these lines. But I asked him before I wrote it how high he could conformably play and Mr. Showoff said he could comfortably go this high. So he kind of asked for it. He also showed me what timbre trills were and I loved em so much I used them all over this thing. This one was performed a few times and I'm hunting for a better recording and performance, mainly from the piano player, who sounds like he might have been drinking.

The Quest - String Quartet
This was the very first classical type thing I tried to write. I wrote this when I was 17. It's from a string quartet in three movements, but this performance is soo God aweful, that I'm only going to include a section of the second movement. I remember this being done a few times and one group of players actually rehearsed it a lot for me. I located that performance and am ordering it up. I'm only putting this here, because I'm kind of proud of my first attempt at string writing. It's not nearly as bad as I thought it was going to be. This performance is really pitchy, but I could have written in a bunch of bum notes also. My handwriting is terrible and this was before Finale came out.

Anywho's, they just came in today and I was having fun remembering and thought I'd share.
B

[fusilierb]

I just realized Reverb Nation is cutting off all these pieces because of file size. So I put a couple of them here:

http://bryanfusilier.com/?page_id=637

Ignore the website its on, that is part of an overly-ambitious project that I'm working on that is still a couple of months away from being all tied together and ready for "the world". I still can't get the piano, sax thing small enough to post it here, got to figure out why I have a file size limit there, but its over eight minutes long and I don't expect anyone to sit through the entire thing.

B