New shakuhachi pieces

I have added several new pieces to the shakuhachi scores page.

There is a new solo piece in western notation, called 'No Answers', and a second solo piece written in Kinko-ryu notation. This is handwritten and scanned in as a JPG file.

I have added three violin-shakuhachi duets that I wrote to play with a friend at work who is also a student. 'Water Mirror has the hardest violin part, and 'Pear Tree Branch' the most difficult shakuhachi part, I think.

Last is a piece which I wrote and performed in church recently - I sang the voice part and played the shakuhachi part, accompanied by a keyboard koto sound. This is written in the pseudo-Japanese style of my chamber opera 'Komachi'.

Mistake corrected

I have updated my last posted composition because of an error in the second piece in the set. My transliteration/annotation of the Chinese text had the wrong 'tone' or 'intonation' for one of the words - this had to be changed to make the text comprehensible.

I doubt this has caused anyone any inconvenience, but if so, my apologies.

Three Tang Poems

I have placed some new scores and Midi files onto the 'Choral' page of my web site. These three pieces for SATB choir with piano are intended to be performed as a set. The poems together contain the faint outline of a story - a Chinese monk prepares for the visit of a brother from Japan, and in the third poem, the Japanese monk sails home in his little boat.

The texts are in the original Mandarin - much thanks to Jerry Huang of the Chinese Chorus of Cambridge for his detailed help and critiques of the text setting. Thanks also to Heather Chu, director of the chorus, for suggesting that I might write something for them.