Long ago, I posted just the first portion of this song, promising that I’d upload “part 2” (aka “the rest of it”) shortly.  At that time I had already finished (maybe 98%, I don’t remember exactly) this version, and just needed to get a good recording.  And then much time passed.  At long, long last, the day before moving (for a while) to Japan (more on this soon), I finally got this recording…. and that was four months ago.  Today, cleaning up some files, I came back across it.  Woops!  So, here’s that long-promised-long-misplaced recording:

I described in the first post that part 1 was written without a piano, just in Finale, which was a new and challenging approach for me.  After learning to actually play the piece on piano (the majority of the challenge of that approach), I expanded upon it in my more typical zone, just jamming around on the instrument, and the result is what you hear above.   Actually at a few small moments in working on this new version, I went back into Finale to really figure out tough passages, so I’m very happy to have added that implement to my musical toolchest, where earlier in my writing I would’ve just ended up going with something I was more comfortable playing off the bat.  All in all, I’m really happy with how this piece came out.

There might be a part 3 in the future.  The plan from the get-go was to write part 1 in Finale, learn to play it, write part 2 with the normal jam-approach, which brings us to now, and then to transcribe part 2 and expand on that, back in Finale, into part 3.  So maybe that’ll happen sometime soonish… but no promises 😉

Here’s the first movement of a new piano piece I’m working on, Cherry Blossom Bosoms.  This piece represents a very different approach to music-making for me: I wrote  it as sheet music (Finale) first, and then learned to play it from that score.  I feel that this method made Cherry Blossom Bosoms come out of my musical box at least a bit — when I sit down at a piano, I generally play the same kind of pianoy stuff, because that’s what my fingers know how to play (I don’t have formal training, and piano isn’t my primary instrument; I mainly learned by transcribing some of my guitar pieces, reading a little bit of sheet music, and jamming around from there).  It also made me improve, at least a bit, at piano: I previously hadn’t written any pieces with very different rhythms for each hand, and it took a lot of practice to be able to play the piece comfortably. The method also came as a matter of necessity: I wrote the piece in January 2013, when living in Japan with my girlfriend, where I had no musical instruments, just my laptop.  That was very much an intentional situation, as I was curious to try “pure composition” (and not ship anything to Japan), and I’m very happy with the result.

Without further ado, here’s the audio:
And the sheet music, in its original Finale format, and as a jpg:

Please feel free to reproduce, perform, arrange, alter, etc this piece, but send some credit this way 🙂

I have just about finished the second movement (/revision) as well, that’ll be here real soon.