An oldie but goodie

Another small bit of shameless self-promotion.

Many years ago I somehow found myself the handbell coordinator at First Baptist Church here in Newnan, GA. It’s a long story. (I had been a handbell player, and somehow L.C. Lane, our music minister, discovered I could ride herd on group efforts and conduct.)

Handbells are not my favorite instrument, but I did my duty. I had already arranged “O Holy Night” for my sister’s handbell choir, so I thought I might as well write something for my own group. The resulting work was a pretty little piece, and it proved to be beyond my choir’s skillset and my patience.

However, it was too pretty to ABANDON, so I renamed it “Stars on Snow” and got to work on it. At the time, my music setup was entirely physical other than my EZ Vision sequencer: I used an Ensoniq keyboard and a couple of synths, a Proteus/2 Symphonic and a Proteus/3 World. Cables were everywhere.

This allowed me to orchestrate and SUCCESSIVELY APPROXIMATE that thing until it came out sounding like this:

This would have been in the late 80s. I decided I should compose more pretty little new age pieces like this and have a whole album. I managed to come up with more than a few, repurposing some other pieces like the “Finale” from my production of Pericles, Prince of Tyre. (Why yes, my Newnan Community Theatre Company staged the first production of Pericles in the state of GA within living memory.)

Alas, the River of Time and Technology eventually swept all of that away: Apple changed the operating system and the port configuration on its laptops, and EZ Vision was no more. When I recently converted all my Finale files to .xml files, I came across all those pieces, now just Unix Executable Files, and my MacBook Pro offers only TextEdit or BBEdit as solutions to open them. “Stars on Snow” exists only as the .mp3 file that I was able to record back in the day.

[Having said that, in searching for EZ Vision online, I did learn of a company that actually converts those UEFs to MIDI files — I may yet retrieve some of those pieces.]