John Harrison

@jim-4

Link to Score

John Harrison was a major clever clogs of the 18th Century. His claim to fame is to to build a clock that was both accurate enough and resilient enough to be both taken to sea and to be used to measure Longitude to a very high degree of accuracy. This was essential for safe navigation of the ‘Seven Seas’.

I do not know much more about him, other than what I read in Wikipedia, but what came to mind was an artisan working away in a workshop, probably at home, trying to improve his design until he could claim his prize.

The music would not be out of place in Pinocchio, where the puppet maker is toiling away in his workshop. I added the tick tock sound to give it a feel of a clockmakers, although surprising enough, I do not think that John Harrison was noted as one of these.

For once (don’t worry it won’t happen too often) I have used a simple 2 2 time. The melody is played by a Fantasia, which has a very light sound. To balance this I had to change the sound of the piano backing to an electric one.

Parallel fifths and octaves, have a bad press in Classical music (although they can be found in both Mozart and Beethoven’s music). This is because they can take some of the richness out of the melody, but on the other hand some times that is what you want. I have decided to look into this in my own music. Sometimes you want this to happen, but as with all things knowledge is power (they can be hard to find even in small scores). So I have decided to use a plug in for Musecore that detects parallel fifths and Octaves. Hopefully this will make the harmony more interesting. I also want to split out the melody and harmony before Orchestrating by using a SATB lay out. So I have a new plan.

1. write the melody on a Piano with cords
2. expand the harmony over a SATB choir, maybe change sound to Piano
3. Run the plug in as above and see what happens, (don’t have to fix them all)
4. It is the recommended by Teachers to have a piece laid out in SATB before Orchestration

Again the result is straight out of Musecore and I am happy with the result.