Postcards from the Crater previews

Postcards from the Crater no. 8: The Mighty Oak (1st pt. mp3) (2nd pt. mp3) (3rd pt. mp3)
Postcards from the Crater no. 6: Ice Cave Road (1st pt. mp3) (2nd pt. mp3) (3rd pt. mp3)

Early in 2016 I started writing short pieces modeled after the Divertimentos that James Oswald composed and published in the 1750s in London. At this point I have nine of these pieces that I like well enough to share, each with three short movements.

I've been playing them before or after Oswald's own pieces during my solo mandolin coffee house gigs this year and now my plan is to turn them into a small book that I intend to have available at the Classical Mandolin Society of America annual convention in Valley Forge, early next month.

I recorded a couple of these this morning and I'm posting them here as a start towards recording them all before the book is published. Musicians often ask if there are sound files to go with my books and I haven't usually taken the time (and it does take me some time to create acceptable recordings) to do that.

Postcards from the Crater is the working title for the collection. This is a breakthrough for me because creating titles is a constant problem and I was quite pleased when this popped into my mind. A couple of years ago we learned that our little town sits on top of a meteorite crater, you can read more about it here.

Using the Crater as a way to gather the pieces under one meteoric umbrella allows me to think about titles for each individual divertimento. I still have a couple of weeks before I have to finalize those titles so for this blog I will use the numbers that I currently have for them.

So here are recordings of Postcards no. 8 and no. 6. I should mention that all of these pieces will be easy to intermediate in their difficulty and they should equally fun to play on the fiddle. See what you think.....