Wacky Ideas for Compositions

Just for fun I thought I would share with you a couple of the ideas that I have had for compositions, most of which just didn't get finished. I might return to some of these one day.

First up, one of the most interesting and unusual musical genres, the haka, that I wrote about in this post. The haka is basically a Maori war chant that has been adopted generally in New Zealand society to both honor fallen military personnel and, by the New Zealand All Blacks, to terrify opposing rugby players:

There is something slightly similar from Bali called the Monkey Chant:

All of which fascinated me as a composer. I mean, aren't we rather tired of all those lovely harmonious choral sounds? Wouldn't we like to hear something rather more primitive? The haka performed by the 2/1 RNZIR Battalion that I included in my post is certainly both primeval and serious. So I thought I might take a stab at creating my own haka:

I think the problem was that I needed choreography of some kind and wasn't sure how to create it or notate it. So this piece was never finished.

Then I spent a great deal of time on a "string quartet" consisting of violin, harpsichord, guitar and harp:

This one was a much longer sketch and would have been finished but I ran into some structural problems. I think the basic idea is interesting and I may yet go back and finish it. I have lots of others, but I don't want to give away what might someday turn into fully-realized pieces.

How about a piece of music? This is wacky piece by another composer. From 1723, an early minimalist piece by Marin Marais titled "Sonnerie de Ste. Geneviève du Mont-de-Paris" inspired by church bells: