Your Recorder Community

I wrote Blue Ridge Water Music shortly after Hurricane Katrina. It is a single piece with four movements, but each movement can also stand alone. I wrote these in the field, as it were, while visiting many of the 250 waterfalls in Transylvania County, NC.

Each movement is made up of small segments, many of which repeat. When the music sends you back more than one segment, such as in Part Two measure 6 and Part Four measures 5 and 17, ignore the internal repeats when playing through that iteration.
I don’t usually indicate much in the way of phrasing, as I prefer the performer to express my music the way they wish. When I play my music I often change the slurring and expression for repeated sections, as a way to introduce just enough variation that the listener thinks they might not have heard this phrase before.

This Members' Library Edition was made possible by a generous donation from Bee Neufeld. As a United Church of Christ minister, Bee played hymns on the recorder to provide music for funeral interments. A charter member of the Portland Recorder Society and the Recorder Orchestra of Oregon, she also directs the recorder consort at her retirement community. Bee is excited to sponsor Daniel J. Hayes’s composition to be part of a tradition hundreds of years old - music lovers financially supporting composers. She hopes his music will bring joy to all those who play and hear it. She wonders: Where would we have been without music during Covid-19?