So many things to listen to on soundcloud - only just round to listening to this properly - brilliant work all round!


@dave-mckeown: Amazing composition. Love classical sax, its so rare. Thanks!

Hahaha oh man, this is great.
without a doubt the most difficult instrument to play this on, but very well handled.

Another unique and passionately played piece of work.  Nice work, Dave!  Favorited!

I'm out of breath after listening this... amazing, Dave! Thank you! :)

Here is a Prelude and Fugue I've written for saxophone quartet. For those of you not familiar with the format, that's soprano, alto, tenor and baritone saxophones and I'm playing them all on this recording.
This music was written for the <a href="http://returntostyx.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://returntostyx.com</a>/ project created by David Stuart, aka <a href="http://soundcloud.com/archimedes">Archimedes</a>. This is an exciting collaborative novel with contributions in text, music and image by all sorts of talented people here on Soundcloud and from elsewhere. It's a fascinating process seeing how people have interpreted the brief and brought their own creativity to bear on the project.
When David mentioned the "Return to Styx" project the first thing that came to my mind was Handel's amazing Baroque operas in which the Underworld was a common theme. It's difficult for us to imagine the incredible impact a Handel opera would have had on the audience of the day. There would have been no CGI or amplification or indeed, much acting or scenery. But Handel knew how to convey very real human emotions in his exquisite music, and that's what theatre-goers would have felt as they concentrated on the performers. That's why I decided to write this piece in a Baroque style....not as an attempt to capture any of the passion and artistry of Handel because that's an impossibility.... but to pay my respects to that first emergence of the personal and vulnerable voice in musical theatre.
For those of you interested in this sort of thing, I originally planned the first movement as a Toccata, but it's not quite long or difficult enough to justify that title, so I've settled for the less ambitious Prelude. The Fugue is in 4 equal voices, with two main themes heard together in counterpoint at the beginning of the movement, before being developed around the ensemble in various keys and combinations. The Prelude is principally in D minor, but the main key in the Fugue is F Major. The Fugue's coda however modulates back to D minor, bringing the piece to a close with the same harmonic sequence as in the Prelude .

I took the picture in a cave carved out of the ice in a glacier in the French Alps

davemckeown.co.uk

Cave of Mirrors, Prelude and Fugue, Dave McKeown

I am a working full-time musician, teaching, performing, composing, recording and arranging, and my gigs in the last few years have included jazz combo, big band jazz, folk, Irish traditional, rock, soul, latin, klezmer, funk, orchestral, chamber, minimal techno, musical theatre and more, so, safe to say, I’ll have a go at anything. 

I'm a firm believer in demolishing boundaries between genres, cultures, languages and ultimately people, and Soundcloud is a terrific place where all this can happen.

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