Original piece: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcYiFDgRdFk

Sheet music: http://www.mediafire.com/view/?nvtmb2c40i2vtit

MIDI: http://www.mediafire.com/?73e9frav8ws562l

Hello everyone, merry Christmas and happy holidays! I trust everyone's been well this week? I've been busy over mine, to say the least! But still, business must proceed as usual, and a trivial thing like a holiday isn't going to keep me off the piano!

So as a belated Christmas gift of sorts, I bring to you Makkon's "Absolution", the concluding piece of the charity album "Faithful and Strong" (http://broniesforgood.org/seeds-of-kindness-2/instructions/). Needless to say, I've been thinking about how tricky this one would be to cover for a good month now, and on Christmas Eve I thought, "Buck it", sat down and started working on it. Five and a half hours later the sheet music was finished (minus a few tweaks over the next couple of days), and I moved onto practicing!

As it turned out, the piece was quite simple, as I imagined. It's a straightforward but hauntingly beautiful piece, both to play and to listen to - though I must say, you don't really gain an understanding for the beautiful simplicity of it until you're looking at it at its most fundamental levels. Makkon, as with all his orchestral works, very skillfully took something basic and turned it into a masterpiece.

Playing the piece shouldn't be a big challenge to anyone familiar with a piano - even a novice would probably be able to master it with practice. The only blatantly complicated part is bars 32 - 42, where the left hand must make very precise and quick jumps from lower in the bass to an octave higher. In addition, the player must also strike them progressively more forcefully, while still maintaining a more controlled crescendo in the rest of the bass. If it proves too difficult, simply omit the lowest bass note and play the bass much the same as from bar 10.

The next key point is phrasing. To truly bring out the beauty of this piece, phrasing is extremely important, so be sure to pay close attention to the phrase marks. If you're at all unsure, simply listen to the original piece for guidance; I myself could probably have refined my own phrasing a bit more. Of course, for more beginning players, this is of less import (to avoid over-complicating the piece).

Heh, I still remember listening to this at six in the morning on the Everfree Radio livestream...