Track Spotlight: "Minor Major" and "Minor Major 2" — Fifteen Minutes on One Idea

Most titles on Piano Reveries appear once. Minor Major appears twice. Tracks eight and nine of Michael Clinesmith’s 22-track solo piano album share a name, sit side by side, and together run for more than fifteen minutes. If you want to hear what this album does when it stops glancing at an idea and settles in with it, this is the place.

Two pieces that share a name and an idea

Here is what the track list tells us. “Minor Major” is track eight and runs 7:29. Minor Major 2 is track nine and runs 7:56. Add them up and you get 15 minutes and 25 seconds under one title.

They are not two halves of one recording, though, and the music page makes that clear with its genre tags. “Minor Major” is tagged Funk/Soul. “Minor Major 2” is tagged Neo-Classical, the only track on the album to carry that label. Same name, two very different coats.

That is the fun of the pairing. A composer who numbers a piece “2” is telling you he wasn’t finished with the idea. The first answer was a good one, and there was still another answer worth writing down.

There is one more thing we can say for certain. The studio’s own timeline lists “Minor Major 2” among Michael’s early piano pieces, written between 2005 and 2007 alongside Bb Melody and Lovely Night. That makes it one of the oldest pieces on the record. Whatever order the two were written in, the idea has clearly been keeping him company for a long time.

Playing minor and major against each other

The title is about as direct as a title gets. Minor and major are the two great colors of Western music. Play three notes one way and the chord sounds bright and settled. Lower the middle note by a single key and the same chord turns shaded and inward.

That one small step is the whole distance between the two. It is the reason a melody can turn from sunny to wistful without really going anywhere, and composers have been leaning on that trick for centuries.

Naming a piece “Minor Major” puts that tension right on the label. It promises music that lives in the tug between the two moods instead of choosing a side. An earlier post on this blog, The Mood of Piano Reveries, described the first piece as light played against shadow, and that is a good way to walk in.

It also makes these two pieces easy to listen to actively, even if you have never studied a note of theory. You don’t need to name a chord. Just notice when the room brightens and when it dims. That’s the piece doing exactly what it said it would.

Why these are among the album’s longest tracks

Let’s be accurate about the numbers, because they are interesting on their own. The longest single track on Piano Reveries is the closing epic, The Sun Will Rise Again, at 8:42. “Minor Major 2” is second at 7:56. “Minor Major” is third at 7:29.

Put the pair together, though, and nothing else on the album comes close. Their 15:25 is longer than all three movements of the Sonatina in G combined, which total 11:22. It is roughly a sixth of the whole album’s running time, given to a single title.

Why so long? As our look at Michael’s composing process points out, the tracks on this record range from 0:49 to 8:42, and that spread comes from letting each piece be as long as its material needs. Happy Anniversary says what it has to say in forty-nine seconds. An idea built on the pull between two moods needs room to actually go back and forth.

You can’t rush that kind of contrast. A shift from shade to light only lands if you have spent enough time in the shade to feel it.

Where they take the listener over time

Look at where the pair sits. The seven tracks before it are all on the shorter side of seven minutes, and the last three of those are the tidy, formal movements of the sonatina. The final movement wraps up in 2:46.

Then track eight begins, and the album changes its sense of time. The genre swerves from classical to funk/soul, and the clock stretches out to seven and a half minutes. Just as that piece ends, the same name comes up again in a neo-classical frame and runs even longer.

This is the album’s deep middle. The record opens with After the Storm and closes with a sunrise, and in between it needs somewhere to sit and think. Tracks eight and nine are that place.

What comes next is a nice touch of sequencing, too. Track ten is Two Beat, which is over in 1:37. After a quarter of an hour of exploring, the album hands you something quick and light, like stepping back outside after a long conversation. Then For Grandma arrives, the only other track that shares the first piece’s funk/soul tag.

Long pieces like these are also where Piano Reveries works best as company. A seven-minute track doesn’t keep pulling at your sleeve the way a string of two-minute ones can. Put both on while you read, write, or cook, and you get fifteen unbroken minutes of one piano following one thought.

Hear both on Piano Reveries

The way to hear these two is back to back, in album order, with nothing in between. Listen to the first, then let the second answer it, and notice how differently the same idea can be dressed.

You can preview every track and buy Piano Reveries right here on the site. The full 22-track album is $9.99, and single tracks are $3 each, so the pair on its own is $6. Buying direct is the most meaningful way to support the studio. If you’d rather stream, the album is live on Spotify, Apple Music, and the other major services.

To follow along as new music comes out, subscribe on YouTube. To back the work directly, Patreon is the place. And if you play and want to try this kind of writing under your own hands, Michael’s scores are available through Sheet Music Plus and Sheet Music Direct.

Long-form, mood-shifting writing is a game composer’s skill as much as a pianist’s. Michael scores his own indie RPG, Rebellion, on Steam, and its music is available as the Rebellion Soundtrack DLC.

If your own game, film, or project needs a cue that can hold a mood for seven minutes and still have somewhere to go, you can hire Michael for a custom score on SoundBetter, read more about the studio, or get in touch directly.

One idea, two answers, fifteen minutes. Take your time with it.