Mort and Dot #3: "River"

A New Album In Ten Parts

Note: Mort and Dot is a new album of ten piano pieces that will be released on May 1. They are based on the sheet music collection of my grandparents. In this series, you can listen to exclusive tracks and learn more about how the project was made.

Here’s are some photos of my grandmother, Dorothy, posing with a friend. They likely would have been taken in the mid to late 1920s (making her a Flapper!). Perhaps this was from a photo booth, but one that made horizontal strips instead of vertical. And here is today’s new piano piece, based on one of Dorothy’s old Tin Pan Alley songs, “Weary River”:

Track #3: “River”

Like this? You can support my work and preorder the entire album here (for a limited time, it will also come with a bonus PDF score, and you can play the music at your own piano):

This piece is a little more involved than the first two. I can’t exactly remember what I borrowed from the original—perhaps something to do with the shape of the lines?—but I know I was curious about finding a continuous melody, one that felt like, well, a river.

Below is a bit of my piano score for “River” (which comes with the album), and once again it is almost embarrassingly simple. But who cares? It was fun to play, and I like how there are three melodies at once, and that the middle voice languidly finds its way through the texture. (The little circle of art at the top is a little hard to see, but it is of fish and frogs making their way through the water. It’s from my niece, Samantha Rehark—more on that in a later post):

And here is the cover to the original piece that was the inspiration. That fellow looks serious!

I like that nice “Dottie” signature on the left hand side. And are those her fingerprints along the right? I often find myself playing through these pieces and the sheet music becomes like a time machine, and I imagine Dorothy sitting down at the piano to play and sing. Here’s an early recording of the original song with Rudy Vallée:

Ok, now that I just listened to this old recording again, I can tell that my piece was definitely inspired by the melody here, as it wanders through the instruments. I also like Vallée’s voice; he seems to be the quintessential dream-boat of the 1920s (“Oh, Rudy!”).

If you’d like to support my work, consider preordering the digital album over on Bandcamp (there’s also a PDF of the Mort and Dot score that comes with each purchase):

Happy listening, and more soon,

Brian