Music by My Dad

My sister asked me today to write down a song that my dad wrote as a kid. She wants her daughter, my niece, to learn it. I think Dad told us that he was 12 years old when he wrote it. He never wrote it down, but he taught me to play the song, and I never forgot it. Now that Dad’s gone, I think I’m the only person in the world who knows how to play it, or knows how it goes.

I hope that will change now.

My sister’s request motivated me to learn (awkwardly so far) a music note-writing program called NoteFlight. I wrote down Dad’s piece over the last couple of hours and exported it to a .pdf. It also made a nice MIDI file which very roughly approximates what the song sounds like when I play it.

I’m pleased to share it with you. It’s not right that this neat little tune should be lost to the world, so here’s my attempt to preserve it. Pianists, feel free to print out the tune and give it to anyone you like.

Sheet music:

You can hit the arrows at the bottom left of this embedded image to scroll back and forth between the two pages. You have to hover the cursor over the image to see the arrows.

MIDI file (as a .wav). This sounds a little robotic as it’s just a rendition of a MIDI file by a computer program, but hey. It’s better than nothing.

Nice job, Dad.