Pipe Organ Music

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I have a guilty secret: I love to listen to and play pipe organs!  I even like to look at them; they bring back memories of the bad old days when I used to pretend to be an insider into church --things.

Well; music was, on one hand, a way for the Christian community to render what they call worship, that is, to praise god and generally have a great time doing it.  It was a way of bringing beauty to a holy place and offering it, which took the place of bringing in dead animals (or worse, live animals, and killing them right there).  Well, these days, of course, only cats do that sort of thing.  On the other hand, music was also an effective way of keeping the faithful interested in staying within the Christian community, and if I had a nickel for every atheist who kept rationalizing why they continued to call themselves Christians simply to keep hearing the wonderful music and singing and so on, well, I'd have an awful lot of nickels.

Unfortunately, I am not a very good organist, simply because I can't do the pedals.  (For those who don't know, the pedals are an entire keyboard, with big fat keys you play with your feet.  It is the bass line that is played this way, and unless you can do it without looking at your feet, it is too hard to do.  But that doesn't stop me from making a sortie into the College chapel and playing the organ however I can.  (The professor who first gave me the OK to play the chapel organ is retiring soon, and I may be forbidden to fool with the thing by the younger brigade.)

The music software I use (let's call it Finale, though I actually use a less expensive product called Print Music) gives me an alternative to actually playing the organ.  I enter the notes in, as always, and the program plays it back.  It does have an Organ voice, but the organ voices it has are, let's see:

• Drawbar organ, essentially a Hammond Organ, but of course they can't use the word Hammond without violating trademark;
• Rock organ, the kind of thing that Procul Harum used to feature.  These are varieties of Hammond-like organs, all the way to synthesizers.  This particular voice is a very specific sound, which is actually terrible.
• Church organ, a pipe organ sound,
• Reed organ.  These were organs driven by a pedal bellows, and the sound was made by beating reeds essentially like the reeds in a harmonica.  The word harmonium probably conveys the idea a lot better.

Only the Church organ sound is any use to me for playing the sort of music I'm interested in, so, well, the music does sound like an organ, but lacks variety.

The very first video I uploaded to YouTube several years ago, actually October of 2008, was of one of my favorite Bach organ fugues: BWV 545 in C major.  This was a fugue I discovered in my grad school days, as played by E. Power Biggs.  E. P. Biggs, a well-known organist of the sixties, who emigrated from England about the same time as Virgil Fox, but was a much more mainstream organist, had been a favorite of mine from my teen years, ever since I was given an E.P. of him playing some of my favorite pieces.  The C major fugue isn't as well known as the famous D minor fugue (that goes with the Toccata), the C minor fugue (that goes with the legendary Passacaglia), the G minor fugue (that goes with a Fantasia, I believe), and the great A minor fugue (which goes with a Prelude, which I don't much care for).  Being a fugue in a major key, it is a contrast to all the others I have mentioned.  Still, to know it is to love it.  I have learned that it is popular in Germany, and is often played at weddings.  Here is my early video of it, with a slide show featuring photos of lovely organs, old and new.  The speed is very, very fast; I didn't know how to control the speed very well at that time; in fact I think it has so many views simply because of its great speed.  (Most of the views are, I believe, from Germany.)



Now an organist really has very little control over the sound he or she makes, because the keys of an organ are simply switches: they turn air on, and the note sounds.  In other instruments, the player has real-time control over the volume of the sound, by varying the bow pressure, the breath, and so on.  Not so in an organ; the most you can do is to control a set of louvre blinds that cover up some of the pipes partially, a poor way to put expression into the sound, at best.  However, an organ is set up to allow any voice to go with any keyboard.  As you probably know, there are at least two, and often more keyboards on an organ, and each of them can be assigned different voices.

On my software system, I can't really connect anything except Church Organ to any of the lines of music (staves).  I mean, there's nothing to prevent me from assigning anything at all to any stave, including Electric Guitar, but I want it to sound like an organ.  All I could do --and I certainly did this-- was to copy certain portions to a duplicate staff or staffs, and make them an octave higher or lower.  This actually takes place in an organ as well.

There are two main kinds of pipe in an organ: flute pipes, and reed pipes.  The flute pipes  have the traditional organ sound that is the round, smooth sound you usually associate with an organ.  There are both soft and loud flute ranks. (A rank is the entire set of pipes all of the same sound.  A single rank is like an entire organ in itself.  Because there are multiple ranks of pipes, each with a different sound, an organ is really a multiple instrument.)

The reed pipes have that slightly snarling sound you hear in the last verse of a hymn, for instance, when the organist is really pulling out the stops.  They're supposed to sound like trumpets, and they do, if you have a good imagination!  There are softer reed pipes, that imitate oboes, for instance.

An organ accompanying a congregation is generally made to sound rounded and mellow (flute pipes).  But an organ playing a solo is usually set up so that one voice is a little distinctive (a reed pipe, possibly), and the other voices soft and mellow (flute pipes).  This really works well in an organ piece; so well that organists accompanying congregational singing like to do that as well, with a somewhat raucous voice playing the tune, and more mellow --flute-- sounds playing the rest of the notes.  Whether you like that is all a matter of taste, I suppose.  Some organists think they're accompanying the congregation, while others --possibly unconsciously-- think the congregation is accompanying the organ.

As you can see, having just one sound --Church Organ-- to play every line of music was a lot less than satisfactory.  I ended up rewriting pieces for an orchestra, or at least a wind ensemble.  Well, sometimes that worked, other times it was just not satisfactory.

Recently, of course, I bought the sound library I keep telling you about.  I could only afford one of the many libraries the company offers, the Garritan Personal Orchestra, or GPO.  They also sell an organ library (also $150), a World Sounds library (also $150, on sale), an Instant Orchestra (not really individual instruments, but whole combinations of sounds, which I don't really understand very well).

To my delight, the GPO contained organ sounds!!!  A limited number, to be sure, but almost a dozen organ voices, in contrast to the essentially single voice I had used thus far!  So, of course I had to re-do the Fugue in C major, and this is the result.  (As happens increasingly frequently, YouTube accused me of having pirated a recording, and I had to refute this claim, which I succeeded in doing.  But sometimes they come right back and accuse me again, especially if the commercial client insists.)  To go with the music, I picked a dozen or so photographs of organs from the Web.  This is probably illegal, and it would be very illegal if YouTube merchandized it.  So the minute YouTube's commercial sponsors start sniffing around this piece, I'll have to take it off the air:



I hope you enjoy that as much as I do; the organ sounds are still limited, since they are intended to be used in an orchestral context.  The pace is also a little more reasonable, and not the mad headlong rush of the original video from 2008.

Very recently, of course, I featured another video in this blog, the chorale-prelude BWV 659 (Nun komm' der Heiden Heiland).  The apostrophe stands for the missing "t" in the word kommt, which translates as "O come!"  The imperative mood is indicated by words that usually end in t, such as "Sehet!" See, or behold, "Jauchzet, frohlocket!"  Rejoice and be merry, as in the opening words of the Christmas Oratorio.

The A minor fugue that I mentioned before, was first introduced to me as played by the great French-Swiss musician and physician Albert Schweitzer.  As you probably know, Albert Schweitzer was a musician who was unexpectedly inspired by the possibility of going into "darkest" Africa to help the unfortunate citizens of the portions of that continent that had been occupied by the French.   He actually went into medical school and qualified himself as a doctor, and spent several decades working in a hospital in Lambarene.  (He is known to have acquired five doctorates: in Music, Medicine, Theology, Law, and Philosophy.  At least the Music and Medicine doctorates were earned fairly; some of the others I consider of questionable provenance.)

The fugue is in 6/8 time.  Many pieces in 6/8 time are either lively jigs, or quiet pastorales.  This fugue is neither, it is a stately, massive piece that occupies this particular time signature like a gothic cathedral.  There is a strong sense of rotation; if I were to make a movie of the Universe turning in its mad waltz through time, this is the piece I would pick to accompany it, not any of Strauss's sunny dance compositions.  Here is a performance of the original fugue from YouTube.  The organist is Ton Koopman, a well-known Dutch conductor, clavierist and Bach scholar.

One day I was fooling around with MIDI files of the A minor fugue, and happened to set it going, in a lighthearted moment, with Marimba sounds.  My wife, who is normally left quite unimpressed by organ music, immediately perked up.  "I really like that," she said, and I had to agree.  The percussive sounds of a marimba articulated the complex polyphony quite well.  So I captured the performance (somehow performances that use drums get messed up in my software) with difficulty, and uploaded the fake video to YouTube.  Here et es:



Finally, here's advanced look at what I'm working on now.  I only have a few bars completed.

Achievement Gaps, Teacher Gurus, and Massively Open OnLine Courses

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I'll keep this brief

Apparently someone has done a study of student achievement in so-called MOOCs, that is online courses offered in some schools.  They found that categories of students who do poorly in traditional classes do even worse if there is an online component to the course.

Interesting, eh?  I don't think everyone has yet got their prejudices lined up in this sometimes amazingly disgusting world in which we live!  What is going on here?

Well, higher education has long been the province of (rich,) smart white males.  But over the years, College has been opened up to women, minorities, Catholics, working class folks of all descriptions, and even immigrants, and each demographic slice looks at the newcomers with alarm: hey, what are they doing here?

Meanwhile, Colleges have been fighting to cope with the influx in different ways.  First of all, they raise their tuition rates, so that they can offer discounts to all those who cannot otherwise afford a College education.  Meanwhile, every institution has to offer more remedial courses for students who should never have graduated from high school.  Honestly, it is no longer the cream of society that finds itself in Higher Education; people who would have dropped out of school if they had lived in an earlier age now find College moderately hospitable.  This includes the less intellectually gifted members of very affluent families, who would normally be expected to wear a nice suit and stroll around the family business merely looking decorative.  Now they entertain aspirations to run for Governor, because it appears that College is a lot easier than anybody thought.

Unfortunately, this doesn't suit certain members of society.  The advantages of wealth that obtained admission for some people in a bygone era into very exclusive institutions of learning seem to be dissipating.  Anyone, it seems, can get into Yale, especially if they're a government protected minority.  (This must certainly lie behind some of the clamor over certain government programs, which have helped scum like Justice Sotomayor to rise to the Supreme Court.  What is she doing there, leaving some deserving old boy out of what should be this last bastion of Conservatism?  Harrumph.  But I think J. Sotomayor will probably turn out to be sufficiently conservative to satisfy some folks, and not conservative enough for others!)

Enter For Profit Colleges and Universities.  At last once again, wealth will have back its privileges.  Unfortunately, these places are not run for the benefit of affluent students.  They are run for the benefit of their administrations and stockholders.  So, like certain similar projects whose profitability partly depends on bilking the Government, you have to grab your profit and run, leaving some plodders holding the bag.  We're all waiting with great interest to see how these places will bounce back, now that everyone knows that they offer less than they advertise.

Now we have massively online courses.  It appears that they are being offered by different people for different reasons; some schools to increase their profile: what we do is so wonderful that we can offer it for free, and everyone will see how awesome we are!  In other cases, it is to make profits: we can offer courses to more people this way; the free online courses are just part of what we have to offer.  Yet others do it just because they feel that information and education should be free, and kids are just not getting what they should be getting.  It's a heady mix of idealism, ego, glamor and foolishness.

Education is not information.  In some disciplines it can be; once you know the vocabulary and some key pieces of information, you ought to be all set.  In other disciplines, education should be distilled experience.  Usually, that sort of distilled experience has to be delivered face to face, even if the amount of face time you get is limited.  Just throwing facts at the students does not amount to education.

But isn't it true that, in some distant future, you'd probably get everything over the wire?  Probably so.

But to get back to this inequity business.  Not everyone really wants non-traditional students to succeed.  I'm sometimes not sure that I want it, either.  To take it to the limit, do I want to have an appendectomy performed by someone who learned her art online?

There are two aspects to education: increasing the skills and the knowledge of the student.  But also: ranking students by ability.  Nobody realizes that they really want the second thing rather than the first.  Now MOOCs are exacerbating the difference in ranking between members of the student body.  Is this a good thing?  If you want everybody to succeed, this will bother you: MOOCs bring out differences in learning ability, which makes things worse from one point of view.  But I bet there are people out there who are rejoicing right now.  Yes!  Finally a way of making the duds hit the dirt!

I think I fall somewhere in the middle.  I do think stronger students should be sent in different directions than weaker students.  But doesn't this usurp the student's prerogatives about what to study?  On the the other hand, most schools reserve the right to admit only students who have certain prerequisites into certain courses.  I hate to be the one who has to manage that sorting.  I like to teach as if all my students are (from Gryffindor?  No, that's not it ...) have superior potential, but you just know some of them are (from, er ... Slytherin?  No...) not going to be able to handle the material, and will slow us down.

There are Teaching Gurus out there who say that everybody can learn anything.  I think that overstates the case enormously.  To accomplish that, the student has to be handed over to some specialist.  How these geniuses teach the material to underprepared (and undermotivated) students is to strip the curriculum down to bare essentials, and take a lot of time to cover those bare essentials (in a highly entertaining way).  But often, those eliminated nuisance topics are precisely the topics that hold students back further downstream.  In fact, a lot of the underpreparedness I see now could very well be the result of reckless curriculum streamlining before I get my hands on the students, in high school, or even further back.  (Some of my students had difficulty subtracting 360 from 510 without calculators.)

It is getting fashionable to say do not blame the high schools.  Just handle the problems when you get them.  The easy response is not to handle the problem at all, but just pass the buck along.  Sooner or later, though, poorly trained graduates reflect poorly on the institution, and we pay the price with fewer students, and students who are even worse prepared than before.  We also pay the price with graduates who cannot be well employed, and who are unable to contribute to the endowment of the school.

The exception, of course, is Business.  Being poorly prepared does not seem to be a handicap for Business; you just have to look good in a suit, and wear an air of confidence.  In many businesses, those who do the hiring are not very well able to tell a capable prospect from a mere mannequin.  Well, ... that's business, I guess.

Arch

Visualizing Harmony: The Lattice Method

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Over the centuries, people have wondered whether there isn't a way to see a chord, without simply looking at the collection of notes that constitute the chord.  The written-out music, of course, shows you the chord.  But for many, this doesn't go far enough to really represent the essential nature of the chord.

Musicians and composers, by dint of sheer practice, get to seeing the sound of the chord by simply looking at the written score.  (“Score” is the technical word for the written music, because it looks as though the page has been scored by, say, a clawed animal.)  You can imagine a musical genius looking hard at the music and hearing it in his or her head at the same time.

In the end, though, there's no getting away from the fact that the only way to see a chord in complete detail is to see the notes.  Stephen Malinowski, an American musician did more than puzzle over this problem.  He got several ideas actually programmed into computer code, and today I want to talk about one of these programs.  (The program, which can be easily obtained by Googling Music Animation Machine and visiting Mr Malinowski’s website, incorporates almost all his various methods of visualizing music; I’m going to talk about just one of the visualization methods built into the program.)

It's called the Lattice Method.  He selects a note, say G, and surrounds it with a hexagon of the most closely related other notes.  Closely-related means other notes that figure with G most often in chords.  You can leave the notes immediately above and immediately below G out, since those rarely find themselves with G in a chord.  Out of the 12 notes on the keyboard, therefore, we select B Flat, B, C, D, E Flat, E.

Let's look at the most common triads that feature G.  These are the usual 3-note chords:

Triads with G as the root (or lowest note)
G major:  G, B, D.  This one can be done with the set of six notes listed above, and G.
G minor:  G, B Flat, D.  This one can be done, too.

Triads with G as the middle note (the “third”)
E Flat major:  E Flat,G, B Flat.  Only uses the six above.
E minor:  E, G, B.  Only uses the six above.

Triads with G as the Fifth (the highest note)
C major:  C, E, G
C minor:  C, E Flat, G.

So, six major and minor triads can be shown with just the closest notes, arranged as a hexagon.  The next step was to make a hexagon around each of the notes in the first hexagon.  Could this be achieved in such a way that the new notes that surround, say, the note D, have the same relationship to D, as that first ring of 6 notes had to G?  The answer is resoundingly yes!   Basically, going to the right, the interval (the distance) between G and D is repeated between D and A, and between A and E, and so on.

Similarly, to the left, the interval from D back to G, G to C, C to F, and so on, are all the same.

The note on the upper right of G is B.  Going along that same direction, we get B, D Sharp/E Flat, then G again.  (The notes repeat, obviously, since there are only 12 of them.)

The note on the upper left of G is E, and going in the same direction, C Sharp / D Flat, B Flat, and back to G.  The completed lattice looks like this:

(I have another image with the numbers here replaced by note-names, but what you will see in the videos will be the numbers.  Note:  Instead of the traditional “Sharp” symbol, the program uses a pound symbol, #, and instead of the traditional “Flat” symbol, the program uses the letter b, which is a barely acceptable substitution.)

Now for the interesting part.

An ordinary major chord, such as G-B-D, appears as an upright triangle.  See at right.  A minor chord, such as G-B Flat-D appears as an inverted triangle!  So if you see a triangle, you know it is a major or minor triad (3-note chord); upright if major, inverted if minor.  This is almost exactly what most of us want to see, when visualizing harmony.

One of my most favorite Bach pieces is a chorale-prelude (or just Choral in German), which is an elaboration of a hymn-tune to be played just on the organ, as a voluntary (that is, a piece between church activity, e.g. while the people wait for the service to begin, or while the minister or priest gets the communion ready, or waits for the collection to be brought up--you know, the usual waiting times).  I put this particular piece through the Music Animation Machine set to display the Lattice, and you can watch it, trying to spot major chords and minor chords.  The chorale is Nun komm’ der Heiden Heiland, or Come thou Saviour of the Gentiles.  (“Come thou long-expected Jesus”, but a different tune than is sung in the US and Britain.)

Next, you can listen for augmented chords, which look like diagonal lines going off to the right and up.

After that, you can listen for diminished chords.  There are two kinds: diminished triads, of just three notes, and diminished sevenths, which have four notes.  Both kinds look like just diagonal lines going off to the upper left.  The triads have three notes, the sevenths have four.

Non-chords have peculiar shapes; a single note looks just like a single circle.  (Of course a single note is represented by multiple circles in the honeycomb pattern, all spaced widely apart.  Even chords, such as a triad, appears as triangles repeated all through the lattice, all colored the same.)

It might make better sense to allow you to explore the Lattice representation by yourself without throwing more detail at you.  What you see, definitely, is what you get.  At the very worst, you can identify the notes you’re hearing.  Remember, G is 1, A is 2, B is 3, (B Flat is 2b,) C is 4, (C Sharp is 4#,) D is 5, E is 6, (E Flat is 6b), F is 7b, F Sharp is 7.  (That’s because G major contains an F Sharp.  Plain old F --or F Natural-- is the stranger, so gets called 7b.)  Here it is:


All these videos were made by me (or at least most of them), but this one is one of my favorites, just because the video came out so well.

Note that when you hear a triad, if the music keeps two of those notes the same but moves the other note one step away, you get a quite different chord!  Bach was a master of this; observe how he does this often.  The bass in this is a “walking bass” of a sort, so that if the upper voices have two notes, the walking bass changes the harmony beautifully.

Arch ‘’“”

Minimum Wage!!!!

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Unlike the world we knew when some of us were growing up, the world we have now is rather a puzzling one.  In some instances as a deliberate result of manipulation, nothing is as simple as it used to be.

The President has advocated raising the minimum wage to roughly $9.  Is this a good thing, or will there be a degree of inflation that negates the benefits of the higher minimum wage? 

Unfortunately, I believe that the answer in the long run is: yes; manufacturers and businesses will gamble that the people will expect prices to rise, and they will expect their competitors to raise prices, and the competitors will.  (The same thing happens with gasoline prices: prices go up just a little before the gas stations actually have to pay more for the gasoline. 

Unfortunately, of course, they wait until after cheaper gasoline supplies have been available for a while before they’re forced to lower their prices to compete with the less expensive gas across the street.  If they’re lucky, the gasoline station across the street will keep the prices up for a while, and both companies make out like bandits.  Does it sound as though I’m cynical about business?  No!  Really?  No!!!  Really?)

The problem, though, is that Congress is reluctant to encourage Washington to channel money into the economy (except in ways that will help Big Business, or at least the Big Businesses that are in Republican hands, e.g. Oil and Energy, generally).  To deal with the matter in a politically feasible way, Obama has to make a suggestion that will be politically dangerous to oppose.  If Congress says No to raising the minimum wage, the Democrats can hope that the fallout will be remembered until the polls in 2016.  If Congress says Yes, the Democrats can hope that the credit will go to Obama in 2016, in which case the Democrats can capitalize on the goodwill.

But the higher minimum wage will (if it comes about) create a temporary boom in the big cities, where most minimum-wage workers live (and also to a far lesser extent in rural areas).  Minimum wage workers do not, generally, hoard their money, in contrast to the Middle Class and the Economic Elite (the so-called 1%) which sends the money offshore to the Cayman Islands, or to the drug lords in Mexico.  So the money will come in to small businesses, which will then see a modest expansion.  It’s up to the Economists to predict how long the upturn will last, and of course they’ll get it wrong, as always.  There will be a slight increase in tax revenue, if the trickle-uppers are right.  I think I just invented a new phrase: Trickle-Up.  I ought to be canonized just for that.

I was just explaining to conjugal buddy K how fiscal conservatives (and Tea Partyers generally) suffer from not thinking their prejudices out.  I had just conjectured that the GOP lower ranks, people who have drifted into the GOP from elsewhere in the last several decades, consisted of hard-working, altruistic people who have just had enough.  They ascribe everything that is wrong with their lives as stemming from the sheer laziness of the working class. 

Of course they lump into the Working Class everyone who is either unemployed or underemployed, inner-city no-goodniks, druggies, single mothers, minorities, immigrants, criminals, rude shop assistants and taxi drivers, and people who give them the finger on the highway.  “Why don’t these people get jobs?” they ask.

Those who know the answer to the question know the answer well.  We also know that it is a long multi-part answer, and one that is not conducive to a sound bite, or even a sound meal.
These people sometimes do have jobs, but not enough to make ends meet.
Some of these people do not have jobs.
It has to do with poor education, where they live, and the schools they attended, and their circumstances while they were kids, which might not have been conducive to high achievement in school.

“Well, why don’t they study harder?  Why don’t they move to areas where the schools are better?  If they really wanted to, they could change their lives and improve themselves!” 

Suffice it to say that (1) it is difficult to get a decent education anywhere today, and especially in urban areas, and most especially if your parents have little education to begin with.  (2) It is difficult to move into a crime-free, drug-free area for anyone who doesn’t already live in one.  Who knows; those who keep minorities and the lower classes from moving into suburbs may very well be our good neighbors, Democrats.  Protection of turf knows no boundaries.  (3) Many of us and our friends who have good, high-paying jobs did not get them because of how well-qualified we were, but because of our connections.  We like to pretend that it's qualifications that got us our jobs, but most often it is matters that do not have to do with qualifications at all, such as what our hobbies are (in my case music, and computer programming), or the schools we attended, or the books we've read.

On the topic of education, what’s the deal here?  Are teachers lazy and incompetent, or are the students lazy and unmotivated?

Again there is no easy answer.  There is absolutely no doubt that students do not work as hard as they should.  There is absolutely no doubt that parents do not create an environment at home that encourages better achievement in school.  Look at what the parent must try to do:

• Emphasize that education is important, both economically (to earn enough money to enjoy life) and culturally (we value education in our family, and you need to have a life that is worth enjoying in the first place, which means interests, and interest in the people around you).
• Make clear that they valued their own education, and that they have high expectations.
• Make clear that they support the teachers, and that they do not encourage their children manipulating the flow of information to and from the teacher in such a way as to cause one side to be pitted against the other.
• Make clear that they value all subjects equally, and do not have preferences.
• Help kids with the sorts of homework that it makes sense for the teacher to expect them to get help with.
• Do their fair share of providing family values and social values to their kids, so that the entire burden of civilizing the kids does not fall on the teachers.

Very little of the above gets done at home, and parents are probably surprised that anyone could expect them to do it all.  Sometimes I wonder whether a couple has any idea of what goes into making a child into a successful adult, and how much of that has to be done by the parents.  Part of what both parents and teachers have to do is to prepare the students –indirectly and tactfully—to become parents themselves.  I tell my own students that being good parents involves a white lie now and then.  I tell them to tell the little kids around them that Math is Fun and Easy.  They look at me as though I’ve grown an extra head.  But seriously, isn’t elementary school math Fun and Easy?  It is an attitude that will be rewarded far, far more in the life of that little kid than warning the tyke to beware, that horrible Quadratic Equations are up ahead.  (Or, they can say that the most delicious thing they ever saw is yet in their future, namely the fabulous Quadratic Equations!  Yes, indeedy!  This is not a matter of truth in advertising; it is a matter of creating positive expectations.)

Doubtless there are teachers who are tired and incompetent, who should get shunted out of the classroom.  These people may well have been extremely competent and enthusiastic at one time, but depending on where you teach, the life of a teacher is not conducive to protracted motivation and ebullience.  “Well, you shouldn’t take up teaching unless you’re going to be peppy and motivated forever!”  Well, my answer to that is that your parents should have gotten an abortion if they knew you were going to turn out to be such an asshole.  I figure that in my life I have had close to, let’s see, about 30 teachers.  And all of them were at least good; most of them were fabulous.  And I did not have an expensive private education; for 10 years I attended a poor Methodist school, where the school fees were on the order of $5 a month, which is not expensive.  And then I went to a public school, and attended a public college, and finally a public university.  Given a chance, teachers want to teach.  Given a chance, these days the kids do not want their teachers to teach.  This is an impossible situation, and it need not continue.  Well, we can’t change everybody else’s children, but we can influence our own, even if they’re getting an onslaught of negative propaganda from their peers.  Maybe you have to move.

Happy St Valentine’s Day!!!

Arch

A Personal Orchestra: A digital sounds library

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By now everyone knows that I tinker with a certain musical notation program pretty frequently; it is called Finale Printmusic.  The family of software products is called Finale; the top of the line program is also called Finale, and costs around $600.  Printmusic, a middle-level product without many of the deluxe features of the top of the line program, costs around $100.

Many of the musical examples I supply you require me to enter the music note by note into the program, which is essentially an editor.  However, in analogy with text editors which will actually read your text back to you (not an uncommon feature these days), Printmusic plays the music back for you.  You can adjust the sounds it uses: e.g. Grand Piano, or Solo Violin, or whatever, for each line of music.  (The music consists of multiple lines.)  Obviously, therefore, the program is sold with an entire sheaf of music sounds already built in.

I have to say at the outset that the sounds provided with the program are really excellent, though they vary in quality from year to year, as I upgrade the program.  Is it just me, or is the sound set for 2009 particularly excellent?  I don't know.

This brings me to the main piece of information for today.  Another program that is in the same family as my music notation program is a sound library.  It is a very basic subset of this library that is packaged into Printmusic, to provide the sounds.  The full library consists of actual sound samples from an enormous variety of instruments, ranging from solo flutes to entire Viola sections, consisting of some 6 violas playing together.  Once you buy their library of sounds, you can connect this system to a number of programs you might have, such as my notation program, or even the Music Animation Program which I use to provide a visual accompaniment to some of the music clips I have supplied in the past.

Of course, when I received an offer (as a user of Printmusic) of one of the libraries for a mere $160, I was tempted beyond bearing.  So last week, I became a proud owner of the so called Garritan Personal Orchestra.  The on-line information, of course, can hardly give one a complete idea of what you're getting, so in some ways this was a leap in the dark.  But, honestly, it is very difficult for them to give a potential buyer a more complete idea of what the package contains without actually giving away some of the sounds they're trying to sell.  In one sense it is a very vulnerable position for a company to be in.

In any case, we talked it over, and decided to go for it.  My wife knows how much I enjoy working with this sort of thing, so pretty soon I was downloading it (almost a gigabyte of data, including sound files of all sorts).  They also provide a player that will play MIDI files.  (MIDI is a number of things: a standard, but most important, a file format.  It is a way of storing music digitally, so that it can be played back.  Unlike an mp3 file, which actually stores the sounds, MIDI stores the list of notes in the proper order; when it is played back, you have to use your own sounds, or at least use the standard low-budget sounds that Microsoft provides with your computer.  The MIDI file only tells you which sounds are needed, but does not give you the sounds.  It is essentially like a piano roll.)

As it turned out, it was by no means trivial to hook up the sound library to my music software.  So far, the only satisfaction I have been able to get out of the thing is to (1) make MIDI files from my old notation program, Printmusic, and (2) play the MIDI files through the MIDI player that came with the sound library, called Aria.

The Aria program has been designed to look more or less like the old-time synthesizers that were built by Robert Moog and others.  Today, unlike back then, the sound is generated from computer circuits, rather than electronic hardware.  In fact, Aria is more like a fancy mp3 player that switches in little clips from a vast number of mp3 files that consist of single notes.  In other words, it is sampling, or at least audio sampling, a close relative to what the hip-hop and techno people do.

You will probably be bored with some of the first attempts I made to "orchestrate" the MIDI files I had made.  Here is one of the first ones I succeeded in making sound pretty good.  I is one of my own compositions ---in fact the only halfway decent piece I have composed in the last twenty years--- which is still making do with the makeshift name of Serenade.This first video (it's just a clip of music; the video is just window-dressing), made with my old system, using nothing but Printmusic:



Now, here is the same piece, made with the sounds from the Garritan Personal Orchestra.  Unfortunately, I enjoyed the string sounds so much that I used strings, instead of the woodwind quartet in the previous video.




I hope to make a version of the piece using Garritan, and a wind ensemble.  Actually, it is ready; I have to make a video out of it.  Then I have to put it on YouTube, because the video features on Blogger are rather primitive.

What do you think of the sound from Garritan?  They've always been good, from what I understand, but evidently this most recent version of their sound library is exceptionally good for the price.

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Sheep may safely graze: a much-abused aria by J. S. Bach

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J. S. Bach, my favorite composer (and a universal favorite, I suppose), lived in the 18th Century.  He was born in 1685, and was working by his late teens.  The earliest permanent post he held, after serving as an organist for a parish church, was as a staff musician for a ducal court, the court at Weimar.  From this point forward until Bach was given a joint appointment to the university and several churches in Leipzig, he worked for various German aristocrats, as their court musician.  (To some extent, his appointment at Leipzig also required writing music for various noblemen.)

For years, in one post and another, one of his duties was to write a multi-movement work to be performed at church, or in a ducal chapel.  These pieces, called Cantatas, were sacred works, and we call them the Church Cantatas.  He was also often commissioned to write Cantatas to celebrate various non-church events, such as birthdays, weddings, and public occasions, such as the inauguration of a town council.  Often these cantatas (also containing a number of sung pieces, both solo and chorus, with possibly an instrumental overture,) were also on sacred themes, and if not, nevertheless had a distinctly pietistic tone, since religion pervaded most aspects of life in that time and place.  But these are called Secular Cantatas, to distinguish them from the Church Cantatas.

Secular Cantata 208 was written for the birthday celebrations of one of his patrons, called “What I love best is a jolly good hunt.”  The most famous movement in it is a soprano aria (solo piece for voice) called “Schafe konen sicher weiden, wo ein guter Hilte war.”  The English translation is Sheep may safely graze when a good shepherd is near.  (Evidently the town had only recently come under the protection of the gentleman, and were anxious to represent their attitude towards him as a good shepherd.  He was also well known as an ardent huntsman.)

This aria, of which I speak has, for reasons unknown to me, become very popular throughout the world, especially in English-speaking countries, and also, surprisingly, in instrumental versions.  Not that the music isn’t excellent, but that dozens of Bach arias are just as wonderful.  Still, there is a pair of flutes in the accompaniment, and clearly the flute accompaniment lends a magic to the piece that has caught the imagination of the public.  It is a well-known wedding piece, though on the face of it, there is nothing to do with conjugal bliss in it at all, at least in the lyrics or the associations.  It’s just that it is a slow, lyrical piece that suits the needs of wedding planners, and so, there it is.

The famous British composer, Sir William Walton, borrowed this piece for a Ballet Suite he wrote, with music taken entirely from Bach’s compositions---organ pieces, sonatas and cantata movements, and, unfortunately for me, I love Walton’s version of the piece just a little more than Bach’s relatively straightforward, simple scoring and harmonization of the aria.  Bach’s song, lightly accompanied by two flutes, keyboards and bass, is expanded into a full orchestral fantasia by Walton, even if, in the end, the effect of lightness is retained.  But there is no doubt at all that the ballet movement is far, far more sensuous than the Bach aria, and this is why I feel guilty for liking it so much.

It always struck me that the tune involved, the aria itself, should be harmonized for four-part choir.  I can just imagine it being sung by a boys’ choir, matching the soft sounds of the two flutes, with maybe lower strings providing the supporting accompaniment.

This is what I first set out to do.  Since the fake voices in my software package sound kind of hokey (“Choir Oos”), I used French horns for the four vocal parts, two recorders (a sort of flute) for the flutes, a violin, a viola, a cello and a bass for the string accompaniment (in lieu of keyboard and bass).  When it was finished, the four horns sounded rather harsh; replacing the lower horns by bassoons did not improve things.

Luckily, the software allows voice substitution for playback.  So I turned the whole thing completely around, and had strings play the four voice parts, and had clarinets and bassoons fill out the harmony under the two flutes.  This is not entirely satisfactory; the strings sound fine in the voice parts, but the flutes and clarinets accompaniment sounds just like an organ.  I made it worse by using all flutes, which sounded more like a small organ than ever.  But I got tired of tinkering with it, and so that’s how it is: four solo strings playing the four voice parts, two flute as per Bach, and three generic winds playing the keyboard part, with a double bass.

The harmony is close to Bach in most places, but I did the whole thing without consulting the original Bach score, which I haven’t been able to obtain from a reliable source yet.  It is fun to try and harmonize Bach pieces by oneself; so that’s what I did.


[I must apologize; a certain business that offers composers and publishers the service of finding their work illegally put on YouTube seems to have decided that my version of this piece was stolen from something they administer, a video or a CD.  The clip, of course, has very little to do with any commercial recording, but the business concerned persists in claiming ownership or administership.  I therefore removed the video from YouTube, and am uploading it directly, rather than allow this company to merchandize it, which is a right they have negotiated with YouTube.  So the quality of this videoclip will be a little low.

Update: The video upload I tried directly here was not successful.  Meanwhile, I deleted the YouTube video, and uploaded it once again.  The claim by the rights manager was promptly reinstated, and I equally promptly challenged it.  We shall presently find out whether these people will abandon their misguided attempts to control the performance of this aria by J. S. Bach.

The situation is made more complex by the fact that the tune was borrowed by a Twentieth-century composer for a Ballet Suite, which consisted entirely of Bach music, adapted for modern orchestra.  I suspect that the copyright administering agency is trying to protect the rights of various performances of this Ballet music on CD.  While my transcription might sound modern and similarly luscious to the uneducated ear, a musical professional will realize that my present arrangement or transcription has as many rights under the law as does that previous one, and that similarities between the two transcriptions are inevitable, considering that they have a common derivation.]

The accompanying video is provided by Stephen Malinowski’s Music Animation Machine, which was profiled in several earlier posts.  I have only recently found a way of capturing the screen output from this program, if not for which I’m reduced to putting some slides as the video portion of the clip.

Afterword:
After having uploaded the video to YouTube, so that I could link it here, I made myself a full 720p HD video of it, as well as Jesu, Joy, which I presented in my previous post, and Xavier Cugat's Brazil, which I may or may not have linked earlier, and put it on DVD.  I have just finished watching it on our home video system.  I can't make BluRay videos (I wish I could), but the quality was a good as it could be short of the BluRay quality.  I was very pleased.

On an interesting aside, YouTube's ambulance chasers have accused me of not owning the rights to Sheep may safely graze; evidently an agency called the Harry Fox Agency administers the rights to this piece as well.  Every video clip I have uploaded featuring works by Bach are challenged by this agency, and subsequently abandoned.  So, I am forbidden from putting the so-called Creative Commons License on the video, which would allow anyone to copy it and use it ad libitum.  Instead I was forced to use the Standard YouTube License, which says something like: I'm not claiming any rights to this piece, and if you copy it and use it, do it at your own risk.  As far as I know, there is no risk whatever in using this video, except that of being terminally pestered by Harry Fox's boys, who will eventually have to admit defeat.  It is more than my time is worth to find out what it is exactly that Harry Fox and company think they're administering; it is probably some TV performance of a Bach piece.

I apologize for all the repetitive griping about YouTube; it was inserted at different times, and is too much trouble to remove!

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