April 3rd, 2010
And here, finally, is the fugue to accompany the prelude I recorded a while ago!
And about this, I just have to say that Bach is hard. So many little notes… even a short piece like this is exhausting to play! There’s really no chance to catch your breath once you get started! It’s really getting to be fun to play this though.
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February 27th, 2010
It’s been a while since the last recording – I spent a week in Winnipeg, another week in Fredericton, accompanied a pile of auditions at McGill, and have been learning Scarlatti, and Rameau both of which take me forever.
But now I’m back with a bit of Bach! I always have a bit of a love-hate relationship with Bach. The music’s fantastic, of course, but it tends to be so dense with counterpoint that it never sits still – most pieces are essentially saturated with moving 16th notes! This in contrast to the D’Anglebert I recorded earlier, where, even though there are a lot of notes, and plenty going on, you still get cadences where you can catch your breath. Not so much in Bach! My goal with this music is always to let it flow as smoothly as if it were a ‘normal’
piece despite all that clutter. (Bach fans, don’t hate me!)
Here’s the C major prelude from the Well-Tempered Clavier, book II. I’ll try to get the fugue recorded in another week or two, though I’m spending some time in Quebec city, so can’t guarantee anything.
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January 23rd, 2010
So, my clavichord started getting lonely with all the attention given to the harpsichord lately, and so I decided I should spend some time with it! Clavichord technique does not take kindly to neglect, I have found. It took quite a while before I could do more than butcher anything I tried to play.
I finally did get something recorded though: Attaingnant’s setting of Sermisy’s Tant Que Vivray. It’s curious writing for the keyboard – there isn’t a lot of French repertoire before the clavecinistes come in a hundred years later, and what 16th century music is out there is rarely played these days. But I think it has a certain charm, especially on the clavichord.
After uploading this, I realized that my computer speakers completely massacre this recording, even more than usual. I can barely even discern the melody at the beginning! Give it a chance with headphones or half-decent speakers, if you can.
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Don’t worry – no more recordings today. I have other work to do!
January 23rd, 2010
As a followup to last week’s allemande, I’ve recorded the prelude from the same suite. I adore unmeasured preludes! If ever there was something that was purely harpsichord music, it would be these. They make the instrument ring in a way that nothing else can! And I love having the freedom to do almost whatever I want with it.
Unfortunately, this makes it almost impossible to play it the same way twice – I considered editing a few sections together for this recording (some parts are not easy!), but decided that would really be a last resort. Finding two takes that fit together technically and musically would be a bigger challenge than just playing the whole thing through!
Speaking of the recording, I have an almost identical setup as I did last week: two Oktava MK-012s, angled at about 90°, four feet or so off the floor, maybe 8 feet away from the harpsichord. Is this the best arrangement? Probably not – suggestions are welcome! I plug it all into a Tascam US-122 which connects to my laptop, and then record and edit everything using Ardour running on Ubuntu linux. Yay for free software!
The only thing I changed for this recording is to tweak the equalizer settings a little bit – the harpsichord’s mighty bass doesn’t really come through on the recording, so I nudged it up just a little.
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January 14th, 2010
Merry post-Christmas! This is an attempt at a new way of posting pictures. I think it’s working well, but let me know if you find broken links or anything else out of sorts. If it works well, I’ll convert all the old albums to this system.
(more…)
January 13th, 2010
Time to start posting some real content! I’ve been wanting for a while to start really using this web page, and also to try recording and performing more music. So the logical thing to do is to start regularly posting sound files! I don’t pretend that these are professional recordings by any stretch – they certainly won’t be professionally recorded! And my living room is far from an ideal acoustic. Any suggestions about microphone placement are welcome. (and yes, the clock is loud – you can hear it clicking away in the background)
I’m also thinking of all these recordings as ‘Works in Progress’. Just because I’ve recorded it doesn’t mean I feel it’s perfect, or even that it’s necessarily ready to perform. Sometimes I might post something just to spark discussion or to illustrate a point, or just because I think it’s neat!
So feel free to comment and to criticize,
To start with, here’s the Allemande from D’Anglebert’s suite in D-. It’s not note-perfect, and I’d really like to do a little more to vary the repeats, but the recording process has been really helpful in learning the piece.
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Download the mp3 here, in case the flash player doesn’t work, or you just don’t like it!
December 21st, 2009
Time to get this web page back on its feet. I’ve upgraded wordpress again, and I’m ready to actually start posting things to it in the new year. Wish me luck!
March 4th, 2009
I upgraded wordpress again. Looks like it’s all working, but you never know with these things! Let me know if something’s broken.
I used a slightly different method for upgrading this time – I’m keeping a git repository, with one branch for the official versions, and another branch for my local changes (theme, plugins, and configuration). An upgrade just means switching to the official branch, wiping the old files, installing the new ones, committing the changes. Then I switch to the local branch, rebase on top of the new wordpress, and all my stuff appears magically on top of the old!
It’s rather overkill, since I don’t really have much of anything modified here beyond my custom theme and a single plugin, but it’s nice and quick! Also, keeping things in git means that there is an automatic backup, so if I break everything, as long as the .git directory stays intact, I can easily revert to the old one. I do with the database could be kept under the same control, but that gets a lot more complicated…
December 4th, 2008
So, parliament has been prorogued, and the proposed coalition government will have to wait another two months before having another try. What do I think of this?
First of all, I’m disappointed – I thought the coalition would be a fine way to salvage a functional government out of a deeply divided parliament. We have a horribly broken electoral system that results in a parliament that does not reflect voters’ preferences. We have a Conservative government now that received about a third of the votes – and it must be said that half of the eligible voters didn’t bother going to the polls at all, through apathy, or else because they knew their votes wouldn’t count for much of anything.
Proroguing parliament in this case is clearly just running from the vote that would bring down the government, giving the coalition a chance to try to govern in its place. That vote was already postponed (it was originally supposed to be Monday, the 3rd, I believe). I think it was Bob Rae who I heard saying that it was “Like a kid pulling a fire alarm so he doesn’t have to write a test.” This parliament hasn’t really had a chance to do anything at all yet – no bills had been voted on at all. It’s rather similar to the way Harper called the election for October 14th, actually – he dissolved parliament the day before three by-elections. This meant that the government managed to avoid the bad press that losing those elections would have given them (all three ridings favoured other parties strongly). It also meant that the other parties, at least in those ridings, would have to be campaigning for 3 months straight – certainly in my riding of Westmount-Ville-Marie, several parties were very low on money at the beginning of the real campaign, having budgeted for the length of the by-election campaign.
So the government has been granted a reprieve – but what for, really? I think it’s obvious that the very first act of the new session of parliament in January will be to vote against the government. There’s just no way that Harper can restore confidence in himself or in his party (practically the same thing, the way he runs things). So why delay the inevitable? What can be accomplished in two months without a sitting parliament? Rather little, I think. The only thing I can think of is that, in January, the Governor-General would be more likely to just call a new election rather than let the coalition have a try.
That said, I don’t really lay the fault with the Governor General. While I wish she had decided otherwise, it’s a difficult decision to make. Normally, the Prime Minister decides that prorogation is desired, advises the GG of this, who then makes it official. The only way she could really refuse this request would be to say that Harper is no longer the prime minister, since he does not enjoy the confidence of the house. That’s a tough call to make though – on the one hand, all non-conservative MP’s (with the exception of the two independents) had written to her to say they did not support the government, clearly indicating a failure of confidence. On the other hand, it had not yet been formally recognized by a non-confidence vote in the house – this would have happened on the 8th, had the prorogation request not been granted. Technically, he is still the Prime Minister, and while not constitutionally obligated to grant his request, there’s a lot tradition behind the practice.
I’d say, though, that this is one of those very rare occasions where the GG should have been more than a rubber stamp. The office has become more and more of a symbolic one, just doing whatever the PM requests, and this is more in that direction. If she just follows tradition and precedent on all decisions, what’s the point of the position at all? Do we really need a purely symbolic head of state? I’d say that her role is really precisely to step in and work outside the well-established rules of the house, and do what’s right for the country, and for the system as a whole. Letting the government run from a confidence vote, preventing parliament from doing its job is not what I want to see.
So we’re left with an ineffective government for another two months, one that’s bound to collapse within days of parliament resuming in January. Stephane Dion will have even less time to serve as Prime Minister, since he has committed to stepping down as soon as a replacement is chosen. I can’t see this decision as being good for Canada in any way. It looks to me like Harper’s just hoping that something happens in the next little while that somehow makes him look good, so that they election that’s bound to happen soon won’t hit his party too hard.
edit: One unlikely, but interesting possibility is that the opposition coalition could call an emergency session of parliament to vote down the conservatives… I really don’t know the specific legalities involved, but it’s something I’d love to see happen!
November 1st, 2008
It is 7:30AM. I’m awake because my neighbour has left for the weekend again (if not longer) and neglected to turn off her alarm clock which sits right across the wall from my bed. It has been beeping for the past 45 minutes now. ARGH. I might be sleeping on the couch for the next few days.
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