rssAct as if what you do makes a difference. It does. - William James
2006, March 13
You Go, Vermont
Reminds me of something the town council of Berkeley CA would do.
Here is a link to a most interesting entry in SCOTUSblog,
From a village green...
2006, February 26
James Pressler, Organist
James Pressler has created mp3 files of the complete Bach organ work and many files from many other composers.
Thanks to an email from Ralph Hancock, I found this site of mp3 files created by a retired(?) organist. One of my favorite pieces is BWV 733. James says this piece is "for full organ and pedal, which takes a long time to come in, but is worth the wait"
The files are created on the computer with the virtual organ software Hauptwerk Virtual Pipe Organ. This software uses sounds sampled from organs from all over the world to create the effect of a real pipe organ in your own home.
This is a very expensive specialized piece of software, requiring that a person be very knowledgeable and experienced with organs and computers. James Pressler certainly fills that bill. His interesting and helpful comments about each file also help me to understand the music, the composers and the baroque era.
If you subscribe, Mr. Pressler will send you a daily and-or weekly email with a fresh organ piece for listening. I have subscribed, and thank him very much for his work.
The links:
Canonic Variations BWV 769 on Virtual Organ
2006, February 11
Robins and Ravens
Spring? The Celtic calendar says yes, it starts midway between the Winter Solstice and the Vernal Equinox, about February 5th.
Kate at CiderPress Hill heard a robin on Thursday, February 9th and thought about Spring.
Yesterday I saw a robin on the wire outside the window, and two days ago saw a pair of ravens in a short version of their mating flight. The mating flights of ravens are truly wonderful, they dive and separate, come together, zoom upwards, fly in tandem then separate again, rise up and dive, over and over as if they heard music in the wind, not audible to us.
For Celts and the birds, yes, Spring is here.
2006, January 29
BWV 1102 - A Neumeister Chorale - Tiger and QuickTime
Prince of Peace, Lord Jesus Christ (Du Friedefurst, Herr Jesu Christ)
I got a request from a reader, Ralph Hancock, for the Neumeister chorale, BWV 1102 last week and have been playing around with it since. I have made some discoveries and learned some new things.
The first thing I learned was that QuickTime 7 has lost the ability to choose an instrument for each track. This is very annoying since this is 99% of the reason I buy (and keep on buying) this program. However, QuickTime 6.5, which allows selection of instruments, will not install on the 10.4 (Tiger) Mac OS. So what to do?
Well, I partitioned my hard drive before upgrading to Tiger, because I really didn't think it would work and I wanted to be able to put Panther (10.3) on the other partition just in case. This turned out to be a very smart move. I found from a blog entry that if QT 6.5 is installed on Panther on one partion, it will run under Tiger in the other partition. So I tried it.
I installed Panther with QT 6.5 on the empty partion. I put an alias of QT 6.5 on the Tiger desktop (so I wouldn't mix it up with QT 7 in the dock).
Tiger was running fine on its partion, all the software I use was running fine, so now came the big test. Will QuickTime 6.5 run while I am booted up from Tiger?
Yes, yes, it works. I am very happy that it works, even though this was a major hassle to keep the functions that should have been left in the program in the first place.
QuickTime 6.5 does indeed run while booted up in Tiger if it is installed in Panther on another partition. In fact, both QTs will run at the same time under Tiger.
The second thing I learned is that Finale from Coda allows playback of changes of tempo, something I had not tried before. So I learned how, a very non-intuitive process hidden in the Text Expression tool. This was very satisfying. Probably this capacity has existed for a long time, but I have not explored enough to find it.
The file I made for Ralph has a very subtle change in tempo, so it is not immediately apparent that anything new has been learned, but trust me, it was.
Here is the version of BWV 1102, Du Friedefurst, Herr Jesu Christ.
