RobsHouse.net [Arichive] blogs

J.S. Bach, Well-Tempered Clavier complete video for people who truly love music

Robert Douglass — Wed, 02 Dec 2015 13:30:23 +0000

I have recently had the privilege and honor of being the producer of the best recording of J.S. Bach's "Well-Tempered Clavier" (Volume 1) ever made on the piano. My opinion - you're welcome to show me evidence to the contrary =)

Now there's a video on YouTube that combines the entire recording with the musical notation in a way that is bound to thrill music lovers and anybody studying these works. Two sources for scores were used. For the Preludes, the Open Well-Tempered Clavier score from Musescore was used. For the Fugues, the public domain engraving by Kyle Rother using Lillypond software was chosen. As a consequence, you can easily compare the default engraving styles of Musescore and Lillypond, side by side.

Enjoy the video - you deserve some Bach today!

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Music

Piano

Wildly popular on YouTube: Kimiko Ishizaka's "Goldberg Variations" and MuseScore

Robert Douglass — Mon, 25 May 2015 15:31:59 +0000

Two things to learn about the success of Kimiko Ishizaka's YouTube video "Goldberg Variations Complete (J.S. Bach BWV 988), with score, Kimiko Ishizaka piano":

People love using YouTube to listen to music. This can be seen in the video's analytics: while it accounts for 44% of the roughly 20,000 monthly views the channel gets, that number goes to 84% of the minutes watched. People watch 125,000 minutes of the video each month - that's 86 days and 21 hours of viewing, every month!
Both the length and the video score are attractive features. Surfing YouTube is hard work. Why not sit and watch something entertaining and educational for an hour or more? Plus, the appeal is broad. People who know the Goldbergs can simply listen, maybe with the video on in the background. People studying piano, or trying to get a visual sense for how the music is put together can see then notes going by, clearly marked in realtime on the MuseScore.

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Music

Kimiko Ishizaka

Operatic - the land of musical smiles, a review of "The Cast: Live from Paris"

Robert Douglass — Fri, 22 May 2015 11:38:39 +0000

Tomorrow I'll be attending a cinema premiere, which is a first for me. It is a film called Operatic, and is a documentary that follows six singers and their opera "band", The Cast, on their 2014 Parisian tour. The soundtrack for the film, which is in fact a recording of a live concert, is being released on Bandcamp.

The format is simple: six singers (three men, three women), with voices spanning from the cellar to the stratosphere, entertain with selections from popular arias and choruses that likewise run the musical gamut, from Wagner to Lehár. What's compelling about "Live from Paris" is the energy, enthusiasm for the music, and the raw determination of the performers that you will have fun. In fact, this may be the most striking feature of the recording: the conviction that opera - the interactive experience of singing and being sung to - is as natural an activity for a group of friends as sharing food or drink.

Campbell Vertesi, the basso profundo (and strongest French speaker) of the group, writes that "studio recordings leave out half the point of music: the audience", and that the exciting moments of the music "wouldn't be the same without the audience roaring to its feet afterwards". This is apparent on "The Cast: Live from Paris". Acoustically, you can not only reach out and touch the singers, but you're also right there in the middle of the audience. It's a small venue - you hear the comments and reactions of the listeners almost as clearly as you hear the singers themselves.

You know right away that this is not a traditional opera recording. The first track is the announcement, in French, that taking photos and videos with your mobile phone is allowed: "of course", and that sharing the experience on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram is encouraged. Oh, and enjoy yourself: "it's OK, you can smile, you're allowed to have fun," and "please sing along".

And then the singing starts, with Brindisi from La Traviata, the chorus of six, with Dimitrij Morozov on piano, playing the part of the orchestra. You hear right away that the venue is not a concert hall. It sounds more like a cabaret (in fact, it's a recording studio). There's not a lot of "hall" in the sound, but the spacial imaging is good. You hear the singers moving across the stage, and can position them individually from left to right. The small space and close mics also serve to remind exactly how powerful opera singing is: it's nearly impossible to make a truly satisfying recording of even one singer operating at max volume; this band has six.

The show then proceeds to introduce each of the singers. Bryn, playing the "party girl" sings a "love song" - Sempre Libera - with its high and clear vocal acrobatics stunningly delivered. Madness! Euphoria!

Till - the only German in the otherwise Anglo-Saxon group - introduces himself in English, explaining that he "never really liked Wagner" until he heard "O du, mein holder Abendstern" from Tannhäuser. He explains that it is the sense of loss that it expresses which makes it so dear to him. He then delivers the first (and possibly the biggest) real musical highlight of the evening. The interplay between the singer and the piano tremolo creates a magical sense of space - "Ein sanftes Licht" - which for me required an immediate second hearing (one of the advantages of recordings). The text is also true poetry, more closely related to the Lieder tradition than any of the other arias on the program.

grüsse sie, wenn sie vorbei dir zieht,
wenn sie entschwebt dem Tal der Erden

Somewhat continuing on the contemplation of death, the three ladies join forces in a trio rendition of "O mio babbino caro" from Pucinni's Gianni Schicchi. This is lovely music, and one is almost powerless but to enjoy it, and the ladies deliver a solid reading. Yet, having just floated out of the valley of the Earth in the sombre shroud of Death, I found myself wanting to prolong the mood of introspection. I don't quite believe Lauretta when she says she'd like to die. She doesn't mean it the same way Wolfram does:

Mi struggo e mi tormento!
O Dio, vorrei morir!
I am anguished and tormented!
Oh God, I'd like to die!

But nevermind Death! He's no fun. Onward with the famous Quartet from Rigoletto. The Cast succeeds wonderfully with this number, aided by the aforementioned spacial separation of the voices in the recorded sound. The different personalities and overlapping textures come through marvelously.

Then comes Brigitte, with the Seguidilla from Bizet's Carmen, with her powerful lower tessitura, and surprising strength at the top of the range. The compelling rhythmic clarity of the Bizet and Verdi before it keep things moving nicely.

Next up is Allison, whose voice immediately overpowers the microphones with the vocal warmups in La Fille du Régiment by Gaetano Donizetti. She breezes up to some effortless high Cs - and is rewarded with much cheering from the audience.

The Cast rounds out the solo pieces with Kevin and Campbell singing "Das Land des Lächelns" (Franz Lehár), and "Si la rigueur" from the little known La Juive by Jacques François Fromental Halévy. Kevin then delivers a highly entertaining "Largo al factotum" from Rossini's Barber of Seville:

Figaro! Figaro! Figaro!, etc.
Dear me, what frenzy!

The Cast: Live from Paris | "Operatic" official soundtrack by The Cast

With the solos behind them, the program hits a sort of a coda with a series of tutti pieces, starting with the trio "Una voce poco fa", also from Barber of Seville, a girls-only tag-team virtuoso romp where everybody gets a chance to flex their pipes, and Bryn earns bravos mid-aria with a sustained note that leaves you wondering where the air supply comes from.

The performance culminates with a pair of feel-good tunes from the world of operetta, Lehár's Lippen Schweigen (sung in English), and then Brüderlein und Schwesterlein (sung in German) from Johann Strauss' Die Fledermaus, where the audience is instructed to give kisses. Brindisi, reprised, is offered as an encore.

The Cast: Live from Paris | "Operatic" official soundtrack by The Cast

The audience was clearly well entertained, the evening an apparent success. But how does the format work as an album?

In opera, one of the primary tensions (and strengths) of the medium comes from the uncomfortable balance between storytelling and music. The more "music" there is, the less the audience can follow what's happening in the plot, thus the need for recitative and aria. By choosing only arias from different operas, sung in a variety of different languages, The Cast is clearly not staging an opera, or even singing real "opera": it is, as the name of the film suggests, operatic.

op·er·at·ic: adj. Of, related to, or typical of the opera: an operatic aria.

The real joy is in the singers, and the singing itself, not the story, not the characters. And that's what this album is really about: the beauty of singing, unencumbered by tragic plot lines, overblown scenery, complex staging, or a large (loud) orchestra. "Have you ever sat close enough to reach out and touch the singers?" asks the Operatic website. Listening to "The Cast: Live from Paris", you really have the feeling that you're in the front row, and yes, you can reach out and touch them.

In closing, I'd like to quote Campbell from his discussion on the place of live recordings in today's classical music scene:

"If you want to record the atmosphere of a show, if you want to keep the excitement of the audience and the intimate feeling of a performance, you have to make a live recording. That doesn't happen very often anymore in the classical industry. So we're bucking the trend, and daring to release a live album - warts and all. You can hear us get excited and improvise, you can hear us make mistakes. But most important, you can hear the audience loving every minute."

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Music

The Open Well-Tempered Clavier is here

Robert Douglass — Thu, 26 Mar 2015 01:19:47 +0000

For several years, the recording I wanted to hear the most was Kimiko Ishizaka's Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1. Now, after several world tours, a successful Kickstarter campaign, and an enormous amount of hard work and perseverance, it is here. You can download and enjoy this public domain creation, and share it with the people you love. I hope that you will find joy in the music, as I have.

Bach: Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1 by Kimiko Ishizaka

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Music

Kimiko Ishizaka

Well-Tempered Clavier

Robert Douglass, Horn Player: The Archive

Robert Douglass — Fri, 06 Mar 2015 00:47:49 +0000

This is an archive of all of the important extant performances from my time as a horn player prior to moving to Germany. I am very happy to have them. They remind me both how beautiful and amazing the music is, and also how damned hard the art is. Thank you to all the musicians on these recordings who played with me. I loved this part of my life dearly, and as such I love you.

Orchestration, Code, Deployment, Infrastructure

Robert Douglass — Wed, 14 Jan 2015 10:43:48 +0000

Managing code is a solved problem. Git plus Github are everything we need and more. Docker and LXC containers, plus Ansible, Puppet, Chef, on IaaS like AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure provide previously unimaginable possibles for deploying services onto consistent infrastructure. Yet no web application is really whole without data, and, in fact the code, data, and infrastructure all need to fit together in exactly the right way, or you don't have an application, you have an unholy mess.

Platform.sh solves the problem of starting every branch of your development on a fully orchestrated environment that has a consist copy of the code, data, and infrastructure of the live application. In other words, you develop directly on a clone of the app. Think about this problem: the metadata for uploaded files is stored in your database; if you synchronize your database from a live application to a development environment, but not your files, you have an inconsistent application. Same with a Solr or Elasticsearch index.

Without the four components of orchestration, code, infrastructure, and data, web application development is non-deterministic, and therefore risky. The big challenge is setting up and infrastructure that extends these guarantees to each developer on your team, for each branch of development that they're working on. That's the promise of Platform.sh.

Platform.sh is optimized for Drupal and Symfony

When is the Open Well-Tempered Clavier going to be released?

Robert Douglass — Sat, 20 Dec 2014 22:23:13 +0000

Kimiko Ishizaka's recording of J.S. Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1, will be released in March 2015. Do you want to be amongst the first people to download it? You have two options. Either you can refresh the Well-Tempered Clavier website every five minutes and find out that way, or you can sign up for Kimiko's mailing list, and get a notification directly. Your choice.

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Music

Kimiko Ishizaka's "Goldberg Variations" are now on Bandcamp

Robert Douglass — Thu, 18 Dec 2014 21:17:26 +0000

Bandcamp is a service that allows musicians to release albums for distribution. It's ideal for the Open Goldberg Variations (and for the upcoming Open Well-Tempered Clavier) recording because it supports the "pay what you want" model. This allows us to offer the files for gratis download, but fans can still decide to pay an amount of their choice to promote Kimiko's efforts to make more recordings and go on more tours. Some of Kimiko's fans are very generous! The other advantages of Bandcamp are the natural audience that they bring (people search the site to discover new music), the high quality of the transcoding and metadata, analytics, and a very nicely designed landing page for albums and artists. Color me impressed.

J.S. Bach: "Open" Goldberg Variations, BWV 988 (Piano) by Kimiko Ishizaka

Download the libre "Open Goldberg Variations" for gratis, or a price of your choosing.

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Music

Danjulo Ishizaka's Janáček, Kodály, and Grieg solo recording is amazing

Robert Douglass — Sat, 11 Oct 2014 12:32:29 +0000

I dearly love this recording, and I'm not the only one. Grammophone, The Strad, and now The Arts Desk have showered praise on this recording. In fact, everybody who hears it is taken with it.

Danjulo set about creating a recital program for solo cello and piano that tells stories about culture, using folk melodies as the central binding idea. In the program notes he talks about the formative aspect of growing up bi-culturally (German-Japanese), how this has left him with a passion for experiencing nationality, culture, and language, and how this is linked to his desire to take the listener on a cultural journey with these pieces.

The recording is very accessible, winning the heart of the listener on the first hearing, but the more you work your way into the intricacies of the pieces, the more you wonder at the depth of emotion and utterly brilliant execution by both cellist and pianist (Shai Wosner). In other words, it holds up well to being on endless repeat. But don't just take my word for it.

Gramophone says:
"The only area in which there seems to be no contrast or conflict is over his prodigious technique, and to hear him live is to appreciate not only how free of any technical boundaries he is but also how that has translated into his performances as a disarming lack of egotism."

The Strad says:
"Ishizaka is simply sensational in Kodály’s Solo Sonata. He proves masterly in creating cogency with what can often seem quite rhapsodic material."

The Arts Desk says:
"Ishizaka also gives us a cogent, virtuoso reading of Kodály's magnificent, soulful Solo Cello Sonata. This is a terrifying piece to play, a work which, in Ishizaka's words, “demolishes the limits of what was thought technically possible on the cello at the time.” The last movement's pyrotechnics are dazzling, but the sonata's sparer, haunted passages are equally effective – the slow movement's dark opening is marvellous in Ishizaka's hands. A superb recital."

This CD is available on Amazon, iTunes, Spotify, and other music stores.

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Music

The DrupalCon Amsterdam Prenote : Drupal Memories (with full video!)

Robert Douglass — Sun, 05 Oct 2014 21:28:24 +0000

Rob, Jam, and guests tell the history of DrupalCon, from Antwerp to Amsterdam, from the point of view of those whose lives were changed by them. This video includes "Oh, and one time, at Drupal Camp", "The Drupal 8 Bug Elimination Challenge", a guest appearance by Captain Drupal, a performance of "The Drupal Song", a re-enactment of the genesis of Acquia, a "Never Marry Me" proposal, and a stunning performance of "Memories" by Bryn and Campbell Vertesi.

It also concludes with the inaugural instance of "Selfieception", the culmination of the underlying metaphor behind this show. Inspired by Daniel Kahneman's TED Talk about "the future as anticipated memories", Rob and Jam set about to create a show that ties our collective experience to "the experiencing self that lives in the present, the remembering self that maintains the story of your life", and to use "storytelling as a function of what we remember from our experiences".

As we tell the stories of our DrupalCons, and how they defined us (remembering self), we engage in a dialog with the audience, who has to pay close attention to capture every moment (experiencing self), as indeed we'll have to do through the coming days of sessions, meetings, chance encounters, and business opportunities. But in a tip-of-the-hat to our remembering selves, we decide to take selfies to remember the moment by. However, to frame the shot in an optimal way, we must all turn our backs on each other, and thus the conflict between experiencing self and remembering self is embodied: the remembering self demands that the experiencing self sacrifices the performer-audience dialog, and turns the back to the present in anticipation of a future memory.

Thanks to the Drupal Association for supporting our ongoing tradition of the DrupalCon Prenote, thanks to the 1,500 people who got out of bed to be at our show at 8:00 in the morning, and thanks to everyone who stood up to tell their story.

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