Opening the archives

[furtwaengler]

I CAN NOW DO TAPE TRANSFERS!

I am happy.

So here is something from the middle of the night (wee hours of the morning), in either 2003 or 2004, extracted from a tape which is not in good condition (just listen to the pitch). I listened to much of the tape, which is a document of a time of suffering...talking and playing through a multiplicity of issues at a time when I needed to be sleeping. I was completely backwards. I guess it was kind of like therapy. Ha, much could be said, but I'll leave it.

Here is a piece...an improvisation from just one segment of my recorded past. It is surely different than anything else I've posted here. It's interesting, observing how things change.

Take care, my friends from Pianostreet.

Dave

[pianowolfi]

It sounds like a message from that ancient time that I'm trying to catch...

some Spanish influence...moorish perhaps...Flamenco...Tango.. yes much Tango

something like cylinder recordings...

like somebody recorded something like 700 years ago...and now it was discovered..

Then a bit of golden Twenties...Waltz, Salon...Grandezza, Nostalgia


fascinating!!!

from the middle of the night...aahhhh   I remember that I have played something in the middle of an agonizing painful painful night in 2008. Rage, fury, passion, defiance. Ultimate. I didn't record it. Argh

Passion, Pain...mystery...the ending....so touching....

Furtwängler....I know, special individuals are often really modest ...

I love it
Thank you

[furtwaengler]

"These notes stood ever in days of yore,
And will stand on forevermore!"
Five hundred years from yonder day
I listened the selfsame way"

Ha, that was a poor illusion. There's a lot that goes unrecorded, and that can be sad, but at the same time its good to let improvisation perform its function in the creative process without obsessing ( ) over capturing it.

Yes Wolfi, you are on to the tango. In this time I wrote a tango for violin, cello, and piano which was performed a couple times. That night I was working on that trio, though this was not the material I was working with, and the material I was working with I did not use. It was a situation where the night before presenting the score for the first rehearsal I completely destroyed everything and wrote a new piece from scratch in five hours. There is a fragment of the first material from finale playback on this same tape, and it cracks me up.

Thanks for your message.  

[pianowolfi]

Hey cool, a variation of the centuries ballade
Yeah I know we can't capture all, but I really miss this particular one
Yeah I know this feeling of being cracked up by something we lost....

[furtwaengler]

Yeah I know we can't capture all, but I really miss this particular one

Yeah, I wish I could hear it myself...and such a thing can hardly be repeated. Is it often the case that the recorder changes the focus, or that some of the best things have only been heard by two ears? I can sympathize with this. I remember a particular occasion when I worked a long day...an hour drive followed by hours of playing juries, followed by a rehearsal of Mendelssohn's C minor trio, followed by more hours of trying to close a project arranging tunes for a "Musical Theater Ensemble." I was so exhausted from sitting over that computer that I could barely walk, and I stumbled into the empty auditorium, fell on the piano, and proceeded for the next 40 minutes or so to create a large metaphysical soundscape I'll never be able to revisit or recreate, and not another soul was in the building, nor did an recording capture it. I think about it, and it is a great loss, but still it served in its time a dual purpose of expression and energy lift (to make that hour drive home). But, to hear it...

Thus I do encourage recording if possible, even if the equipment is horrible, which mine always has been, as has my knowledge of the recording process...just having a shadow of some of these things, just a glimpse, if but only for myself, if indeed nothing ever comes of it...I'd rather have that bit than nothing.

(Now, I'm going to need some discipline and restraint wading through the tapes! (Not all of them are music.))

(Oh, please, you post some music, Wolfi!)

[pianowolfi]

Yeah, I wish I could hear it myself...and such a thing can hardly be repeated. Is it often the case that the recorder changes the focus, or that some of the best things have only been heard by two ears? I can sympathize with this. I remember a particular occasion when I worked a long day...an hour drive followed by hours of playing juries, followed by a rehearsal of Mendelssohn's C minor trio, followed by more hours of trying to close a project arranging tunes for a "Musical Theater Ensemble." I was so exhausted from sitting over that computer that I could barely walk, and I stumbled into the empty auditorium, fell on the piano, and proceeded for the next 40 minutes or so to create a large metaphysical soundscape I'll never be able to revisit or recreate, and not another soul was in the building, nor did an recording capture it. I think about it, and it is a great loss, but still it served in its time a dual purpose of expression and energy lift (to make that hour drive home). But, to hear it...

Thus I do encourage recording if possible, even if the equipment is horrible, which mine always has been, as has my knowledge of the recording process...just having a shadow of some of these things, just a glimpse, if but only for myself, if indeed nothing ever comes of it...I'd rather have that bit than nothing.

(Now, I'm going to need some discipline and restraint wading through the tapes! (Not all of them are music.))

(Oh, please, you post some music, Wolfi!)

You are really nice. Very very nice  

I know I will post again but I don't know when. It happens often spontaneously