Art Facts

Video: Schumann/Liszt--Widmung (Dedication)

2012-01-02T08:12:00.004-06:00

Here is the second video from my first session at the new house. It's Franz Liszt's solo piano arrangement of Robert Schumann's Widmung (Dedication), which was originally written for piano and voice. I think it's pretty safe to say that this is the most beautiful piece of music ever. I'd been putting off recording this one for fear of not doing it justice. But at some point you just have to hold your nose, pull the trigger and jump. (?).

A couple of technical comments... these two videos (Widmung and Alt Wien) are the first I've filmed with two cameras simultaneously. I bought Johanne a new camera for Christmas (a Panasonic Lumix FZ150). It does HD video too, so I nabbed it for a morning to do these two pieces. It makes the post-editing go a lot faster to have two angles to choose from for any given take. The problem is that even though both cameras were shooting full 1080p video, the quality of the Panasonic's video is much better than my Canon. The shots from the treble are all Panasonic, the shots from the bass are the Canon. The Panasonic shots are much crisper, and there's very little digital noise. The Canon shots are a little blurry by comparison and you can see plenty of digital noise in the near outer casing and inner (wooden) rim of the piano.

For the audio, I decided to close-mic the piano a little more than I did in Austin. There's more house noise and street noise here, and putting the microphones closer helps get cleaner sound. But it also means there's less of the desirable kind of room noise (natural reverberation). So there's a little more work to do in the audio mixing/mastering to get a sound that fits naturally with what you're seeing in the video. I could probably have added even more recreated room sound, but it's at the expense of clarity.

Anyway, here's the video. I hope you enjoy it!

Video: Godowsky--Alt Wien

2011-12-29T18:55:00.004-06:00

Back in July, 2010 I wrote of my last visit to Paulette's house to play her B. My mother's friend Louise suggested that I add some tranquility to my program. It was a good suggestion so I set about trying to find something I liked. The first piece I considered was Alt Wien (Old Vienna) by Leopold Godowsky (Triakontameron, No. 11). But I thought it might be a little too schmaltzy, a bias not lessened by its ridiculous subtitle: "Whose Yesterdays look backwards with a Smile through Tears." Then I discovered Godowsky's Pastorale and abandoned Alt Wien. But I wasn't able to get it out of my head, and decided to learn it. And now I love it: not so much schmaltzy as charming.

This is also the first video from our new house in New York. I wasn't sure how it would come out. I was pretty used to my setup in Austin. And the lower ceilings, hardwood floors and parallel walls make for a much livelier room. I still have lots of experimenting to do, but I'm pretty happy with both the audio and the video so far.

Ready, Set, Go!

2011-12-28T19:14:00.004-06:00

Hello from New York.

We made the big move back in August, and haven't had much time over the last four months for anything but work and setting up home. But I was able to take advantage of a few days off over the holidays to get my studio set up, get my piano tuned and shoot a couple of videos.

It will probably take some experimenting to get the video and audio how I'd like them in the new setting. But I think things are looking pretty ok. I hope to finish the production over the next couple of weeks.

Stay tuned!

ConcART IV (Farewell)

2011-07-26T17:23:00.002-05:00

The past few months have been one wild ride.

If you're reading this blog, it probably means you're my mother or my father (hi mom, hi dad). And that means you already know that Johanne and I are leaving Texas for the unfriendly cold of New York. We leave mid-August, less than three weeks from now.

But we decided to try to squeeze in one last ConcART before going. This would give us a chance to see all of our great Texas friends one last time, play some music for them, maybe sell them some art. I haven't had time to pull together a full, brand-new recital program, so I thought I'd play the three new pieces I have, along with one favorite from each of the first three ConcART recitals. In fact, I couldn't decide on just one from ConcART III, so I chose two.

So ConcART IV (the "Farewell ConcART") will be Sunday, August 7, 2011. And here's the recital program:

Prelude I -- Gershwin
Sonata No.8 (Pathétique), 2nd movement -- Beethoven
Pastorale/Renaissance No.8 -- Corelli/Godowsky
Danza de la Pastora -- Halffter
Alt Wien -- Godowsky
Widmung -- Schumann/Liszt
Toccatina Op.36 -- Kapustin

The Beethoven is from ConcART I, the Halffter from ConcART II and the Corelli/Godowsky and Schumann/Liszt are from ConcART III. The Gershwin and Godowsky are both fun, short pieces that I was able to pull together fairly quickly. Putting the Kapustin on the program is sheer insanity. I'll be lucky to come out of it with no broken bones.

Wish us luck!

Video: Falla--Danza ritual del fuego

2011-05-29T08:01:00.004-05:00

Manuel de Falla's Ritual Fire Dance from the ballet El amor brujo, arranged for solo piano by the composer. (I also added a few parts to the arrangement based on the original orchestral score).

Over the years I've learned quite a bit of Spanish (and Spanish-flavored) music by big composers (Albéniz, Granados, Ginastera) and lesser-known composers (Halffter, Soler, Nin-Culmell). This bias is no doubt inherited in part from my old teacher, Douglas Voice. But I never learned anything by Manuel de Falla, who was one of Douglas' favorites (I think). That's what inspired me to find and learn something by Falla for last year's ConcArt recital.

A couple of things to note in the video. First, I tried a new camera angle: "wide bass", and it doesn't quite work. It's shooting into the light, so the subject (me!) is too dark. I did what I could in editing, but it's still visually kind of ugly. I think I'll try again, though, with an accent light coming from the bass side of the piano. The problem is, I like to keep the exact same lighting for all camera angles so it looks like they were shot simultaneously. Some experimentation will certainly be needed. The composition of the angle is poor, too. The manual focus on my camera is flexible for still shots, but not very convenient for video. It's much easier (and I get better results) using autofocus. But it means I need to keep the subject in the autofocus sweetspot.

The second thing to note is the return of video cats. Kashmir made his acting debut in my Mozart video and was quite a hit among YouTube commenters. Here he makes two appearances. Shiner also makes a very brief appearance. I tried to delay the scene change to give him more camera time, but I just couldn't get it to work.

Ritual Fire Dance is an exciting, dynamic piece. But as usual, I find it hard to capture that in the video/recording.

Video: Handel--Air and Variations (The Harmonious Blacksmith)

2011-05-08T19:32:00.003-05:00

Two years ago I wrote:

Claude Debussy's Arabesque I might be the "oldest" piece I play, in the sense that I've played it longer than the others.

But I think George Frideric Handel's Air and Variations (The Harmonious Blacksmith) is even "older". I probably learned it a year earlier than the Debussy, which makes it thirty years since I first learned it.

The piece, written around 1720, is in what's called the English Division style: the theme is stated in (mainly) quarter notes, or one note per beat. Then there's a variation where the right hand plays two notes per beat, a variation with the left hand playing two notes per beat, then a variation with three notes per beat in the right hand, then three notes per beat in the left hand. Finally, the fifth variation has four notes per beat in both hands. This gives the impression that the piece keeps speeding up: twice as fast, three times as fast and finally four times as fast.

Video: Nin-Culmell--Muiñeira (Galicia)

2011-05-01T09:53:00.004-05:00

Here's another piece I discovered on YouTube. I'm pretty sure it was served up as a "Suggestion" video to one of my own. Given the spotty information accompanying the video, it took a little hunting to find the music. The piece is Muiñeira (Galicia) by twentieth century German/Cuban/Spanish/American composer Joaquín Nin-Culmell. It's number 24 from Tonadas, a suite of 48 pieces in four volumes.

Nin-Culmell was born in Germany, the son of Cuban-Spanish parents and brother of famous author Anaïs Nin (whose full name was Angela Anaïs Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell). He was also a student of the great Spanish composer Manuel de Falla.

A muiñeira is a Spanish song typically played by a Galician gaita, which is a kind of Spanish bagpipe. The piece does sound bagpipey to me, especially the grace notes in the middle section. The lack of individual note attacks on bagpipes prevents you from playing the same note twice, so if you want to repeat a note you use a grace note to articulate it. This is exactly how Nin-Culmell uses grace notes in the middle section.

As far as I can tell, this piece was also what I call a "YouTube Bullseye"—a piece that has exactly one video on YouTube. Of course, now that I've recorded it, it's no longer a bullseye.

Video: Corelli/Godowsky--Pastorale (Angelus)

2011-04-24T09:08:00.005-05:00

I've written previously about Repertoire Season, the time of year shortly after a ConcArt recital when I start hunting down pieces for the next recital. During Repertoire Season after the ConcArt-II recital in November, 2009, I was considering trying to learn something by Leopold Godowsky, a twentieth-century Polish composer. I wasn't really confident I'd find anything, because my main criteria for pieces are that they are beautiful/entertaining, shortish, and playable. Godowsky has a bit of a reputation for writing very difficult piano music (and difficult piano arrangements of other composers' compositions). But then I stumbled across a video by pianist Magdalena Baczewska of Godowsky's arrangement of Arcangelo Corelli's Pastorale. I think it's one of the most beautiful pieces I've ever heard. It's fairly short, and it didn't sound too difficult at all. (It turned out to be quite a bit trickier than Baczewska's wonderful performance suggests).

Pastorale is the sixth (and final) movement of Corelli's Christmas Concerto, one of his twelve concerti grossi. A concerto grosso is a Baroque form of orchestral music. There are two groups of performers (the concertino and the ripieno) that engage in a kind of musical dialog. I think Godowsky's wide but relatively sparse piano arrangement really captures the sound of the concerto grosso.

For the video, I had the idea to emphasize the dialog by switching to the bass camera angle exclusively for the recurring "response" theme in the piece. I think the idea was better in conception than execution, though. For the first statement of the response, I didn't have a good bass angle take. And since the response theme is short, the frequent camera switches kind of interrupt the video flow.

The second problem with the video is due to the position of one of my light stands. It was too close to the camera for the wide angle shots. This lights up dust floating by the lens. More seriously, it gave me a lens flare that I didn't notice until I'd finished recording. (You can see it as a light circle where the right side of the piano meets the treble leg). I managed to reduce the effect by setting levels in editing, but it's still pretty obvious.

I'm nitpicking, though. I love this piece so much that I can't not love the video!

Is it Spring Already?

2011-03-30T20:57:00.003-05:00

Time to take inspiration from my wife and my cousin and come out of blog hibernation. It's been a wild few months, but I hope to get a week in April to record some new videos. Until then, let me sneak in a little celebration of a recent YouTube milestone. On March 29, I reached 20,000 views of my videos on YouTube. 10,000 in the last six months. Thanks to all the people who watched them, the 27 people who have subscribed, the 90 comments and the 119 thumbs up. Too bad about the one thumb down. :-(

Repertoire Redux

2011-01-23T15:27:00.003-06:00

It's that time of year again. The ConcArt is behind us, holidays are over, cold weather has settled in. It's Repertoire Season!

I've wondered in the past in this blog whether I would be able to keep up old repertoire while adding new stuff. Well, I'm finally losing some of my old pieces. And it just doesn't really seem worth it to me to be spending more time on them when my new pieces are so demanding. I always thought it would be a good idea to keep the old ones to pull out in case people ask: "Do you play any Rachmaninoff?", or "Play that Beethoven I like". But let's face it. People aren't exactly stopping me on the street and demanding I play the third dance from Ginastera's Op.2. And now that I have (HD) videos of most of the pieces I've played in the last couple of years, I feel better about letting them go.

So what's this new stuff that's taking so much time? I have two new pieces in the can: Leopold Godowsky's Alt Wien ("Old Vienna") and George Gershwin's Prelude I. These two are memorized and up to speed. Maybe not quite ready for public performance, but close. A third piece is in the works, and I'm pretty sure I'll be able to get it down. It's Toccatina Op.36 by Nikolai Kapustin. I have half of it memorized and close to speed. It's a pretty insane piece, so it's taking a lot of work.

Beyond those three, I've been reading a lot. I'm trying to decide between two baroque pieces (Bach vs. Scarlatti). I have a classical piece I might do (Field). There's an Albéniz I'm considering, but I'm still hunting for this year's "gotta play" Spanish piece. Still on the lookout for a big, over-the-top romantic piece, too.

ConcART III Review

2010-11-21T09:04:00.004-06:00

Another ConcART event is in the books. And I'm happy to report it continues to be a great success. The numbers were down a little this year: about 35 people made it to the recital with another dozen showing up during the art show. But it's still a thrill to pack that many people into your living room for a piano recital and party. We're thinking of expanding a little next year and coming up with some creative additions to the ConcART template.

The calm before the storm

As usual, I began the party with a welcome and introduction before launching into the recital. My little stories before each piece were once again very warmly received. And I think this year I was more prepared than ever before, so the performances went very well. I was most worried about the Brahms (Hungarian Dance No.2) being messy, but it came off very clean. I had no problems with the Handel (Harmonious Blacksmith), and several people commented later that they liked this one a lot. The Corelli/Godowsky (Pastorale) offered the only real flub of the day, but I recovered pretty seamlessly. Of course it was at a spot that usually gives me no trouble, but that's the way things go. The trickier spots that I was concerned about were fine, and the performance was good. So overall, I'm very happy with this one. The Nin-Culmell (Muiñeira) went great. I don't think I could have played it better, and I heard several joyful outbursts at the end. As expected, the Schumann/Liszt (Widmung) was a crowd favorite. This piece was very well prepared and I was really able to put myself into the performance. The final piece (Falla's Ritual Fire Dance) turned out to be the second crowd favorite, which surprised me a little. It's a great end-of-program piece. Johanne confirmed to me later that the performances were all comparable to my practice performances, and that the tempos were all dead on. (One of my biggest issues is playing too fast when I'm nervous, which then causes other performance problems).

The art show was also a big success. Johanne sold eleven paintings. And the sales seemed a little more intense to me than past years. Many people had strong favorites and went straight to the office to make sure they got their first choice. This year we also offered CDs and DVDs of the first two ConcART recital programs for sale. We sold 26 discs. I was a little surprised (but happy) that the CDs were more popular than the DVDs. The ConcART-II CD was the biggest seller (10) followed closely by the ConcART-I CD (9).

Bottom line: I declare ConcART-III the most successful ConcART yet. Even with fewer people, we sold almost as many paintings (in fact, more per-guest), and the desire to buy seemed much stronger to me. Add in the disc sales and it's undeniable that our guests were very generous to us this year. Most importantly for me, the more I think back on it, the recital really was the best so far.

On to ConcART-IV!

Get 'Em While They're Hot

2010-11-08T21:31:00.005-06:00

Some time last year, Johanne and I got the idea that I should record video and audio for all of the pieces from ConcART and ConcART-II, and offer DVDs and CDs for sale at this year's show. After nine days of recording, six piano tunings, hundreds of hours of audio and video editing, hundreds of dollars in discs, cases, paper and ink, days of babysitting the disc burner and printer, 800 cuts and 150 folds, I finally finished them all.

And here they are: $10 apiece, buyer's choice, until I run out!

ConcART III

2010-10-30T21:09:00.003-05:00

It's the most wonderful time of the year... ConcART time!

Our first art-show-slash-recital was in October, 2008. We followed that up with ConcART II in November, 2009. Both were more successful than we dared hope. Now we're just two weeks away from ConcART III, which will be held Sunday, November 14, 2010.

Johanne has been busy with pastels and oils (including some great explorations with the palette knife). I've been busy 'shedding for the recital part. There are some challenging bits, but I really, really like this program.

Hungarian Dance No.2 -- Johannes Brahms
Air and Variations (The Harmonious Blacksmith) -- George Frideric Handel
Pastorale/Renaissance No.8 -- Arcangelo Corelli/Leopold Godowsky
Tonadas No.24 - Muiñeira (Galicia) -- Joaquin Nin-Culmell
Myrthen Op.25 No.1/Widmung -- Robert Schumann/Franz Liszt
Danza Ritual del Fuego -- Manuel de Falla

Come to Austin, see the show!

Video: Rachmaninoff--Prelude Op.23 No.5

2010-10-18T20:57:00.004-05:00

After the first ConcART recital (in October, 2008), someone asked me if I had ever played any of the great Russian composers. I decided then and there that I'd answered "no" to that question for the last time. So I started hunting and in December, 2008 decided on this Prelude by Sergei Rachmaninoff. I figured "I've got ten months to learn it for the next ConcART... no problem".

Well, I may have underestimated the piece, or overestimated my skill, because I don't think ten months was quite enough, given my short, after-work practice schedule. I did play it at ConcART-II in November, 2009, and it went well enough. But I promised myself I'd work it a little harder for the video. So I gave it a half-year's rest and started over.

Overall, I'm happy I learned the piece, because it fills what was an obvious gap in my repertoire. It's a beautiful piece and it's fun to play, even if it serves up the occasional trainwreck. And I learned something else from this piece, too. Rachmaninoff had really big hands.

Rachmaninoff: Prelude Op.23 No.5 from Ken Barker on Vimeo.

Video: Albéniz--El Puerto (HD)

2010-10-04T21:00:00.003-05:00

El Puerto was the first piece I recorded when I got my piano back in the summer of 2008. Two years later I finally got around to redoing it in HD with a good audio recording.

Isaac Albéniz wrote twelve pieces (four books of three) in his masterpiece, the Iberia suite. El Puerto is the second piece in book one. It's a very special piece for me, not just because I love it so much and I played it so much in my youth. Iberia was also a favorite of my teacher, Douglas Voice, who performed all twelve pieces in concert. Douglas passed away in 1998. I still think about him just about every time I play this piece.

I'm quite happy with the video. There's a lot that can go wrong in this piece. But this performance is pretty clean.

Albéniz: El Puerto from Ken Barker on Vimeo.

Video: Liszt--Sonetto 104 del Petrarca (HD)

2010-08-03T09:50:00.003-05:00

Here is the latest installment in my series of HD remakes of SD videos. The old video of this piece is nearly two years old, and was only the second piano video I made. Definitely time for a makeover. Sonetto 104 will always be special for me, since it's one of the pieces I performed most towards the end of "the performing days of my youth". It's also one of the first I recovered when I started practicing again in 2007.

Liszt: Sonetto 104 del Petrarca from Ken Barker on Vimeo.

Coming Home Again

2010-07-24T10:09:00.007-05:00

Various uninteresting events kept me from traveling home to Ottawa in 2009. But I made sure to hard-schedule a visit in 2010. As in 2008, I made sure to take advantage of Paulette's invitation to play her young Steinway B. My small audience was mom, dad, Johanne, Paulette, mom's friend Louise and my first piano teacher, Edith Orton. It was a very casual gathering and I made sure to play the pieces I'm working up for this year's ConcArt recital. I also played a couple of "oldies", a couple of "requests" and one piece on Paulette's Baldwin L1. Here's the list:

Friday, July 16, 2010:

Quejas, ó La Maja y el Ruiseñor (Enrique Granados)
Danza de la Pastora (Ernesto Halffter)
Air and Variations: The Harmonious Blacksmith (George Handel)
Widmung (Robert Schumann/Franz Liszt arr.)
Muiñeira (Joaquin Nin-Culmell)
Hungarian Dance #2 (Johannes Brahms)
Ritual Fire Dance (Manuel de Falla)
Danza del Gaucho Matrero (Alberto Ginastera)
Impromptu Op.90 No.4 (Franz Schubert)
Sonetto 104 del Petrarca (Franz Liszt)

I think everybody had a good time. I had two very nice comments and one good piece of constructive criticism. Paulette asked when I bought my piano because it sounded like my playing had matured and become much more expressive since 2008. She attributed it to having my own piano to play every day. Edith asked if I practiced technique (scales, etc.) regularly. I explained that with my limited practice time, I practice technique in service of the pieces I'm learning/playing only. But I do practice the runs, arpeggios, trills, etc. from the pieces as though they were technical exercises in order to get them as clean as possible. Her impression was that my technique and articulation were strong.

The constructive criticism came from my mother's friend Louise. She suggested (and everyone agreed) that it would be nice to have more tranquility in my repertoire, since most of the pieces I played were quick or fiery or energetic (or all three!). I do have slower, calmer material, but didn't play much of it. The comment reminded me that even in a casual gathering, you shouldn't ignore program-level considerations. It also convinced me that I really need to add one more piece to this year's planned ConcArt program. Now I just have to find a new piece that's a slow/tranquil foil for the rest of the program, something that's melodic and beautiful, something that's not too trivial, and that I can learn and get up to performance level for the Fall.

Having fun at Paulette's Steinway B

Video: Granados--Quejas ó la maja y el ruiseñor

2010-07-06T10:37:00.002-05:00

This video is my HD remake of Enrique Granados' wonderful The Maiden and The Nightingale from Goyescas. That leaves just two more HD remakes to do: Liszt's Sonetto 104 del Petrarca and Albeniz' El Puerto. The Liszt is already filmed/recorded, but not edited. Look for it to appear around the end of July/beginning of August.

I feel like my performance of Maiden has really improved over time. But I just went back and watched the old, crappy SD video and the performance wasn't bad. There are definitely some things I prefer in the new one... and there are plenty of very subtle improvements. And of course, the video quality is a million times better. But my playing of the piece hasn't changed as much as I thought.

Granados: Quejas ó la maja y el ruiseñor from Ken Barker on Vimeo.

Happy Second Pianoversary

2010-05-30T08:57:00.012-05:00

Today marks the second anniversary of the delivery of my piano. I can't even imagine life without it. In two years it has starred in 18 videos and audio recordings, it's shown itself in two recitals to 100 people, it's learned about 25 pieces, and it practices almost every day (I assume it doesn't play when I'm out of town).

It's been tuned 10 times, voiced twice, had its shanks fired, been tweaked, lubricated and adjusted. It's been covered on three occasions and wiped down 700 times. It has been played by two people.

It has never had a cat inside of it, although this is not thanks to any great self-restraint on the part of the cats. I've never touched its case with my bare hands, but I think today I will.

Happy Birthday, piano!

So That's What It Sounds Like

2010-05-29T09:16:00.000-05:00

I've had my piano for two full years now. But believe it or not, I've never heard it played (I'm always the one playing it). I've invited others to play it, but have never had any takers until last weekend.

My neighbor's father is a fairly advanced pianist, and we talk about repertoire pretty regularly, but he's never taken me up on offers to play my piano. Last Saturday after dinner Johanne and I were out throwing a football in the street when he came out with his grandson to see the football. After chatting for a few minutes Johanne invited him to try the piano again and this time he took us up on it.

He played parts of Schumann's Carnavale and Mendelssohn's Songs Without Words, and even the first page of Liszt's arrangement of Schumann's Widmung, which was really fun because that's a piece I play too. I couldn't stop smiling, hearing my piano for the first time. And it's amazing how rich and full it sounds from "out front", even though its unisons are horribly out right now. I can't wait to have him back when it's tuned so I can hear it at its best.

Video: Ginastera--Danzas argentinas (HD)

2010-05-02T09:11:00.003-05:00

The pieces I posted in the last three blog entries are often (usually?) performed together as one big work: the Danzas argentinas. I wanted to do the same with my video: have one continuous performance/video of the three dances together. (The individual videos posted last month were actually edited down from the full-length video). So this week I'm posting the complete video.

Ginastera: Danzas argentinas from Ken Barker on Vimeo.

Video: Ginastera--Danza del gaucho matrero (HD)

2010-04-11T09:16:00.004-05:00

Here, finally, is the third piece of Alberto Ginastera's three Danzas Argentinas. This is The Dance of the Arrogant Cowboy. It's not a remake like the other two, because I never got around to recording it when I first recorded the others.

Listening to the performance, it occurs to me that I approach videos and recitals quite differently. For recitals I think energy and expression are more important than cleanliness. People take away the big picture more than the details. But in a video the details are much more noticeable. And permanent! So I think my video performances are a little more conservative. That is certainly the case here. Comparing it to the hundreds of other videos of this piece you can find on the web, my performance here is quite clean, but maybe not as fiery as some.

Ginastera: Danza del gaucho matrero from Ken Barker on Vimeo.

Video: Ginastera--Danza de la moza donosa (HD)

2010-04-03T21:06:00.002-05:00

Here is my HD remake of Danza de la moza donosa (Dance of the Graceful Young Maiden), Ginastera's second piece from the Danzas Argentinas. It's my favorite of the three dances. And although I think the performance is quite a bit better than the old SD version, I still find it just a little lackluster. Will I ever really love one of these videos? Maybe not.

The video itself is part of one long video of all three dances, so the visual similarity to this blog's previous installment is not coincidental. I guess I'll post the long, complete thing after the third dance.

So, no further ado, etc.

Ginastera: Danza de la moza donosa from Ken Barker on Vimeo.

Video: Ginastera--Danza del viejo boyero (HD)

2010-03-28T19:37:00.002-05:00

Welcome to the second in the Ripoff Series of videos (videos of pieces that I've posted videos of before). My first stab at filming this piece was exactly 18 months ago. And not only was it crappy SD, it was crappy mono audio. Mono audio!

I think the audio is pretty good on this one. I'm still learning and improving. And I'm still getting used to my new camera, and experimenting a little more in video post-production. Video experts will no doubt cringe at my heavy hand on the levels.

When I blogged about the original video in September, 2008, I promised (?) that I would do videos of the second and third Argentine dances, too. I did manage to post a pretty terrible performance of the second one, but not the third. This time there is no risk that I'll renege. The second and third are already "in the can". I have a little editing to do before I can post them, but they'll be online in the next couple of weeks.

So here is the HD/stereo remake of Alberto Ginastera's Danza del viejo boyero, the first of the Danzas Argentinas.

Ginastera: Danza del viejo boyero from Ken Barker on Vimeo.

Video: Beethoven--Pathétique Sonata, 2nd Movement (HD)

2010-03-21T08:35:00.005-05:00

Ok. I know what you're thinking: "What a ripoff! We already have a video of this piece!" It's true. But this is a better video. I'm going back and redoing all my earliest (SD) videos in HD.

The SD/HD cutoff also (coincidentally) marks the line between what I think are the worse performances and the better performances. My goal is to have decent performances on HD for all of the pieces in my repertoire. The videos I need to redo are the Beethoven, Liszt, Albéniz and Ginastera.

This video is also my first video with the new camera Johanne bought me for my birthday! It's a Canon SX1 IS. The camera is in the category they call "superzooms", a bit of a misnomer for cameras that are halfway between point-and-shoot and SLR. They have most of the flexible manual controls of an SLR, significant glass and an internal viewfinder. But the lens is not interchangeable and the viewfinder is an internal LCD (as opposed to a mirrored view through the lens). Among the superzooms, the Canon has the best video features for me (full 1080 HD, full swivel on the LCD, manual focus and exposure locking, and a remote control).

My New Canon SX1 IS

The video quality is great when there's enough light. Here, the video seems a bit noisy, especially if you look at the darker areas. I'll have to keep experimenting with light, settings, etc. But you can't believe how great it feels to be released from the shackles of digital video tape. I'll never go back.

Beethoven: Pathétique Sonata (2nd Movement) from Ken Barker on Vimeo.

Happy Repertoire Season

2010-03-14T14:08:00.006-05:00

Hello Blog.

Well, it looks like I let February go by without a single post. Shame on me. The good news is that the blog going dark doesn't mean I've been ignoring music. Au contraire, I'm in the middle of a busy "repertoire season". This is the time of the year for me to be learning brand new pieces to add to my repertoire. Immediately after the late-Fall ConcART, I like to start planning a new program, and that means finding new pieces to play.

I usually hunt around YouTube for pianists I like and composers I'd like to try. If a piece jumps out at me I'll go get the manuscript from the library at UT and spend a week or so reading it and trying it on for size. And if it survives reading week, I order my own copy of the music.

Right now I'm working up four brand new pieces by Johannes Brahms, Manuel de Falla, Robert Schumann (arranged by Franz Liszt) and another new Spanish discovery: Joaquín Nin-Culmell. I realize it's a bit pretentious of me to claim him as a discovery, but when there's only one recording on YouTube, I think that counts as a discovery. I'm also resurrecting an old George Frideric Handel.

The Handel, Falla and Nin-Culmell are already memorized and up to speed. I'd say they're "performable" (given adequately loose performance standards). The Brahms is memorized but not up to speed. It's definitely not at performance, but it will be. The Schumann/Liszt is still in the earliest stages of learning.

Counting everything except the Schumann/Liszt, my memorized repertoire sits right now at twenty: Albeniz, Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Chopin, Debussy, Falla, Ginastera (×3), Granados (×2), Halffter, Handel, Liszt, Mozart, Nin-Culmell, Rachmaninoff, Schubert and Soler.

Happy Repertoire Season!

How to Film a Piano from Above

2010-01-31T10:16:00.006-06:00

I promised that I would write a blog post on how I got the overhead piano shots in my last video.

The problem is that it the camera needs to be directly above the piano and high enough to use a longish focal length (to avoid fisheye distortion of the straight horizontal lines of the piano). You can't just use a normal tripod... it would have to be a really tall tripod with a long boom arm.

But this is exactly the kind of puzzle Johanne and I like to work through over Sunday morning coffee. We put our heads together and came up with a pretty simple solution.

We have ten-foot ceilings, so there's definitely enough room to get the camera high enough. We gave up on the idea of stands and booms right away, which left fixing the camera to the ceiling. Johanne came up with the idea of a T-track like the tracks in power tool tables that let you fix jigs, fences, etc. to the table. The track itself is in the shape of a C, which gives it a T-shaped slot. You slide a T-bolt into the slot, place your object (with a hole in it) over the T-bolt, then tighten it down with a knob.

So we installed a short length of T-track on the ceiling above the piano:

Gold T-track fixed to ceiling above the piano

In the zoomed-out photo, the gold T-track above the piano just looks like a gold line on the ceiling. Zooming in, you can make out the C-shape of the track forming a T-slot:

T-track on the ceiling

To fix the camera to the T-track, we bought a simple L-bracket. We fix one arm of the L-bracket to the T-track with a T-bolt and a knob:

T-bolt passing through the L-bracket

The T-shaped head of the T-bolt slides into the slot of the T-track. Tightening the knob fixes the L-bracket to the T-track. Using a single bolt allows us to rotate the bracket under the T-track to get it perfectly square with the piano keyboard. We attach the camera to the other arm of the L-bracket using a 20-1/4" knob bolt, which is one of the standards for camera tripod mounts:

Camera attached to the perpendicular arm of the L-bracket

A thin piece of wood keeps the L-bracket from marring the camera and prevents the knob bolt from bottoming out in the camera's tripod mount. The camera can swivel on the L-bracket to make sure the focal plane is parallel with the keytops (to avoid trapezoid distortion).

Simple! I bought the T-track, T-bolt, knob and 20-1/4" knob bolt at Woodcraft, and the L-bracket at Lowe's. Total cost: about $15.

Video: Schubert--Impromptu Op.90 No.4

2010-01-16T09:20:00.003-06:00

Here is another piece that I didn't really plan on adding to the repertoire. I only intended to learn it well enough to record it back in Spring 2008 as a surprise for my mother. As I wrote on the blog back then:

Schubert's Impromptu is a piece that my mother used to play. Some of my earliest memories are of her playing it on her old Chopin upright piano. I couldn't have been more than four or five years old. But it was one of the pieces that got me interested in learning the piano and has stuck with me all these years.

But I found that I really enjoyed playing it, and it was close enough to performance level to work it up for the first ConcART in October, 2008. These days I probably run through it at practice once or twice a month. That seems to be enough to keep it "ready".

The piece itself is a little deceptive. There's nothing obviously difficult about it. But keeping the right hand "waterfalls" light and even is very technically challenging. This recording shows that I still struggle with the evenness. That's also what makes it risky to play this piece on an unknown piano. If the action isn't responsive enough you're in for a hot, gooey mess.

I continue to push my experimentation with the video, here. I'm finding that mixing up different camera angles adds to the interest of the video, making it easier to sit through the whole thing. (I'm also finding that it's important to plan the angles/switches instead of just jumping around between them randomly). One of my favorite camera angles in professional videos is the direct overhead shot. But it's not an easy shot to get: how do you get the darn camera up there? And it has to be high enough to get the whole keyboard without fisheye distortion. Anyway, I batted some ideas around with my personal problem solving expert (Johanne) and we came up with a nice solution. I'll write a separate blog post about it soon.

Schubert: Impromptu Op.90 No.4 from Ken Barker on Vimeo.

Video: Mozart--Variations

2010-01-09T09:01:00.004-06:00

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote these twelve variations on the melody from a popular French children's song called Ah, vous dirai-je, Maman. The title translates roughly to "Well, let me tell you mother...". The words to the song catalog the grievances a young girl has with her parents, such as putting too much emphasis on lessons and not enough on candy. The exact same melody is also used in at least three English children's songs, too. Namely, Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star, Bah, Bah, Black Sheep, and the Alphabet Song ("Now I know my ABCs").

My history with the piece is kind of spotty. The score was always nearby when I was growing up, and I would often mess around with it, but I never had any interest in really learning it. Then last Spring when Steinway Guy asked me to play in his students' recital, it seemed like the perfect fit. So I worked up eight of the variations for that performance. Having that much of it under my belt, it was easy to add the remaining four variations for my ConcART-II program. I don't imagine I'll continue to play the piece much, but Johanne suggested that it would be a good idea to videotape it before it starts to degrade.

So here we are.

On the video... I'm still working on the process, trying to improve lighting, video quality, production values, etc. This is my first attempt compositing video from more than one camera angle. And the audio bugs me on this one. It's too harsh... not warm enough. Part of that is the piano. It's brightened considerably over the last year and a half. I had Gary the Piano Tech bring down the voicing a little, but it needs more for my tastes. I think I'll do more experimenting next time with mic position and maybe fool around with more eq/filtering during mixing.

One last comment: listening to some other videos of this piece on YouTube, I notice a few differences in arrangement. Most people don't tie those notes over the bar line in variation I. And there even seem to be some differences in notes in the right hand B section of variation III. I wonder if these are actual differences in the different editions of the score. I used the International, but I know there are several other publishers, too. I'll have to check it out at the library.

Mozart: Variations on "Ah, vous dirai-je, Maman" from Ken Barker on Vimeo.

Video: Chopin--Etude Op.10 No.3

2009-12-05T10:43:00.002-06:00

One of my favorite pieces to play and I finally got around to video taping it.

I'm starting to think that maybe the conversion to Flash video used by both Vimeo and YouTube just can't handle audio well. In this case YouTube seems even worse than Vimeo, but both introduce some nasty distortion. I'll post .wma files (like I did for Maiden) so that there's an accessible version of decent-quality audio. I think if you download the .wmv from Vimeo, you'll also get decent audio.

Chopin: Etude Op.10 No.3 from Ken Barker on Vimeo.

Video: Soler--Sonata No.84

2009-11-28T19:10:00.002-06:00

Ok, I'll admit it: I have a strong bias toward Romantic composers. But I've made an effort to diversify a little by bringing more Baroque and Classical pieces into the mix. This piece is a keyboard sonata by late Baroque Spanish composer Padre Antonio Soler.

Soler was a monk, musician and composer, of course. But he was also an inventor, mathematician and author.

I hear Sonata No.84 as "light and playful", though the recent trend for this piece seems to be "as fast as humanly possible".

Now. With respect to the video... I've been fiddling with this for several days. Both Vimeo and YouTube seem to be converting the file to a Flash video with some nasty audio artifacts. But I've decided I'm going to have to live with it. If you're hearing distortion, you can download the .wmv file from the Vimeo page. It should be clean.

Soler: Sonata No.84 from Ken Barker on Vimeo.

Video: Rachmaninoff--Prelude Op.23 No.5

2009-11-21T08:49:00.003-06:00

Somebody asked me last year if I played any Russian music, and I realized that I had never studied any of the great Russian composers. So I started listening to a bunch and decided on this Prelude by Rachmaninoff. It's shortish, popular and fun to play: exactly what I'm looking for in new pieces to learn.

This performance is from the ConcART recital, which I decided to video tape this year. I was happy with the performance, mainly because I didn't trainwreck. Sure there are clams aplenty, but I thought it came off pretty well anyway.

The audio, on the other hand, is horrendous. It's taken from the camera's on-board mic, which is bad enough. But the camera also has a built-in compressor which can't be turned off. So when you hear the high-pitched whine/buzz, that's the compressor trying to make the soft parts as loud as the loud parts. Ugh. You'll just have to take my word for it that I had some nice soft passages in there.

As usual, you can watch in full HD at the vimeo page.

Rachmaninoff: Prelude Op.23 No.5 from Ken Barker on Vimeo.

ConcART II Review

2009-11-17T14:51:00.007-06:00

I'm happy to report that this year's art show/recital was a success. The demographics were similar to last year: 50 people came in time for the recital and another dozen or so showed up later in the afternoon. Johanne sold 12 paintings to friends, neighbors, and even to other artists and a couple of guests of guests that we didn't know.

Welcoming our guests

I played a program of six pieces. I put quite a bit of thought into selection and sequencing of pieces, and I think it paid off. Several people commented on how interesting and varied the program was. And like last year, they really appreciated the little stories I gave to introduce each piece.

Playing the piano

I was disappointed not to have photographic proof of applause from last year. So this year I made sure to document it. Everyone seemed happy to accommodate, even through my low battery scare.

Proof of applause

Here's what it looked like from my angle.

From the "stage"

And even with about sixty people milling throughout the afternoon, we still way over-bought on food and drink. I guess that's why it's important to buy stuff you like: you're going to be finishing it for the next two months.

Looking at art

Once again, I'd like to thank several people for making ConcART II run smoothly:

Gary for tuning the piano and working on the hammers two weeks before the recital, and then coming back to put on a hard tuning two days before the show
Libby and Annabel for handling art sales
Laura for protecting the doors during the recital and for kenneling Maple dog for the day
Debie for monitoring the refreshment stations

All-in-all I'd have to say that this year's event was even better than last year's. Now to get to work on next year's party. What should I play?

Granados: Laments or The Maiden and the Nightingale

2009-11-07T09:18:00.002-06:00

Yesterday my father underwent (successful) coronary artery bypass graft surgery. In preparation for the tedium of convalescence, he bought himself an MP3 player. Among the 50 albums he loaded, he included the Piano 101 recordings. But he noted that some of the pieces that I made videos for aren't available as audio recordings. So I went back to the original audio files for those videos and encoded .wma files for downloading. Listening to them without the visual distraction of video, I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the recording. And they capture the tone of my piano nicely. So I decided to post some of them here.

I've mentioned before that Enrique Granados' Goyescas suite is pretty much the pinnacle of piano music for me. The fourth piece in the suite is Quejas ó la Maja y el Ruiseñor (Laments or the Maiden and the Nightingale). And if you were wondering why people learn to play the piano, Maiden is a pretty good answer.

It's been a little under a year since I recorded this and I find the performance a little dry and plodding. But is it good enough to post to a blog with three readers? Most probably!

Quejas ó la Maja y el Ruiseñor (Enrique Granados)

ConcART II

2009-11-03T20:40:00.002-06:00

If you've been reading this blog for a while, you may remember Johanne and I had a combination art show/piano recital last fall. We enjoyed it so much we decided to try to have one once a year. Well, the time has come! ConcART II will take place Sunday, November 15, 2009.

Johanne will be showing the pastel paintings and oil studies she's done this year, as well as a few older paintings that won awards in 2009.

To kick off the show, I'll give another recital of classical piano music. I wanted to mix things up a little this year. Last year's recital was very heavy on Romantic and Spanish music. I think this new program is more varied, and maybe a little more accessible.

Twelve Variations on "Ah, vous dirai-je, Maman" (Wolfgang A. Mozart)
Etude Op.10 No.3 (Frederic Chopin)
Sonata No.84 (Antonio Soler)
Arabesque I (Claude Debussy)
Danza de la Pastora (Ernesto Halffter)
Prelude Op.23 No.5 (Sergei Rachmaninoff)

If you can make it to Austin November 15, let me know and I'll send you the Evite.

Transfer Function, What's Your... uh... Function?

2009-10-10T09:23:00.014-05:00

Having a good mental model of how an unfamiliar piano responds helps you know how to adjust (or not adjust) your playing. For example, if a piano's action seems relatively stiff, you might be more careful to avoid notes not sounding. If a piano is voiced more brightly than you're used to, you might want to beware the tendency to underplay to compensate.

Both of these examples illustrate the importance of sensing how effort applied translates to sound out. I think of this relationship as a Transfer Function: different amounts of energy in (effort applied) produce different changes in energy out (volume, roughly). When playing an unfamiliar piano, if you can build a mental model of this transfer function, you're more likely to be able to exploit its dynamic range effectively. It's also easier to avoid overplaying a piano whose sound is smaller than what you're used to or underplaying a piano whose sound is bigger.

The graph below shows how energy out might vary depending on how much energy goes in for three hypothetical pianos.

The yellow curve is the transfer function for a hypothetical "linear" piano, where doubling the effort produces exactly double the volume over the entire dynamic range. The red line would be a piano where small changes in effort produce larger changes in volume at the soft end, but more effort is required to produce changes in volume at the loud end. For example, a small increase in effort (from a to b) might be required to go from pianissimo to piano, whereas a large increase in effort (from e to g) might be required to go from forte to fortissimo. The green curve represents the transfer function of some wacky imaginary piano where the louder it gets, the easier it becomes to play even louder.

Real pianos would have transfer functions more like the red curve. Eventually, the curve flattens out to the right, meaning that as you hit the keys ever harder, you don't get much more volume.

The next graph shows how transfer function might account for differences in big pianos versus small pianos. One of the most surprising things when playing concert grands, for example, is how they continue to respond dynamically at the loud end. That is, even when playing loud, the piano has power to get even louder. The transfer function of smaller pianos flattens out faster than that of larger pianos. In the graph below, the red curve would be a larger piano, the green curve a smaller piano.

Any given piano may have a unique shape to its transfer function. The red curve in the graph below represents the transfer function for a piano that requires little effort to get from piano to forte, but then flattens out quickly. On such a piano, the risk to the player is in reaching high volumes with little effort, but then having no headroom left for louder passages. The tendency then would be to over-exert on loud passages, which can affect clean technique and result in fatigue. Keeping a model of this piano's transfer function in mind while playing would remind you that wide dynamic variation requires little change in effort in the soft and middle dynamic ranges, that forte comes easier than expected, and you should be careful not to hit the flat part of the curve before the loudest passages of the piece.

Action!

2009-10-04T09:27:00.008-05:00

I was excited by the title of a recent post on the Dallas Steinway blog: The Importance of Good Action on Pianos. I guess I was expecting a technical article about the motion and interaction of elements of a piano's action and how they affect playing. But the article seems more aimed at piano buyers, with the message: "don't be put off by a firm action... it's good for you".

The reason for my excitement (and disappointment) is that I spend a lot of time thinking about how pianos sound and feel. And I think there's more to action from a player's point of view than just "firm or not firm". So why not write about it on my blog?

When a piano requires relatively more energy to play, people often describe its action using words like "heavy", "stiff", "firm", etc. But I've played lots of pianos that felt "heavy but loose", or "light but stiff", suggesting there's more than one dimension. So here are the elements I think of when describing a piano's action:

Weight (heavy vs. light)
Stiffness (stiff vs. fluid)
Tightness (tight vs. loose)
Response (responsive vs. sluggish)

These may or may not map simply to physical differences in the machinery of the action. And they're all closely related to the subjective perception of how effort produces sound. I think of this effort-in-to-sound-out as a kind of Transfer Function, which I'll describe in another post. For now, I'll say a little more on each of the four elements.

I see weight as a perception of how much matter it feels like you're moving when you press a key. This may correspond to the actual weight of the moving pieces. It may also be affected by a sense of inertia (how much effort it takes to get things moving, and how much it feels like they keep moving once in motion).

Stiffness to me seems more similar to friction. How fluid is the motion of the key? The action can be stiff but light (like pushing an empty cardboard box across a table), or heavy but fluid (like pushing a heavy stone across ice).

The tightness of an action is more about the amount of extraneous motion. The motion can be lateral (for example, extraneous side-to-side motion if the guide pin is too loose in the bushing) or vertical. Two kinds of vertical looseness are excessive bounce on key-up and excessive mushiness at the bottom of the key bed. It's easy to imagine an action being heavy or light and loose, and fluid and loose. I'm not sure I can imagine stiff and loose.

For me, the response of an action is about the perceived directness of the connection between motion and sound. More than the other elements, response seems temporal to me. Is there a feeling of delay in the action? How quickly are notes available for repetition? Does the key motion seem synched with the note sounding (especially when playing softly)? Informally, does the piano do what you want it to without hesitation?

So where do various pianos stand on the four dimensions? I'd say the action on my piano (an Essex 183) is medium-weight, somewhat stiff, nice and tight, and extremely responsive. The Steinway D I played at my last recital was fairly heavy, but fluid and a little loose, making it feel overall a little sloppy to me (the lack of stiffness and tightness failing to hold the inertia of the heavy action in check).

Of course, all of these perceptions are in the context of how the piano produces sound in response to force exerted, which is the topic of my next post.

A Pilgrimage

2009-08-16T08:48:00.004-05:00

I just got back from a week in New York for work. For the first half of the trip I was staying at the Millennium Broadway Hotel, which is in midtown Manhattan, right in Times Square. When I learned I was going to be spending time in Manhattan, I knew there were two things I had to do while there: 1) run Central Park; 2) visit Steinway Hall.

The reception area of Steinway Hall, NYC

Steinway Hall is on West 57th St., just a half a block from Carnegie Hall. The reception area inside the entrance is a large, two-story domed room with a D sitting right in the middle (see the photo). I failed to surprise the receptionist by saying I was on a pilgrimage from Texas. She had me sign in and pointed me to the five rooms off the hallway leading from the back of the reception room. The salespeople at the desks around the outside of the room appeared not to notice my intrusion.

The piano rooms were more old mansion than store showroom. Each had several Steinway grands, mostly As and Bs. And there seemed to be very few stock pianos: most were from the Crown Jewel Collection, with some combination of scrollwork music rack, retro fallboard lettering and exotic wood. I plinked a couple of notes on each, trying to find the piano that was expecting me. The closest I came was a Macassar Ebony B. Unfortunately, a piano tech was tuning in the adjoining Boston room, so I continued on down the hallway.

The room at the end of the hallway was the largest and housed several stock As, Bs, Os and a couple of Ms and Ss. One of the As insisted I play it, so I carried over the lone bench and pretended I was Enrique Granados. The action was gorgeous and the dynamic range was shocking. Unfortunately, the cubic shape of the large room and the tiled floor made the room much too live for my tastes. Rather than cry about it, I found a brighter A in the center of the room and blasted out some Rachmaninoff. The room may still be echoing.

I had read that there were two other floors of pianos and wanted to explore a bit more. So I returned to the entrance only to find the receptionist's desk empty. The salespeople continued their theatrical display of not noticing me, even though I was the only other person in the room. So I wandered over to the staircase and went up to the second floor. I was somehow met by one of the previously uninterested now suddenly very interested salespeople. He told me that guests aren't normally allowed upstairs unescorted. Taking this as an offer to escort me, I asked to see the second-floor rooms and pianos.

We started our tour in the Artist Room, whose walls are covered with portraits of Steinway Artists. I immediately picked out Alicia's photo. We then went on to the large room at the end of the hall, where they keep the concert Ds and Bs. The salesman started probing a little, so I told him my story: how I became infatuated with an A out of my league, had a brief affair with a Boston 215 and ultimately found true love in my Essex 183. He conceded that the 183 was a nice piano, if not an A. They don't stock many of the larger Essex and Boston because people who shop for pianos on W57th are usually there for a Steinway (even if their piano needs are for something 7-feet and black for the empty space in the living room).

I think at this point we both sensed mass was over. I didn't play any Ds, but I had seen more beautiful Steinways than you can shake a topstick at. And playing those two As in the home of Steinway was an absolute joy. Next time I'll have to think up a story that will get me into the Concert Bank.

How Many Dampers does a Piano Have?

2009-07-28T15:05:00.007-05:00

I've played a lot of pianos. But it never occurred to me to think much about how many dampers there are.

Dampers are felt-bottomed wooden blocks that lift off a key's strings when the key is depressed, allowing the strings to vibrate. The damper then drops back on to the strings when the key is released, stopping the strings from vibrating. Each key on the piano has a damper, except for the highest few keys. I always assumed the highest keys didn't have dampers because their sustain wouldn't interfere unpleasantly with the music (either because they have less sustain or for some psycho-acoustic reason, dunno).

But I never noticed where the dampers stopped until I got my own piano. My Essex EGP-183 has 71 dampers. That means the last damper is on the G6 key. I noticed that some of my pieces sounded a little funny in the upper register. So I started looking at the other pianos I play. The nine-foot Steinway D has 71 dampers. But all of the other Steinway grands I play (M, L and B models) have 67 dampers (ending at D#6). And all the Yamaha grands I know have 69 dampers (ending at F6).

The dampers on an Essex EGP-183 go up to G6; no dampers on G#6-C8

So what difference does it make?

Turns out I play two pieces that have passages that climb up to exactly G6 and stop there, followed by rests. On most pianos, that means the G rings out over the rests. But on my Essex, the G stops dead.

G6s at the end of Ginastera's Danza del Viejo Boyero

Luckily, it's easy to hold the G6 with the right hand pinky and come off the other right hand notes dry. And I really prefer the sound (probably because I played the Ginastera for many years on pianos with no G6 damper and I'm used to that sound).

G6 at the end of Rachmaninoff's Prelude Op.23 No.5

The Rachmaninoff is a different story: I've only ever played it on my Essex. But that ending sounds really dry to me. If I hold the G6 with the pinky and take both the G3 and G4 in the left hand, it sounds "right" to me. (In most recordings, the room is live enough that the note sustains, damper or not).

So how's that for minutia?

Spring Recital Review

2009-06-13T09:56:00.006-05:00

It's been two weeks since the Spring Recital at Steinway. I'd meant to post a review right after the recital, but never got around to it. Luckily, I checked the rulebook and there are no restrictions on how long after an event you can still blog it. So....

The Spring Recital took place May 31, 2009 at 5pm in the recital hall at Steinway Piano Gallery, Austin. The program had twelve performers: eleven students of Steinway Guy and me at the very end. The students played two pieces each. I played three:

Variations on "Ah, vous dirai-je, Maman" (Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart)
Danza de la Pastora (Ernesto Halffter)
Danza del Gaucho Matrero (Alberto Ginastera)

The students were mostly quite young, the audience mostly camera/camcorder-toting parents. As the program wound on, some of the younger students in the audience started getting quite restless. The rising temperature in the hall didn't help either. So by the time it was my turn, the room didn't seem interested in hearing three pieces by some guy. But there was nothing to do about it except get up there and play what was printed in the program.

The piano was not their usual model D Steinway. It was a glossy D. (By default, the New York Steinways have a satin finish, the Hamburg Steinways a glossy finish... so it looked like a Hamburg D). Turns out it had recently been rented out by the Steinway Gallery to Diana Krall for a private event, and she had autographed the plate. I thought the sound was gorgeous, but the action felt a little spongy.

I gave a little opening spiel then launched into the Mozart. It was nice to hear the audience's noises of recognition when they realized the theme was "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star". And to my surprise, the videos and still cameras didn't stop. I'd assumed the parents would put away the cameras when their kids were done. I think this is the first time I've ever played a recital with flashes going off while playing.

To keep things moving, I shortened my verbal introductions a little, and skipped the repeat I usually play in the Halffter. But it turns out that my concerns were unfounded: everybody seemed to enjoy the performance. And the Ginastera at the end is always a big hit.

So there you have it. I'm grateful to Steinway Guy for another opportunity to perform. I feel like I'm slowly narrowing the gap between the quality of public and private performances, though it's still much wider than I'd like. I just have to keep at it!

Happy First Pianoversary

2009-05-31T20:43:00.003-05:00

I thought I should celeblog the first anniversary of the delivery of my piano. It was one year ago yesterday (May 30) that it arrived. I play it every day and love it more than ever. It's been a dream come true. Here's to you, piano!

Impromptu Recital

2009-05-20T22:20:00.003-05:00

My good friends Bruce and Claudia Porter saw their youngest (Ben) get married last Saturday. Johanne and I went to the wedding, which was held at The Mansion in Austin. It was a great ceremony, dinner and party and we're really happy for Ben and his bride Alejandra Rodriguez. (As an aside, Alejandra, who goes by "Ale" for short, has just inherited the best beer name ever: "Ale Porter").

The Mansion, as you'd expect, has several big rooms with pianos. They have a little Hardman baby grand (one of the huge cast of decent early twentieth century American piano makers). Another room has a Steinway M or L (couldn't quite tell which just looking at it -- it was old enough that the model stamp wasn't in the usual place and the L is only 3.5" longer than the M). But the star is a Baldwin SD10 9' concert grand. The photo shows the actual piano in its room at The Mansion.

After the bride and groom left, we were standing around and somebody suggested that it wasn't too late for me to check out the SD10. So a few of us went in for an impromptu recital. I played Ernesto Halffter's Danza de la Pastora, Alberto Ginastera's Danza del Gaucho Matrero and the second movement of Beethoven's Pathétique Sonata. It was late and I was tired, but it went well. My small audience insisted on one more, so I played Enrique Granados' Laments, or the Maiden and the Nightingale (Quejas, ó la Maja y el Ruiseñor).

Everyone seemed to enjoy the performance. As much as I did? Maybe. :-)

Spring Recital

2009-05-10T09:17:00.003-05:00

I've mentioned here that I'd like to find more opportunities to perform. So I jumped when Steinway Guy asked me to play at a recital of his students on May 31. It's a great opportunity to play for a larger audience and I thought it would give me a chance to test-drive a couple new pieces. The recital will be at the Steinway Piano Gallery, hopefully on the D!

I asked SG if he had any preferences, or if there was an overall theme to the program. He said I could play anything I like. But then a few weeks ago he mentioned that it would be good if I could play something the audience would recognize. But not Für Elise or the Moonlight Sonata. And the pieces shouldn't be too long, since there will be a lot of kids in the audience. But they should be technically challenging to show the students what you can do if you practice your scales and technique.

Of course, I have nothing that fits all those criteria. And it seemed a little late to learn something brand new. But then it hit me! The Mozart Variations on "Ah, vous dirai-je, Maman" would be perfect. I've never really learned them, but I've noodled around with them enough over the years that I was confident I could put them together in time. I'll also play Pastora and Gaucho Matrero, which the audience surely won't recognize, but are short, fast and very entertaining.

Variations on "Ah, vous dirai-je, Maman" (Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart)
Danza de la Pastora (Ernesto Halffter)
Danza del Gaucho Matrero (Alberto Ginastera)

I sent the program to SG and he loves it. So there you go. I'm committed.

Video: Arabesque I

2009-04-28T19:59:00.004-05:00

Claude Debussy's Arabesque I might be the "oldest" piece I play, in the sense that I've played it longer than the others. I think I first learned it in 1982. (I could probably recover the year if I knew what grade it was in the RCM syllabus).

Update 4/29/09: BJ says in the comments that it's Grade 10, which means I probably started learning it Fall, 1982.

I'm very happy with the audio on this recording. The video is ok. I might start experimenting with lighting and post-production image processing.

Again, to watch in HD, you'll have go to vimeo and watch it full screen (well worth it, says me).

Debussy: Arabesque I from Ken Barker on Vimeo.

Video: Danza de la Pastora

2009-04-16T20:42:00.004-05:00

Danza de la Pastora is a wonderful piece by twentieth century Spanish composer Ernesto Halffter. The piece was originally written as part of his one-act ballet Sonatina, but he also arranged it for solo piano.

I had never heard of Ernesto Halffter. Last Fall I was hunting around the web for Alicia de Larrocha recordings. She's one of my all-time favorite pianists, and is responsible for popularizing much of the Spanish piano repertoire. I came across a video on YouTube from an old 1967 documentary pairing Spanish art and music. The second performance is de Larrocha playing Danza de la Pastora. It completely hooked me from the first notes.

So I started trying to find out more about the piece and about Halffter. I could only find one recording of his piano works, a two-disc set by Guillermo González. The liner notes state that Halffter was "one of the most important Spanish composers of the twentieth century". I have plenty of respect for Halffter, and I'm completely crazy about Pastora, but I'm going to have to call BS on this one.

A note on the video... I'm definitely making some headway with the video quality. This is my first piano video in HD. You can play the embedded version below but you won't see it in HD. So make sure you go to my page at vimeo.com and watch it full screen. I should also note that YouTube now allows HD videos and stereo audio, so you can watch it HD at my YouTube page too.

Halffter: Danza de la Pastora from Ken Barker on Vimeo.

Thom Barker Band: No Forever

2009-04-14T19:46:00.001-05:00

The second TBB demo is a song that also made it on to Twice the Usual, though with a quite different feel.

No Forever

I'll post the version off 2x as well, for comparison.

No Forever (off Twice the Usual)

The most obvious difference is the tempo. The TBB version sits just under 150 bpm. The 2x version is 180! I like the faster tempo better, but I think the slower version would have worked if we had performed it more relaxed. As it is, it sounds like we're all fighting to hold it back.

To me the second most obvious difference is how warm the TBB recording sounds. That's the difference between a real recording studio and some schlub with a home studio. The 2x version sounds very harsh by comparison. The mix on the TBB version is better too. The bass sits in the lows and doesn't stray. The electric owns the mids, and the drums find the gaps. On the 2x version, everything is fighting for the mids.

Apart from that, I think we can all agree on what the recording really needs: more cowbell!

Thom Barker Band: All The Same To Me

2009-04-12T09:17:00.005-05:00

The first of the two 1996 Thom Barker Band demos was All The Same To Me.

All The Same To Me

This song has all the elements of a classic Thom Barker song: happy-catchy music, despondent lyrics, hooky Chénier guitar themes, sloppy overplayed bass and horrible backing vocals.

The first thing that jumps out at me is how over-compressed the drums are. Sure, it makes them sound nice and punchy. And it was the '90s. But man, that's a lot of compression.

Second thing is Chris' electric theme. He has this knack for coming up with a hook that's completely original, but ends up defining the song. Underneath, the acoustic and bass just repeat I-vi-IV-V (the Heart and Soul chords... and a million other pop songs). Chris' hook gives it its own character.

The bridge (at 2:03) is a departure for a Thom Barker song. I can't think of another one like it. I'm pretty sure Thom had the idea of breaking down to a half-tempo version of the chorus. I think it was also his idea to switch to 6/8 time. I do remember working it out on my SY77 sequencer to show the band how to get in and out of it. We never quite got it right, though. We got into it ok, but tended to rush the half time a little. And the band was never really comfortable coming back out. You can hear in the recording that the outro chorus is a little slower than the beginning of the song. It's maybe 8-10 bpm (about 5%) slower. The highlight of the bridge for me is Chris' harmonic embellishments. Any time he accuses me of playing too many chord extensions I can point him here. Who's the jazz-head now, eh?

Thom Barker Band: The Recording

2009-04-10T22:42:00.005-05:00

The Thom Barker Band recordings were done at the new Sound of One Hand Studios at their location on Liverpool Court (off Innes Road) in south Ottawa. It was after they moved but before they renamed to Liverpool Court Studios. We recorded in the big room and Marty Jones was the engineer. The photo clearly shows their new (used) Neve console.

Marty Jones at the Neve

Both songs were straight guitars-bass-drums. Thom used his blue Yamaha acoustic and his yellow hair.

Thom at Sound of One Hand

I had recently upgraded to the John Pattitucci signature Yamaha six string bass (the TRB-JP). It's still my all-time favorite instrument with a single-digit number of strings. We recorded it direct through the good-old Sans Amp Bass Driver DI.

Ken at Sound of One Hand

Chris was still using his old Ibanez electric at the time. This was obviously before he developed full-on GAS (Gear Acquisition Syndrome). He tracked his parts from the control room, but the sound was mic'd off an amp in the big room. I remember us fooling with different amps (including the big Marshall in the picture and the smaller combo that Marty is messing with). I don't remember what amp we went with.

Chris at Sound of One Hand

Scott was playing his basic Tama kit (with one anonymous rototom).

Scott at Sound of One Hand

Thom Barker Band Promo Photos

2009-04-09T20:50:00.002-05:00

In the Fall of 1995 when Thom was getting serious about promoting the band, he put together a "promo package" which included press clippings, the Forest cd, bios and promo photos. We had done up a couple of photos specifically for the promo package. I don't know what happened to the negatives or any of the prints. I assume they're probably lost forever.

Thom Barker Band, Fall 1995, Regent St., Ottawa

But this was 1995 and there was a new craze sweeping Computer Science Departments. It was called the World Wide Web. It made it easy to publish text and pictures online in a way that was presentable for reading (as opposed to just searching and downloading). Not being immune to the draw of a bandwagon, I started scanning photos and putting them on web pages in my Unix account at the University of Ottawa.

Unfortunately, sometime in the late '90s I accidentally deleted all photos in my musicpix directory whose filename began with the letter 't'. Don't ask me why. So the scanned versions of the Thom Barker Band promo photos (tbb-promo1.gif and tbb-promo2.gif) and a bunch of others were gone.

Fast forward 14 years to April, 2009. Thanks to the magic of the Wayback Machine, I found the deleted photos. Sometime between 1995 and the date I deleted the pictures, the Wayback Machine archived them. I'm sure I've checked the archive before, but if you've ever tried to find old stuff there, you know it's kind of hit-or-miss. Today I got lucky.

Thom Barker Band, Fall 1995, Regent St., Ottawa

The Thom Barker Band

2009-04-08T21:19:00.006-05:00

Hold on to your hat, blogreader... you're in for a surprise. I have uncovered the long-lost Thom Barker Band recordings! And I've digitized them and cleaned them up for posting. But first, a little background.

Thom Barker Band at The Pit, December 21(ish?), 1995

Shortly after we finished recording Forest for the Trees, Thom decided he wanted to go for more of a band concept, and to ramp up our performance schedule. He was used to doing solo shows and duos (with me). We added electric guitar (Chris Chénier) and drums (Scott McCulloch).

Zaphod Beeblebrox, August 9, 1996

We rented a rehearsal studio in the basement of Irene's Pub in the Glebe (Ottawa) and booked a whole bunch of shows over the winter of 1995 and well into 1996.

The Gluepot Pub, August 10, 1996

We also booked Sound of One Hand Studio (where both previous albums were recorded) and got the whole band in there to record two songs. I thought we had lost those recordings forever, but I found a cassette at my parents' house and brought it back to my studio in Texas where I was able to get a decent quality re-recording of them.

Stay tuned!

Piano Fire

2009-04-04T08:05:00.006-05:00

What a horrifying noun compound that is.

Gary-the-Piano-Tech was over yesterday. It's the longest I've gone between tunings since I got the piano (15 weeks!). I showed him the sticky G and he pointed out that its hammer was rubbing against the adjacent hammer. He explained that when the hammer shank wood is still young, changes in humidity can cause the shank to warp a little making the hammer go off center. All you have to do is warm up the wood and coax it back. In the shop he has a heat gun for just this task. For location jobs he keeps a torch in his kit.

Let me repeat that and let it sink in: he keeps a torch in his kit to warm hammer shanks so he can bend them.

It's a little hard to see, but the photo shows him applying flame to wood inside my piano. I implored him not to start a piano fire (and immediately regretted coining the term).

Anyway, he did three shanks and the tuning. We talked about options for voicing and some of the subtler aspects of regulation (like leveling the hammer line). I won't be getting any of that work done soon. But the voicing has already noticeably hardened up a bit.

Repertoire and the After-Work Musician (II)

2009-03-28T09:07:00.006-05:00

Back in November I wrote about trying to build repertoire on a shoestring practice budget. At the time I was holding 13 pieces at performance level. Keeping a daily practice log allowed me to concentrate on squeaky wheels without letting the more settled pieces go too long without attention. But I was already feeling a little stretched; I wrote:

I'm curious to see how far this routine will take me. Will it continue to work with 20 pieces? 25? Or am I already at the limit for the number of hours I put in?

Here is my four-month update.

I've managed to bring up three more pieces. So I have 16 that I would feel comfortable playing from memory in public. As expected, the practice gaps for most pieces have gotten longer. I may go a week or even two without playing Puerto or Sonetto 104, etc. But they don't seem to be suffering much. When I come back to them, the memory is fine and there's even a freshness to the interpretation that I'm really enjoying. I'd probably want to work them hard for a week if I had a serious performance, but I'd have no qualms about whipping them out for something more casual.

As for new pieces... I'm working on two big ones and three little (tiny) ones. The big ones are a Rachmaninoff prelude and a Mozart concerto. I played the Mozart a hundred years ago, so the learning curve isn't too steep. It's longer than the solo pieces, so that takes time. I've never played the Rachmaninoff before (or any Rachmaninoff). It's a challenging piece and requires daily attention. But I'm definitely over the hump and it's getting close (mostly memorized, almost to speed).

The three tiny pieces are from Schumann's Scenes from Childhood. Mom sent me the music and I chose three of the more popular ones to learn. It's good to have some short, popular tunes in the bag.

My Fifteen Minutes

2009-03-15T11:17:00.004-05:00

I'm not quite sure how to "file" this, but I thought my blog readers (all three of you) might be interested.

That great video hosting site that I love (vimeo.com) allows users to create "channels". A channel is simply a place to showcase videos that have something in common. Anybody can create a channel on vimeo and add any videos they like to the channel. Channels are organized into categories (comedy, music, nature, etc.) making them a great way to discover new videos.

The creator of the Classical Music channel on vimeo stumbled across my piano videos and added my Moza Donosa video to the channel. I think it's pretty cool to see my video somewhere that I didn't put it. (But I amuse easily).

It's not the heat...

2009-03-09T21:57:00.004-05:00

What is the the maximum room humidity for a piano to be playable?

In general, I don't know. But right now, for my piano, it seems to be about 60%.

I used a humidifier during the winter to keep the humidity up to a level comfortable for the piano. But in the space of a week the temperature has jumped in CenTex, humidity is into the 60s and my baby is suffering. I have one hammer that's sticking pretty badly. A few dampers are a little sluggish. And in general the action just feels a little less responsive... a little less crisp. (Or maybe I'm just playing badly these days.)

Anyway, I'll break out the dehumidifier. But humidity in the low 60s shouldn't be a problem. I'm sure the action still just needs some first-year adjustments. I've heard it's pretty common to have sticky keys/dampers in the first year.

Paging Gary....

Piano Lid Pillow!

2009-03-02T21:29:00.003-06:00

Behold my new, one-of-a-kind, Essex piano lid pillow, custom-made by my wonderful wife, Johanne:

If you're wondering what a piano lid pillow is, don't bother Googling it. The Internet doesn't know what it is either. It's a cushion that sits on the lid of a grand piano so that when you fold the front part of the lid over it doesn't rest directly on the back part of the lid and mar the finish.

I've been hunting for one for months, but nobody makes them. The only one I've ever seen is made by Estonia pianos. When you buy an Estonia piano, you get a lid pillow with it.

So Johanne made one for me from an Essex polishing cloth. I expect that this post will now be the only Google hit for "piano lid pillow".

Forest: Cuba

2009-02-24T16:21:00.006-06:00

Here is Cuba.

Cuba

It's one of the few guitar+bass tracks on the album where the timing wasn't a complete mess (except at the beginning and during a couple of the breaks). It's also one of the few tracks where listening to the backing vox doesn't cause me physical pain.

I think Thom was planning to do the solo on guitar, but I had been noodling around with some Latin stuff on bass and we thought it might fit. The main bass on Cuba was my old Yamaha TRB-5p, but I played this solo was on my Steinberger XL-2A. I had the Steinberger strung up tenor (A-D-G-C) in those days because I was trying to learn Monkey Businessman off of Michael Manring's Thonk album, which had been released in 1994. Between the high tuning, the EMG pickups and the SansAmp, that bass cut through the mix like a buzzsaw. When I later replaced the TRB-5p with the TRB-JP, I was able to do both bass parts live on the same bass.

Thom played the mando himself on the track.

Forest: She Makes Me

2009-02-21T22:35:00.003-06:00

The only gospel song in Thom's catalog:

She Makes Me

Ok, it's not really gospel. It's just a simple, pretty song. But the chord progression (I-III-IV-I) screams gospel to me, and I wasn't able to resist pulling out a bag of gospel clichés in the piano and organ parts.

This is one of the few songs on the album where the feel isn't too rushed. Somehow we were able to relax on this one. But the lead vocal needs to be dragged a little. Nowadays, you'd just nudge the vocal track by 50 ms or so. I did this to the lead vocal on Life is a Circle off of Twice the Usual. It completely relaxes the vocal part. But in 1995, recording to analog tape, you did the best you could and lived with it.

The piano (E-mu PROFormance again) and organs (Roland JV-1080) were tracked separately (they're different parts). But when we played this song live, I would just layer the E-mu with the XP-50 and it came out pretty close to the same thing. I still like the organ sound for the solo, but dislike the main background organ sound in the verses.

And I still really like the gospel organ solo (starting at 2:58). It's just one B3 cliché after another. In particular I'm digging the four descending "blue" figures starting at 3:34.

On the down side, there's too much compression again on the acoustic guitar. I wonder why we thought we needed it. And the doppler effect of the Leslie simulation on the B3 organ just makes it seem out of tune. (A Leslie is a speaker that spins around inside a cabinet. It adds tremolo because the speaker is alternately louder (facing you) and quieter (facing away). It also adds vibrato because the speaker is sometimes moving towards you and sometimes away from you, causing a rise and fall in pitch like an approaching/retreating ambulance siren). In hindsight, I probably should have just turned off the Leslie simulation. (For the record, this is also why the organ at the end of Even After All This Time from Twice the Usual sounds out of tune).

The timing gets sloppy at the end, too.

But overall, a pretty cool song.

Forest: Could Have Been

2009-02-20T09:58:00.003-06:00

Here's where things start to get a little scruffy.

Could Have Been

I really like the lyrics for this song. At first blush, they're positive: the verses are full of pleasant imagery and the chorus has explicitly positive phrases. But the "it could have been" raises doubt, making the ultimate message ambiguous.

Marty Jones suggested the crashing surf sound during the chorus. He happened to have just that sound in some sample library and triggered it directly from a button the front panel of the rack-mount sampler. I think I ruined this song for Thom some time later when I suggested it sounded more like a toilet flushing and he wasn't able subsequently to shake that impression. It didn't help that I also used to make toilet flushing sounds when playing this live.

Thom played the electric on this. He had some flavor of Fender Stratocaster and I think a Fender Twin Reverb amp. The lead part is ok, but I don't like the sound... again it's thicker, more phlegmy than it needs to be. But I love the sound of the rhythm electric (the part is in the chorus, hidden under the surf sound, and is mixed pretty low).

Technically, the recording is a mess. The acoustic sounds like it was recorded with a cheap mic (which I'm sure it wasn't) in the bathroom (which I know it wasn't). The timing of the bass part is terrible. The backing vox are cringetastic. And the tuning is just way off, all around. It's shocking how bad the tuning is on the whole album, really. I think I'll do a whole post on tuning and intonation (and all the work that went into it on Twice the Usual).

Nice Day for a Walk: A Video Test

2009-02-17T10:48:00.007-06:00

This post kind of stretches the boundaries of "a blog about my music projects", but what the heck. Let the blog police come after me.

If you've read my posts with videos, you know that I've been frustrated with the process and the quality. So I've been experimenting and I think I'm getting closer to finding the equipment, software and skills to produce better video.

The clip below is one such experiment. I shot it with a borrowed Canon HV-20 mounted on my own home-brew, totally ghetto steadi-cam. It was a very windy day, so there's plenty of camera movement, but not nearly as much as if I had shot hand-held.

I captured the video to hard-drive on my studio desktop computer because it's the only computer I have with a firewire card and a fast enough disk to handle the realtime HD transfer. Unfortunately, the only software I have on that machine that can capture HD is an old free version of Pinnacle. Strangely, Pinnacle can capture the HD stream and save it to an HD mpeg file, but then doesn't recognize the file format and can't edit it. The only software I have that can edit the HD file is Movie Maker HD on my Vista Ultimate machine (which doesn't have a firewire card). But my expectations of doing video on computer have been so reduced that I'm actually quite happy with this rigamarole of a process!

You'll have to go to vimeo to view the clip in HD because vimeo (understandably) doesn't allow embedding of HD. If you watch the video here in the blog, it will play in standard definition.

Nice Day for a Walk from Ken Barker on Vimeo.

Forest: Why

2009-02-15T09:48:00.003-06:00

This is another one of my favorite songs, and one of Thom's saddest songs for me. Obviously, there's a lot of competition for that title. But Why is sad in a different way. It doesn't have the angry hurt of some of the others. The calm, detached acceptance in this one is what makes it go deeper.

Why

If I remember correctly, Thom had a basic chord outline and asked me to write a piano part. Unlike others that ended up keyboard-only, Thom planned that this one would be from the git-go. In fact he may have come up with the original structure on piano. But my memory is a little fuzzy on that.

The take is ok... but it's still obviously done under the stress of pay-by-the-hour professional studio time. It's just not relaxed and there is some sloppy timing. The piano take for Down By Your Fire is better in this regard, but I had been playing Fire for years, whereas my Why part was only a week or so old when we recorded it. Once again, the piano is the E-mu PROFormance/1+, and it's not bad, even out there by itself.

I think three things give the piano part its particular character:

the use of sixths and ninths all over the place
splitting four-note chords into two consecutive two-note chords (first and third note in one, second and fourth in the other); this adds rhythm and opens up what would otherwise be more dense voicing
horizontal and vertical "shifting" of the split chords; vertically there is shifting among different inversions of the chords up and down the keyboard; the solo is really just different shifts of figures already played in the chorus; horizontally, the split chords shift to different beats in subsequent bars and also shift off the beat occasionally

We recorded the piano first and then added the vox, so Thom had to get the timing just right to anticipate the re-entry of the piano after the big pauses at 1:02-1:04 and 2:33-2:35. I think Marty and I made him redo those entries like 20 times each. And the temperature in that vocal booth just kept rising and rising. Haha. Good times.

Forest: I Know Me

2009-02-12T20:49:00.003-06:00

There's lots I like about this song, and plenty I don't like about the recording. But the former definitely trumps the latter for me.

I Know Me

The song also has a special significance for me. When we recorded this in August, 1995, Johanne and I had been dating for about four months. But our pre-dating "courtship" took place over winter 94-95. We were Ph.D. students together at the University of Ottawa, with the Rideau Canal just outside our office. Most days, after work we'd lace up and go for a skate down the canal in the dark, getting to know each other, falling in love. The line:

And where ice on Rideau Canal lights
Glistens in skating lovers' laughin' eyes

can still make me mist up a little.

Thom's voice kind of cracks on the word "free" at 3:31; I remember lobbying to re-record the line, but we left it in. I don't remember why we did, but to this day it's my favorite moment of any recording of Thom's vocal. It's raw emotion in a song that's already emotional for me and I honestly still get a chill when I hear it.

Where the snow flies free,
Where the cold cuts the skin...

It's the only cold weather imagery that makes me miss the Canadian winter.

As for the technical side...

There's way too much compression on the acoustic guitar; this sparse arrangement didn't really need much.

I think I came up with the string parts in the studio. We decided the track needed something extra. Marty found violin and cello patches on the Roland JV-1080 and I noodled for a bit and then recorded them. They're simple and they build verse-by-verse until dropping out to let Thom finish alone. I like the counter-melody they add.

We also re-recorded this in a more radio-friendly arrangement a few years ago when Thom was still in Austin. I should try to find the newer version.

Forest: Down By Your Fire

2009-02-08T19:07:00.005-06:00

Down By Your Fire was the last song on Forest. But I'm blogging it first because I think I think it's the best track on the album.

Down By Your Fire

This is a great song. A great, great song. Thom used to play it with guitar only. And we played a guitar + piano version on the Regent Street album (1991). Listening back to the Regent Street version, I notice that some of the Forest piano part was already in place. Over time I started adding more of Thom's guitar part on piano and eventually he stopped playing guitar on the song altogether.

The instrumental part is much more relaxed than other tracks on the album, and has better time and feel. It's probably because I'd had the part under my hands for years by the time we recorded it (in contrast with the song Why, where the piano part was written just prior to recording it).

The keyboard sound is my E-mu PROFormance/1+ layered with my Roland D-50. The PROFormance piano sound can't really compete with modern, multi-layer, disk-streamed, non-looped, gigabyte sampled grands. But it actually holds up ok in this context, even out there all on its own. I guess the one part of the sound that bugs me is the ridiculous sustain. But in 1995, this was a really good piano-in-a-box (and it was already five years old at the time).

It seems I have some deficiency that renders me incapable of finishing a song on a straight major chord. I have to play the ninth. Chris Chénier's wife Nathalie once asked him after one of our shows: "Why does Ken always play that funny note at the end of every song?"

I miss playing this song with Thom.

Forest: The Recording

2009-02-07T10:02:00.014-06:00

We recorded the album at the old Sound of One Hand studio in Ottawa (when it was still in The Market, before they moved to that business park off Innes Rd. and ultimately changed their name to the considerably less inspired Liverpool Court Studios, after their street address). Marty Jones was the engineer.

Despite what I said in an earlier post, I think this was before Sound of One Hand got their Neve console. I'm pretty sure that's not the Neve in the photo. But we did record to two-inch, 24-track tape. You can see the tape machine in the photo below, along with various testaments to Marty's shark obsession.

What other equipment did we use? I'm pretty sure Thom used his blue Yamaha acoustic. I don't remember what vocal mic we used, but it was a large diaphragm condenser. For keyboards I used my Yamaha KX-88 controlling my Roland D-50, the studio's E-mu Pro/Formance (piano module) and the studio's Roland JV-1080. We also used the studio's sampler, though I can't remember exactly what it was... probably an Akai S-series or Roland S-series. I'm thinking maybe a Roland S-550.

For bass I used my old Yamaha TRB-5p direct through an original Sans Amp DI. What a great little box. The original Sans Amp didn't have the knobs on the outside (like its successor, the Bass Driver DI), so you had to unscrew the back and dial in your settings with those tiny little plastic screws. That meant that you'd usually come up with a sound you liked and leave it that way. The sound Marty liked (the sound everybody liked back in '95 when they discovered the Sans Amp) was with the "Drive" cranked. So that's the sound on Forest. It's probably got too much dirt/wool/Ampeg for my current tastes, but it's sure full of character. And I'll be darned if it doesn't sound like we mic'd up a big ole tube amp through a huge cab. I also used my Steinberger XL-2A for the solo on Cuba.

Ok. Enough mumbo-jumbo. Let's get to the music!

Forest: The Album

2009-02-06T21:14:00.005-06:00

Listening back to The Forest for the Trees after all this time, two things stand out for me. First, the songs have held up; the songwriting is really the highlight of the album by far. Second, many of the recorded tracks are a mess. The timing is sloptacular and everything is out of tune. Thom, if you're reading this, I mean no offense. My bass parts and bvox are the worst of all.

But in spite of the warts, I still really enjoy listening to many of these tracks.

So I'll probably only blog the less egregious tracks. Or maybe I'll leave the rough ones until a later date when nostalgia defeats shame. Either way, lets jump right in.

The Forest For The Trees

2009-02-01T10:39:00.005-06:00

The Forest For The Trees was the third Thom Barker album, and it was our first CD. Marty Jones was the engineer at Sound of One Hand studios in Ottawa, where we recorded it between August 1 and September 14, 1995. I forget how many sessions there were, but I remember there were some longish gaps during the recording and between the recording and mixing while Thom scared up the money to pay for it all. I'm guessing there were at least a dozen sessions. It's probably been close to ten years since I actually listened to Forest, but I remember being pretty impressed by the sound quality at the time. Marty was a good engineer, and Sound of One Hand had recently bought a great Neve console. Also, we were recording to 2-inch tape. So, as you'd imagine, the raw sound was kind of like butter melting on hot asphalt in the summer sun (poetic, no?).

Well, I listened to the album yesterday and two things struck me:

In comparison, the quality of Twice the Usual is much better than I've been giving it credit for
In spite of some truly cringe-worthy moments, there is some Gold! on Forest

Listening to the album also brought back a flood of memories from the sessions, inspiring me to do a little Forest-blogging. Thom has given his permission for me to bare the skinny and post the audio. Are you guys in?

Update (2/07/2009): Now that I think of it, I'm pretty sure Sound of One Hand didn't yet have that Neve console.

Video: Danza de la Moza Donosa

2009-01-03T17:35:00.002-06:00

Danza de la Moza Donosa (Dance of the Graceful Young Maiden) is Ginastera's second piece from the Danzas Argentinas. I like playing this piece a lot, but I can't seem to play it at the speed indicated. Every couple of months I force myself to speed it up, but it gradually settles back down to the tempo I'm playing it in the video. For some reason, this is its natural speed in my brain.

The video itself turned out ok, I think. But I really need to find a camera with manual exposure control (or even just fixed exposure). I wore a brighter shirt in this one to fool the camera into making the video darker than the last one. But the automatic adjustments it makes as I'm moving around are really annoying.

All part of the big experiment, I guess.

Ginastera: Danza de la Moza Donosa from Ken Barker on Vimeo.

Video: Laments or The Maiden and the Nightingale

2008-12-30T18:21:00.007-06:00

The Maiden and the Nightingale (Quejas ó la Maja y el Ruiseñor) is the fourth piece in Enrique Granados' Goyescas suite for piano. It's not really fair to say that one piece of music is "better" than another, but I think it's probably safe to say that Goyescas is the best music ever written by anybody.

I like to think of Maiden as a battle between a young maiden who is determined to be dark and dramatic and a little bird intent on pulling her out of her funk. You can hear the bird fluttering in and out through most of the piece. But you'll have to listen through to the end to find out who wins.

Granados: Laments or The Maiden and the Nightingale from Ken Barker on Vimeo.

Video: Pathétique Sonata, 2nd Movement

2008-12-28T11:25:00.004-06:00

This is the second movement (Adagio Cantabile) of Ludwig van Beethoven's Pathétique Sonata (Sonata No. 8). It's another piece my mother used to play that has always stuck with me. I decided to learn it because it's a (relatively) simple way to add entertainment to the repertoire. Many people recognize and love the piece. Even if you've never heard it, it's recognizable because it's been "quoted" a lot in popular music.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I've made some changes to my recording setup. Better lighting makes the video a little clearer. Better mic pres and converters make the audio much better, and I'm recording in stereo. But the biggest improvement is probably due to using a different video hosting service. YouTube is great for quantity and variety, but the video and audio quality are terrible. Google Video was supposed to be better, allowing higher resolution and stereo audio. But after uploading the video I found it was no better than YouTube. I finally settled on Vimeo. I love this site. They actually play the video at the quality of the uploaded file! Brilliant!

So here goes... let's hope the embedding works properly.

Beethoven Pathétique Sonata (2nd Movement) from Ken Barker on Vimeo.

Art Facts Video -- Take 2

2008-12-27T21:30:00.006-06:00

I was pretty disappointed with my first attempts at piano video. The audio quality was nasty, the video was iffy, and of course, YouTube does its best to convert mediocre to horrible. So I'm trying again, attempting improvements on all three fronts. Johanne bought me new mic pres and converters for Christmas, so the audio should be much better. I picked up a thousand watts of lighting to improve the video. And I'm going to try streaming off of Google Video instead of YouTube, so I can at least have stereo audio in the video.

I'll post the first new video as soon as Google has finished processing it. In the meanwhile, here's a picture of my recording setup. In the photo, my new lights, my Essex with two AKG mics on it, and on the half-wall, left-to-right: hygrometer, metronome, headphones, Lexicon Omega (mic pres and converters), trackball, keyboard, monitor. Of course, Johanne's paintings hang off the picture rail, with a couple of gaps for the recently sold.

2x: Finding Twice the Usual (P.S.)

2008-12-07T11:33:00.003-06:00

Just noticed that Twice the Usual is also available on Amazon.com. You can download the whole album or individual songs. These are mp3 versions, so the sound quality won't be as good as if you buy the physical CD from Thom's website. But it's still pretty cool to see the album on Amazon.

2x: Finding Twice the Usual

2008-12-05T22:10:00.002-06:00

What would prompt me to blog about 2x after almost a full year since the last post?

Two things.

First, after the album was manufactured/released, I took down the unmastered recordings linked from this blog. That's because Thom is trying to recoup some of the costs of production (by selling the album instead of giving it away free). It's also because the recordings were unmastered, and considerably inferior to the finished product. But I still get some clicks on those audio links, so I thought I'd make the album a little easier to find. The links now take you to the 404 page at art-facts.com, which itself now has a link to Thom's website, where you can buy the album.

Second, I never blogged about the mastering session. It's definitely blogworthy (a low bar, admittedly), but not today. Short version: I took the recordings to Nick Landis at Terra Nova Mastering. Terra Nova is one of the premier mastering houses anywhere, and Nick has ears the size of satellite dishes. Going to him was kind of like asking Picasso to put some finishing touches on your pencil doodles: he'll probably make some great improvements, but bring a mop and bucket for your self-esteem.

To be continued....

Art Facts Facelift

2008-11-28T12:01:00.004-06:00

I'm fooling around with a new look for the blog.

Leave a comment if you like it or if it makes your brain bleed. (And let me know what browser you're using, especially if it looks hinky).

And be sure to check out the new "Labels" menu below the "Blog Archive" on the right. I went back and put labels on all the old blog posts. Now you can jump directly to all posts with audio, or all posts about recitals, etc.

Repertoire and the After-Work Musician

2008-11-27T11:23:00.003-06:00

Professional musicians often list their repertoire on their websites. Sometimes I look at these lists and think: how can you have 100 pieces up to performance level? Well, I guess if you practice 8 hours a day you could run through that repertoire beginning-to-end once a week and still have 5 days to really practice.

But what about us working shlubs? Is it possible to build (and maintain) a decent repertoire with 8 hours of practice a week?

Last November I was struggling just to get two pieces up to performance level. When I finally got them, others started to come more easily. I now have 13 pieces at performance level. But I certainly can't run through all of them every day, or even every two days and still hope to work on rough spots or new stuff.

But I'm finding that while some pieces need constant attention, others can go several days without playing. And when I do play them, the trouble spots are immediately obvious, because they're the spots that don't survive several days' neglect. So in a way, my practice is more focused.

To make this work, I keep a one-page chart with all the pieces I know (and new ones I'm learning) listed down the left, and the days of the month along the top. Every day I put codes in the grid for the pieces I worked on. If I simply played through a performance of the piece from memory, I put a "P" in the grid. If I worked on the piece, it gets a "W". If I played through with the music it gets an "M". So when I sit down to practice, I can look at the chart and see which pieces have gone the longest without attention.

Anyway, it seems to be working really well. I'm pretty confident that I could pull a full recital program together with about a week's notice. And I can certainly sit down and play a piece or two if people ask... and probably something different from the last time I played for them. I'm also making progress on 3 or 4 new pieces.

I'm curious to see how far this routine will take me. Will it continue to work with 20 pieces? 25? Or am I already at the limit for the number of hours I put in?

ConcART Review

2008-10-25T10:24:00.003-05:00

The party was a great success. In total, we had about 65 people show up over the four hours, and Johanne sold six pieces. 50 people came in time for the recital, almost all of them arriving in a flood between 1:00pm and 1:05pm. They took their seats right away and by 1:15pm we had a packed house and were ready to start on time.

I gave a little introductory spiel and then launched into the program. Luckily, the people who came were interested in hearing a classical piano recital. So we had a very attentive and very appreciative audience of 50 crammed into our living room. And I think their attentiveness rubbed off, because I was able to focus intently on the music and it went great. I'd say it was one of my best performances ever.

A couple of highlights...

Many people commented that they appreciated the little stories I told before each piece. Instrumental music can sometimes be pretty abstract, so if you know to "listen for the little bird fluttering in and out" or "the right hand is supposed to sound like water cascading over rocks", it adds a more concrete dimension.
I was most worried about The Maiden and the Nightingale, since it's a difficult piece and this was my first real performance of it. But it went great. I described it as a battle between the maiden trying to be dark and dramatic and the happy little nightingale trying to snap her out of it. I suggested that people listen and decide for themselves who wins the battle. Later, one of the guests wrote in the guestbook: "The nightingale got the last word!"
The Danzas Argentinas are always a great way to end a program. The big build up to the final, piano-wide up-down glissando and crashing cadence puts an exclamation mark on everything. The audience responded with laughs and shouts and a blast of applause that seemed to go on and on.

I should also note that things wouldn't have gone nearly as well without the help of several people. In particular:

Gary, for tuning and adjusting the piano
Libby, for handling the art sales
Laura, for working the back door during the recital
Melissa and Debie, for keeping the food and drink areas stocked and clean during the party

We're encouraged by the good results to do it again, maybe twice a year. That means I have to go get to work on repertoire!

ConcART!

2008-10-03T21:57:00.007-05:00

On Sunday, October 19, Johanne will be having her first solo Art Show at our home here in Austin. The show will feature her latest pastel painting series on Rocher Percé, her new wood burnings and a couple of new wood sculptures.

To kick off the show, I'll be giving a recital on my new piano. We're expecting 40-50 people. (If you're in Austin, or think you could make it and didn't receive an invitation, let me know. I'll get one out to you).

I wanted to give a longish recital. Most other opportunities involve multiple performers where each is limited to one or two pieces. This is an opportunity to stretch out a little and design a nice program with some variety. The problem is that when I laid it out, it was too long. And removing pieces is a sad thing. But after much hair-pulling, I've whittled it down to...

1. El Puerto (Albéniz)
2. Sonetto 104 del Petrarca (Liszt)
3. Sonata No.8 (Pathétique), 2nd movement (Beethoven)
4. Impromptu Op.90, No.4 (Schubert)
5. Quejas, ó la Maja y el Ruiseñor (Granados)
6. Danzas Argentinas (Ginastera)

There are a couple of glaring omissions, but even still, I'm worried it's a little long. I figure it runs about 40 minutes. Make it 45, since I plan to tell a little story to introduce each piece. But I think the flow/variety of the program would suffer if I removed any more. (Not to mention... it would break my heart).

So what do you think? Would you sit through those 45 minutes? Even if you were coming mainly to view the art?

Recital Recap

2008-09-28T20:07:00.005-05:00

I played my second recital at the Orpheus Academy Saturday evening. They have pretty regular recitals for their students. One of my neighbors studies classical guitar there, and she talked to the owners about letting me participate in their "Adult Impromptu Recital" series.

The first recital was last Spring, and I played El Puerto (Albéniz) and Sonetto 104 del Petrarca (Liszt). The piano in their recital hall was an older Petrof and when I got up to play I noticed that it had only two pedals... no Sostenuto. I use the Sostenuto all over the place in El Puerto, so I offered to play something else. But they had a nice Kawai (probably an RX-2) in another room, so I played there. I'm sure they were all thinking "Who is this ass... thinks he need three pedals!". Anyway, it went well, and I really liked the atmosphere and the attitude of the organizers and students.

This time I played the three Danzas Argentinas (Ginastera). We used a different room again. The piano was an old Sohmer & Co. It belonged to the owner's grandfather. The strings were pretty dead, but I snuck the lid open before the recital and it was fine. I thought the performance went really well. The Danzas are a challenge to perform. If you can maintain calm, they're fine. If you tense up at all, you lose the handle and it's a trainwreck. I'm glad to say no trains left the rails.

And while I'm recapping recitals, I might as well mention my Ottawa recital, too. I guess it wasn't really a "recital". I thought it would be fun to get my Ottawa music teachers together and play for them. My mother's friend Paulette offered her new Steinway B for the event. What a gorgeous piano. In attendance: mom, dad, Johanne, Paulette, my piano teacher (1978-1985) Edith Orton and my Music History teacher (1983-1986?) Sandra Cooke. I played most of the old pieces that I've worked back up, but also threw in an unripe performance of Granados' Quejas, ó La Maja y el Ruiseñor from Goyescas.

Me at Paulette's Steinway B (next to Paulette's Baldwin L1)

I'd like to keep a record of these performances, and the blog seems like as good a place as any, so...

December 21, 2007: Cal Janacek's Christmas Recital

Étude Op.10 Nr.3 (Frédéric Chopin)
El Puerto (Isaac Albéniz)

May 24, 2008: Orpheus Academy of Music Adult Impromptu Recital

El Puerto (Isaac Albéniz)
Sonetto 104 del Petrarca (Franz Liszt)

August 8, 2008: Paulette's House

El Puerto (Isaac Albéniz)
Arabesque I (Claude Debussy)
Sonetto 104 del Petrarca (Franz Liszt)
Danzas Argentinas (Alberto Ginastera)
Quejas, ó La Maja y el Ruiseñor (Enrique Granados)

September 27, 2008: Orpheus Academy of Music Adult Impromptu Recital

Danzas Argentinas (Alberto Ginastera)

Video: Danza del Viejo Boyero

2008-09-15T09:14:00.003-05:00

This video was really just me experimenting with the camera and audio equipment. But I've been hoping to get a little less formal about posting here, so what the heck.

Here's Alberto Ginastera's Danza del Viejo Boyero. Of course, the downside to posting this is now I have to do videos of the other two Danzas Argentinas. (And by "downside" I mean either "downside" or "upside").

Video: Sonetto 104 del Petrarca

2008-09-03T09:56:00.004-05:00

Here's the product of my second video adventure. This time the lighting and video quality are quite a bit better. Thanks to my friend Bassett for lending me a real video camera. I still need to work on improving the audio quality, but I'm actually quite happy with the performance. And I'll take a decent performance over video/audio quality any time.

I was recording the video on the Labor Day holiday, and every time I hit Record, somebody on the street would start making a bunch of noise, or Maple would walk by and shake her collar, or Shiner would start meowing. Then around two o'clock in the afternoon, the animals settled down, the neighbor across the street stopped grinding metal plates and the neighbor next door put away the lawn mower. I sat down, hit the red button, and that was it.

The piece is Franz Liszt's Sonetto 104 del Petrarca, one of my favorites to play.

Pianoversary

2008-08-24T16:42:00.006-05:00

One year ago I was driving a rental from Regina to Saskatoon to catch a flight to Minneapolis where I would end up having to spend the night before flying to Memphis trying to get to Austin.

I was on my way home from the Antonini family reunion where my uncle Marty entertained, my brother and my cousins performed, and my aunts and uncles sang and danced. At one point in the weekend, Uncle Lui asked if I would play the piano. I couldn't: I didn't have a single thing I could sit down and play.

On the long road home I had the chance to reflect. It sucked that I didn't have anything to show for all the lessons, practice, recitals, competitions and exams. I decided I needed to get it back.

The story from then on appears in this blog. After one full year, I've built up a decent repertoire, played some recitals, made some recordings and bought my first piano. And I feel like I'm playing better than ever. So Uncle Lui, next time I'm up north and there's a piano nearby, I have some pieces I'd like to play.

Until then, Happy Pianoversary!

Art Facts Video

2008-07-23T09:25:00.006-05:00

I was hoping to post a video of the new piano shortly after it arrived. But man, there's a lot of hardware and software that just doesn't work well. I'm not going to rant about all of it here, but I would like to single out YouTube for not being able to maintain the audio/video sync in .wmv files. Amazing. If I figure out a workaround, I'll post a replacement video.

Anyway. The quality is kind of crappy and the piano is ready for its acclimation tuning. And there's a clam at the end and a minor train wreck in the middle. But it's time to post the darn thing.

Update (July 28, 2008): I've managed to improve the audio/video sync somewhat by kludge. This is the newer version.

Update (September 12, 2008): YouTube fixed their audio problems, so here's another version with better audio (but the sync problems are back... sigh)

Lyre Bottom Followup

2008-07-12T08:52:00.003-05:00

Well, I was wrong about the lyre bottom being the least important part of the piano. It turns out the pedals and pedal hinge blocks are attached to the lyre bottom, not the lyre box. Makes sense. So Steinway Dude showed up with a lyre bottom including new pedals. It only took a few minutes to remove the lyre, unscrew the lyre bottom and install the new one. (Man, a piano looks stupid without a lyre).

As luck would have it, the new pedals run a little smoother than the old ones. They're the exact same model, but they're aligned a little better and don't rub at all. It was on my list to have the old ones adjusted the next time the tech comes out, but now I don't have to wait. I made one small tweak to the damper lyre rod nut to shorten the damper pedal dead zone and now the piano plays better than ever.

Props to Steinway Piano Gallery and Steinway Dude for being so responsive. They replied to my email within an hour of my sending it and were at my house replacing the part just a few days later. I highly recommend them for all your Steinway piano buying needs.

What Shall We Do with a Broken Lyre?

2008-07-09T20:45:00.006-05:00

O misery.

I noticed the other day that the wood of my lyre bottom is chipped in the front corner on the una corda side.

"What's a lyre bottom?", you ask? Luckily, it's probably the most unimportant part of the piano. It's a rectangle of unfinished wood screwed to the bottom of the lyre (the pedal contraption thing). See the schematic:

Anyway.

I emailed Steinway Dude about it. He emailed me right back suggesting he could send someone out to look at it or I could send him a photo. So I got a couple of pix and it looks like it'll be pretty easy to replace. At first he said he'd need to take the lyre for two days. Man, my heart dropped. The thought of going without pedals for two days was totally depressing. I half considered calling off the repair so that I wouldn't have to part with the lyre. But the exposed screw scares me a bit from a structural point of view:

Luckily, S. Dude discovered he has a spare lyre bottom and he can replace it on site in about a half an hour. So he'll come and fix it Friday morning. I'll let you know how it goes.

More Piano Pix

2008-06-02T20:24:00.007-05:00

The delivery day pictures didn't really highlight the piano itself, so I tried to get some better shots. It's not in the brightest room in the house, but here it is.

All closed. Waiting.

Half-lid.

Open.

And finally, a closer shot of the keyboard and fallboard:

Delivery Day!

2008-05-30T13:38:00.013-05:00

Steinway promised to show up sometime between 10am and 11am, which is ok because I had a few things to do in preparation for the piano's arrival. The truck rolled up at about 9:45am and left less than a half hour later. Raymond and his assistant have done this before. This chronicle is a little lengthy and bloated with photos (and even video!). So let's get started.

It's here! It's here! I can only hope that everyone reading this will someday experience the thrill I got having a Steinway truck outside my house.

The movers are quick and efficient, but handle my newborn with great care. There's nothing sloppy about the way they move... you can tell they're watching every corner and bump.

Through the front door...
...and into the gallery. The legs latch into position and are then tightened by hand. But to make sure they're tightly latched, the movers whale on them with this huge Thor's Hammer. Raymond is at the beginning of a full-arm swing at the treble leg here.
Once the tail leg, treble leg and lyre are secure, they tilt the piano over into position before attaching the bass leg.

A couple more thumps by Thor and the bass leg is in place.

The piano is up. Raymond, please put away that hammer. I don't think my heart can take any more piano bashing.
But does it play well? Heck ya! (Our dog Maple seems to like it, too).
Who's a good dog? Who's a good dog!? I may be biased, but I think Maple kicks the RCA Victor dog's butt. And that's Kashmir on the half-wall trying to get up the nerve to jump inside for a closer look. If a thing has an inside and an outside, Kashmir prefers the inside.
Shiner finally decides to grace us. In the video he's trying to pretend he doesn't even notice the sudden appearance of the huge monolith that all the other apes are obsessed with. But as cool as he is, he still has to sneak a look as he passes by. Watch it again and notice Kashmir trying to climb inside from beneath this time.

Piano 101: Coda

2008-05-29T20:38:00.003-05:00

When I decided to start practicing again and build a program, I had no idea how obsessed I would become with the piano. I want to play them all.

I've had fun practicing, performing a little and recording some pieces to post here for family and friends. It's all been an absolute joy for me.

Hanging out at the Steinway Gallery was a roller coaster. Playing all those great pianos was a real high, but there was no way I would ever be able to get one. The less expensive Bostons were beautiful, but still out of reach. And there was no shortage of other good pianos I couldn't afford either. I finally got curious enough to ask about Steinway's relatively inexpensive "third string" line: the Essex. Like the "second string" Boston, these are pianos that are designed and sold by Steinway, but manufactured for them in Asia: Boston by Kawai in Japan and Essex by Young Chang in Korea (with one or two models built in China by Pearl River).

The biggest Essex is the 183, at just a sliver over six feet. It shares many of the design features of the Bostons and Steinways, including the wide tail of the four longest Steinways. I was really impressed with the 183, although the voicing and action of the floor model was a little uneven. When I mentioned it to my Steinway guy, he said he'd have his tech do some work on it. Over the next month, I went in every weekend to play it and give my impressions. And every week the tech would work on it some more. The tone and playability turned out exceptional. So the Steinway Gallery ended up with a floor piano set up exactly to my tastes... and a piano that I couldn't live without.

After more financing obstacles than I care to rehash, giving up expensive coffee, Trappist beer and ice hockey, I was able to work it out. Steinway delivers my brand new Essex EGP-183 tomorrow morning. My own piano. I'm so excited, I think I will barf.

So even though Piano 101 has come to an end, I expect that my new piano will inspire many posts to come. Stay tuned!

Piano 101: 10. Sonetto 104 del Petrarca

2008-05-27T20:54:00.003-05:00

Franz Liszt published some of his greatest solo piano music in three volumes he called Années de Pèlerinage (Years of Pilgrimage). The second year ("Italy") includes three pieces inspired by the Italian poet Petrarch. Sonetto 104 del Petrarca will be my final recording in this series. So sad.

The piece is one of my all-time favorites. It really showcases the piano, with singing melody, percussion, lush orchestral voicing and shimmering effects. I loved playing it years ago and I love it even more now.

Track 10: Sonetto 104 del Petrarca (Franz Liszt)

Piano 101: 9. Toccata pour le Piano Opus 54

2008-05-11T19:48:00.003-05:00

Jenö Takács was a twentieth century Austrian composer. According to my Austrian edition (Doblinger), this piece was written in 1946. The metronome marking is 96-108 half notes per minute. And as if anticipating our disbelief, the composer also notes that the total performance time is around four minutes. The composer's insistence notwithstanding, I couldn't bring myself to record it that fast. So my version has parts that get up to 96, but mostly hangs down in the low 90s or high 80s.

I decided to include this piece because my uncle Marty liked it so much. He came to visit us in Ottawa one time and I played it for him. He suggested that after finishing the piece, I should leap up, kick over the bench, knock out the lid prop and slam down the fallboard. I never took him up on his choreography, but from that point on I couldn't play the piece without it crossing my mind.

Track 9: Toccata pour le Piano Opus 54 (Jenö Takács)

Piano 101: 8. Impromptu Opus 90 Nr. 4

2008-04-26T19:28:00.002-05:00

I broke the rules on this one. These were supposed to be recordings of pieces I used to play many years ago, but I never played this one before this year.

Schubert's Impromptu is a piece that my mother used to play. Some of my earliest memories are of her playing it on her old Chopin upright piano. I couldn't have been more than four or five years old. But it was one of the pieces that got me interested in learning the piano and has stuck with me all these years.

I'm sure my father will recognize this piece, and probably my brothers and sister, too. But I wonder if any of my mother's brothers and sisters remember her playing it. I would love to hear any reminiscences.

Track 8: Impromptu Opus 90 Nr. 4 (Franz Schubert)

Piano 101: 7. Arabesque I

2008-03-23T19:37:00.002-05:00

Debussy's Arabesque I was probably the first piece I learned that you'd consider "concert repertoire". It must have been around 1982 or 1983, I think. The piece is an example of French Impressionist music, known for its suggestion of atmosphere. But I had a lot of trouble trying to capture the tranquility and mood in a recording. Nonetheless, it's one of my all-time favorite pieces to play. It feels like making music.

Track 7: Arabesque I (Claude Debussy)

Piano 101: 6. Danza del Gaucho Matrero

2008-03-07T22:41:00.003-06:00

The final Argentinian Dance is the Dance of the Cunning Cowboy. The opening instruction on the score is "Furiosamente ritmico e energico" ("furiously rhythmic and energetic"), and it doesn't let up from beginning to end. You really have to work out how to keep the energy up without hammering on every note, because your arms won't make it to the end. I've found that stressing the inner voices in the big chords gives power and brings out the melody while avoiding exhaustion.

There are plenty of examples of the 2x3 vs. 3x2 rhythm throughout, as well as a new twist in the chordal melody sections where Ginastera inserts some bars of 9/8 among the 6/8. That adds a 3x3 grouping to the mix. There are a few other bizarre accent patterns that can completely throw your timing if you're not careful.

Anyway. Strap on your seatbelt...

Track 6: Danza del Gaucho Matrero (Alberto Ginastera)

Piano 101: 5. Danza de la Moza Donosa

2008-01-30T20:15:00.000-06:00

The second of Ginastera's Argentinian Dances is the Dance of the Graceful Maiden. And I LOVE this piece... the close chromaticism in the melody... the wide open intervals in the harmony.

There isn't a lot of rhythmic action, but a classic accent figure from Spanish music appears a couple of times. The 6/8 bars are mostly accented 1-2-3-1-2-3 but Ginastera occasionally throws in a bar accented 1-2-1-2-1-2. The most obvious examples are at 1:29 and 2:01. You can hear the effect by reciting this little poem:

Muffin with Marmelade
Muffin with Marmelade
Muffin with Marmelade
Muffin Muffin Muffin

This figure also appears all over the place in Albéniz' El Puerto and in the other two Argentinian Dances.

Track 5: Danza de la Moza Donosa (Alberto Ginastera)

Piano 101: 4. Danza del Viejo Boyero

2008-01-19T07:38:00.000-06:00

Or Dance of the Old Cowherd, although I can't imagine anybody dancing to this piece, much less an old cowherd.

Viejo Boyero is the first of three pieces that make up Alberto Ginastera's Danzas Argentinas. These three were among the last pieces I studied with Douglas Voice.

Listen for the six long notes at the end: they're the notes of the six open strings of a guitar.

Track 4: Danza del Viejo Boyero (Alberto Ginastera)

Piano 101: 3. Villanesca

2008-01-06T20:57:00.000-06:00

Villanesca was probably my first exposure to the Spanish piano repertoire. My score has pencil markings from both Edith Orton and Jean-Paul Sevilla, suggesting that I worked on this piece toward the very end of my time with Mrs. Orton. That's when she was sending me occasionally to study with Jean-Paul and Douglas. Probably around 1984.

There's something so compelling about the mood of this piece to me. I always come back to it, and it always affects me. I think it's probably a combination of the stately, foreign sounds and my history with the piece.

I never studied much of the story of Enrique Granados. I know he was a Catalonian composer from around the turn of the century (19th to 20th). He's best known for his Goyescas suite, not the Spanish Dances suite from which Villanesca comes. I might get around to recording one of the Goyescas pieces eventually. We'll see.

Track 3: Villanesca (Enrique Granados)

Piano 101: 2. Étude Opus 10 Nr. 3

2008-01-01T10:04:00.000-06:00

If I had to guess, I'd say the piece I performed the most over the years was this Chopin Étude. Its nickname is "Tristesse", but I don't really find it sad. Maybe it's a little wistful.

The Chopin Études were intended to present technical exercises to students in the natural setting of enjoyable music. Chopin accomplished this blend so successfully that the Études have become part of the solo piano concert repertoire. The exercise in this piece is right-hand self-accompaniment. The right hand is playing two parts simultaneously: the obvious melody and a chordal accompaniment. The goal is to make the melody sing, standing out from the accompaniment, even though they're being played with one hand.

Track 2: Étude Opus 10 Nr. 3 (Frédéric Chopin)

Piano 101: 1. El Puerto

2007-12-28T19:36:00.000-06:00

Ok. I had another goal in getting back to the piano. I wanted to build my playing back up well enough to record my old repertoire for my parents. They had to listen to me practice this stuff every day. At the time they were probably sick of hearing it. But it's been almost 20 years, and I thought it would be nice for them to have a record of me playing again. The full project will take me a while, so the recordings will probably come slowly. But the first rough track is here.

I chose to do El Puerto, from Isaac Albéniz' Iberia Suite first. It was one of my favorite pieces to perform, and probably my favorite piece of piano music, period. It could use some polish, but here it is.

Track 1: El Puerto (Isaac Albéniz)

Piano 101: I Wish I Knew How To Quit You

2007-12-24T09:28:00.000-06:00

I was back at the Steinway Gallery again on Saturday.

Steinway Guy emailed me to tell me he just received two new Bostons that I should check out: a 193 (6'4") and a 215 (7'). So I went in Saturday to have a look. That makes it three weeks in a row I've been in there.

The new Bostons were great. The tone on the 215 was gorgeous, and it played a lot like a Steinway B. But its action was a touch mushier than the 193. So Steinway Guy says he's going to have his tech look at the 215 to see if he can firm up the action, make it as crisp as the 193. To be honest, I'd rather his tech see if he could voice the 193 to make it as warm as the 215. (Ya, like they're going to voice a piano to the tastes of some guy who can't afford to buy it). I'm really impressed with the Bostons, though. They sound and play great at half the price of the core Steinways. Of course, even half the price is a darn expensive piano -- well above the range of the Japanese pianos.

I also played the Pramberger 228 (7'6") again. It's a nice piano, great tone. A little loose. There's a buyer in San Antonio who wants it. Steinway Guy held on to it because he knew I was coming in Saturday and I had mentioned that I liked it. I had to laugh. I told him to go ahead and send it to San Antonio.

But the star of the show remains this one Steinway A. I've probably played four or five As (6'2") and four or five Bs (6'11") at SPG. But this one A is "The One". Number 578688 (or "688", as I like to call it) may be the nicest piano under 9' that I've ever played. It does everything I ask it to do, without complaint or hesitation. It's like it wants to make me play better. And the tone is like buttah.

Ok. This is getting a little weird.

Anyway. Steinway Guy is going to email when his tech has had a go at the Boston 215. Probably later this week. That'll make it four weeks in a row. Johanne is definitely starting to get suspicious.

Piano 101: Coming Out (Again)

2007-12-22T15:37:00.000-06:00

When I started practicing again I had no idea how much pure joy I would get out of just playing. I'm excited every time I step out to practice at the University or a friend's house, or even when I play bits and pieces on pianos at the store. And when I'm done my head is so full of music that walking and talking and chewing and breathing all feel locked to some rhythm. (I probably look like a dork).

But my goal of all this was to be able to play piano again in public on demand. And my target was Christmas. Well, today is December 22... and yesterday I played in a little Christmas recital at the home of a friend who teaches. I think that counts for "in public", even if the public was pretty small.

I performed two pieces: a Chopin Étude (Opus 10, Number 3) and a piece from Isaac Albéniz' Iberia Suite (El Puerto). They're kind of challenging to play, but I think it went pretty well. I hope to record these two over the next couple of weeks and post the recordings on this blog.

Afterwards, the host of the recital suggested I might be able to perform at one of the upcoming recitals at a music school she's involved with here in Austin. If it works out, I might be able to find leads to other recitals, too.

Hm... better get back to practicing!

Piano 101: Ancient History

2007-12-17T22:15:00.000-06:00

My mother is a piano teacher, so we've always had lots of piano music in the house. I remember sitting on the floor at her feet under the keybed of her old "Chopin" upright piano while she played. When I was old enough to reach the keys I started plunking out stuff myself. With my mother's help I began to make my way through the lesson books. This informal arrangement lasted for maybe five years, I'm guessing. I had stumbled my way to about a grade 5 level in the Royal Conservatory of Music (Toronto) grading system. We decided that if I wanted to "do it right", I needed a teacher. So at ten years old I began formal lessons with Edith Orton, a great Ottawa teacher.

Mrs. Orton guided me through the Royal Conservatory examinations until RCM grade 10. Along the way she encouraged me to perform in recitals and compete at the Ottawa Music Festival and the Canadian Music Competition. My repertoire was mostly from the RCM examniation syllabi, but also included, importantly, concerti for piano and orchestra. My orchestra was my mother, playing the orchestra parts arranged for second piano. As I advanced through the grades, Mrs. Orton also stressed the importance of occasional lessons with other teachers. I had the opportunity to meet with Jean-Paul Sevilla, Andrew Tunis and Douglas Voice, all three at the University of Ottawa at the time. But more than anyone else, Edith Orton taught me music, and I'm forever indebted to her for it.

After grade 10, Mrs. Orton decided I would benefit more by getting a new teacher. The obvious best fit was Douglas Voice at UofO. I think I must have been about 17 years old and probably starting grade 12 at High School. (High School in Ontario at the time went to grade 13). My two years of lessons with Douglas Voice prepared me for the ultimate Royal Conservatory exam: the Associateship Diploma in Piano Performance. Creative planning of my High School course schedule over the years allowed me to finish grade 13 spending only a half day at school. The other half I could spend practicing.

My lessons with Douglas were completely different from previous lessons. We would often spend our time discussing issues of interpretation or experimenting with different sounds and techniques to decide what might work for a given piece. I took the Associateship exam in the Spring of 1986, the same time I graduated from High School. I thank Douglas for bringing me to the "next level" of performance, and for introducing me to an incredible new world in the piano repertoire -- in particular the Spanish piano works of Granados, Albeniz and Ginastera.

After High School I had a bit of a premature mid-life crisis. I had always assumed I would find some kind of career in music. When I realized I didn't want to get a BMus, it became obvious that my options were pretty limited. I panicked. I got into computers. During the musical winter of my computer studies, I did manage to spend one semester at the piano, fulfilling a Humanities credit by doing a juried recital course in piano performance. It gave me the opportunity to study once more with Douglas Voice, one-on-one for the semester. We remained good friends, but that would be the last time we studied music together. Douglas succumbed to cancer in 1998. I wish I could play for him one more time.

Thom's Journal -- Say Goodnight

2007-12-16T17:07:00.000-06:00

Temptation is a harsh master who carries a double-edged sword. He came to me hard in the fall of 1995. I was traveling a lot to Texas and California. My then-partner was traveling a lot to Asia and Africa. I was lonely, but it wasn't just the physical separation, we were also growing apart emotionally. Just to make things more complicated, I started falling for another woman. The longing was both titillating and tortuous. The opportunity first presented itself in San Francisco, but I managed to avert temptation and say goodnight. I sat in my hotel room in Santa Clara for a while strumming my guitar. The plodding progression that would become the foundation for the song perfectly reflected my dark mood. I really did cry myself to sleep conflicted by longing, guilt, obsession, love, frustration and confusion. The next morning I was overcome by emotional numbness and wrote the chorus.

When we did Say Goodnight as a band, the crunchy distortion of the electric guitar gave the song an even more tortuous feel, which I like. I almost still like it better just me and acoustic guitar, though, because it's so much sadder that way.

Thom's Journal -- Not A Setting Sun

2007-12-16T17:04:00.000-06:00

Louis Fagan was one of the best friends I ever had and an extremely talented poet, lyricist and musician. When he died of a heroin overdose in 1997 after having ostensibly kicked the addiction, I was angry. What a waste. Adding to my emotional anguish was the fact I was in New York City at the time and incommunicado. Although several people tried desperately to get hold of me, by the time I got back, the funeral was over and for a long time I felt like I had no closure, especially since nobody ever shared the results of the autopsy with me.

Writing Not a Setting Sun was an exercise in catharsis. I had to get my anger and sadness out. I still intend to write a song celebrating Louis' short life and the wonderful music he created.