Doesn’t she look like Kokopelli?

Kokopelli

On the West Coast of Denmark, there lies a series of bunkers; remnants of the German occupation during World War II.  The bunkers were occupied by mostly young or partially incapacitated German soldiers, stationed on the peaceful beach sand against an enemy that never came.  Until May of 2008,  some of the most historically revealing bunkers had been covered with sand. After their sudden and unexpected uncovering, numerous tourists and bounty hunters were quick to remove many of the removable artifacts, despite some of it having gone to local museums.  However, the ironwork, wiring, stone, plumbing, and especially the wall drawings remained on this quiet July day when I, my wife, and my mother-in-law went to explore them.  It turns out that the wall drawings were most likely done after the fact, by a Dutch summer school a little over a decade ago.  More information is pending. 

Following is the full collection of photographs.  Please leave this album intact, and please refer all pictures to this page, if you feel the need to take parts of it out of context.  I dedicate these pictures, and the experience, to all those who suffer, and who have suffered, under the cruel hand of war. 

James Howard Young, Odense, Denmark, August 2008

Information and Purchase Details

WARNING:  The MPEG-2 plugin for QuickTime will play video but NOT audio from the .mod files that the Everio produces.  I am going to call support in the very near future, and will post a solution here when I find it.  

I recently had a need to play along with a soundfile at the Baroque standard of A=415. I was, however, interested playing along using a Piano at A=440. The way I did this was simply to drag the file to the desktop and then open it with QuickTime.  Using Apple-K will reveal a window that allows you to change the pitch of a sound file without changing speed.  Although this type of synthesis is generally disastrous, the result here is very good, definitely not perfect, but absolutely usable. Dragging the Pitch arrow to the next click up will raise the pitch by one half-step, roughly the amount needed to bump 415 up to 440 (see below)

Green arrow indicates start point, Red is the goal point

Happy Studying!

If you’re like me, you may sometimes have a hankering for some good old Bach Cantatas.  I would like to pass on some resources that I have found useful in this regard, the information is available to use, but in some cases is either copywritten, or for sale.  Enjoy!

Recordings

I am a big fan of the following groups:  All can be downloaded on iTunes, but I am not sure about other places as I haven’t checked.  I recommend iTunes, because of its simplicity and fair prices.  In addition, there is a good availability of most of the titles. To do a search in iTunes, I usually put the following keywords:  ”BWV” then “Artist” 

If you choose a low number for the BWV, you will be directed to the Cantatas.  You can also just use the word “Cantata” and iTunes will find it for you. 

Now to the groups:

English Baroque Soloists, John Eliot Gardiner: A classic and groundbreaking group, for whom we can thank for a significant amount of pioneering Bach research and performance.  They have a clean and glossy sound, but the online MP3’s are a bit lacking in production quality, from what I can hear.  This is very slight, and shouldn’t dissuade the eager buyer, in my opinion.   

The Bach Ensemble with Joshua Rifkin: This is one of the premiere American Bach ensembles, and their recordings are good, I mean Really Good.  Unfortunately, there are only a few examples available for download.  I am not sure how much they have released. Sound is dirty and honest, a great start for the drama lover.  

Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra with Ton Koopman: Great sound, great performances, a bit in the English Baroque Soloists category of glossiness and “cleanliness”, so to speak.  Recordings are excellent, but slightly marred by a certain attempt at perfection.

Bach Collegium Japan with Masaaki Suzuki (Recommended): Not only is their iTunes discography enormous, the Bach Collegium Japan are the acknowledged champions of Cantata recordings.  They have made countless breakthroughs in performance practice over the course of the last decade, and seem to still be going strong. The later recordings (2005 and up) are completely transcendental.  Jaems’ favorites (no, I can’t afford them all yet!) Volumes 21, 23, 25, 33, 28, 14, 27, 31, 13, 17, 36, 35, and 24.   Homepage

Translations

I can only recommend one site, and it is located here: link

The translations were done by Mezzo-Soprano Pamela Dellal, also a language scholar and personal friend of mine. Boldface is used for Chorale texts, and regular typeface for recitative and Aria texts.  For mixed movements, the reader can easily identify which is which. 

Scores

I know of one place and it is located HERE.  Excellent resource, with piano reduction.  Full scores are generally not available for free, but these reductions are. Thanks to whomever put it up: an excellent resource. 

Catalogue (BWV)

Oh, and one more thing: if you are interested in the numbering system of the complete canon of Bach works in the Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis, you can find a PDF version at the following link: Here

Happy listening!

Download audio file (Lieben.mp3)

Download PDF

The philosophy behind WP-Spamfree

The badge below is an actual, live updating counter of how many spam comments have been blocked in this blog using WP-Spamfree.  The first time I found about about WP-Spamfree, I thought it was a hoax.  The deal is that you can remove all Captcha tests (the blurry photos where people have to try to guess numbers and letters) or math questions, and basically open up your comments to the world, and WP-Spamfree will block all spam, or at least the majority of it. In the case of this blog so far, it has blocked all spam.  It seems too good to be true, but it isn’t.  

I highly recommend this great plugin for your Wordpress blog.  As of this writing, almost 3000 spambots have been thwarted.  Download it directly from Wordpress plugins: [link] 

Finale Notepad 2008 gives you the ability to import and export Midi files, and to open and save all Finale files from prior or current versions.  In addition, you are given access to some simple tools to edit scores before saving or printing them. You can also print pages to PDF.  

What kind of people could use Finale Notepad 2008?  Well, if you happen to come across a Finale 2008 file that you want to use, then Finale Notepad will let you open it and print it.  If you find a Finale 2006 file that you want to turn into a PDF so that you can send it to a colleague, then Finale Notepad 2008 will let you do that.  And if you find a Finale file online from basically any version you can think of, and you want to transpose it up a fourth so that it can be performed by Brass quintet, then you can do that as well.  It’s completely free. 

The idea, of course, is that you will be so enthralled by the capabilities of Notepad, that you will want to upgrade to the commercial version. There are 2 problems though: 1) Downloading Notepad requires that you create an account - and that you give a valid email address and fill out some survey and 2) You can’t purchase an upgrade online.  It’s a win-win situation, because the Finale people get some free advertising and information on their user base, and you get the ability to work with Finale files without paying an arm and a leg for the commercial version.  

Transposing a score with Finale Notepad 2008

Finale Notepad 2008 is not a substitute for its commercial cousin, but it is useful for people who aren’t Finale users, but who want to make simple edits to a Finale file before sending it onward, or using it themselves.  It is like the musical equivalent of Acrobat Acrobat, allowing users to send each other musical documents for the purpose of editing and/or usage.  Notepad 2008 has been overhauled and improved. Check it out here:

Finale Notepad 2008

One of the great features of the freeware FTP browser Cyberduck, is the ability to edit files directly from the file browser.  The reason I am writing this post, is because I used Cyberduck for about three years before I even knew you could do this. It’s possible that it hasn’t always been a feature, but recently I found out that they had added TacoHTML to the list of possible file editors, and I thought “hey what’s this?”.  As it turns out, I couldn’t get TacoHTML to run in this capacity, but that’s not so important, as we’ll see here:

Why is this useful?  Well, even if you are running a blog where you can do all of your editing online, there is still an occasional need for a good ol’ text file.  For example, I use a text file to contain the info text for this page. That way, I can add and take away games from the page from one place, without having to change the info for every single instance of the games.  In the old days, I would need to edit the file on my desktop, then upload it via Cyberduck.  

Now, all I have to do is set the Preferences->Browser to “Double click opens file in external editor” by setting the preference shown below:

You can tell Cyberduck to edit a file when you double click it

As I said before, I was not able to get TacoHTML to work as an external editor.  I did, however, manage to get Smultron to work. Smultron is a very good code editor and is completely free. If you download and install it, it will then show up as a selectable item in your Editor pulldown list in Cyberduck:

Using Smultron to edit files in Cyberduck

If you select Smultron from the list above, and you enable “Double Click opens files in external editor”, then you can begin interacting with online files directly from Cyberduck.  Next time you want to change a php file, just double click it, make the change, and then choose “Save”.  The file is automatically downloaded, saved, and uploaded again without any undo stress on you or your computer.  The process is very fast.  

If you don’t want to enable click to edit, then there are a few other options.  One is that the Editor should appear in the toolbar as shown below. In addition, you can use Apple-K to edit a selected file with your chosen editor.

Using the toolbar..

...Or use Apple-K to edit file

That’s it!  Don’t forget to donate…