A few weeks ago I came across a tape in a cardboard box. The tape contained a few quick piano sketches I wrote during 1990-1991 and recorded while living in Japan. One tape-to-mp3 conversion later, and these six poorly recorded pieces are now in the Internet Archive with track titles and everything – like a real album, but without the talent.
There’s nothing terribly special about these pieces musically – they are, in fact, quite formulaic. And as my friend Steve once said to me, I apparently don’t know how to end a song. But they offer a fun little peak into my musical thinking before my undergraduate training, and make for good trivia. You’ll likely not care, but since I went to the trouble of digitizing and archiving them, I thought I might as well share.
If for some incomprehensible reason you’d like to download them, here’s a zip file of the Sketches mp3s complete with metadata and cover art – ready for your iTunes. It’s all licensed CC BY, naturally.
Driving home from a meeting last week I heard a truly atrocious recording of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, one of my favorite pieces for orchestra. The conductor’s interpretation (or complete lack thereof) had me screaming at the radio and almost putting my head through the steering wheel on a couple of occasions.
The best recording of this fabulous piece of music is, in my not so humble opinion, John Mauceri leading the London Symphony Orchestra – (previews available from Amazon at Rimsky-Korsakov: Scheherazade
). How does this relate to OCW, you ask?
For a number of years there has been an opinion among some in the OCW community that we need (only) one really excellent open version of each of the high enrolling GE courses like English 101. My experience in the car reminded me why several different versions of open courses are necessary. Obviously, a rather talented conductor had led a rather competent orchestra in this recording, and NPR had liked it well enough to play it. But it was truly awful. Painfully so.
In education, as in music, matters of taste matter. No, you won’t learn more or remember longer when the teaching is adapted to your so-called “learning style,” but the experience will be much more pleasant when it is. And who hasn’t sat through a class that made you want to put your head through the desk? I never want to have that excruciating experience again, neither with music nor with learning.
Published on
May 30, 2007 in
Uncategorized.
Tags: music.
This is a departure from my normal open content talk, so feel free to pass this post by if you’re not interested in music. Continue reading ‘Transcendental Generative Music’
