Music

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. ...

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? ...

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. ...