After a quite long hiatus, I’ve been getting back into piano performance for personal pleasure (say that 5 times fast…), revisiting some old pieces that have been on the border of my ability for some time, having decayed to a certain point, but never completely lost.

I’ve got the piano tuned (first time since I first got it a few years ago!) and the damper pedal adjusted so the dampers aren’t contacting the strings “even when it’s lifted”, which was resulting in tones that decayed quickly into their harmonics (“wrong pitches”) that lingered, muddying the sound until everything sounded indistinct. The dynamic range of this instrument is still nowhere near where I’d like it to be, but otherwise it actually sounds good (ignoring some mildly harsh harmonics… it is a spinet after all: shorter strings means they have to make them thicker to get the same pitch).

I’ve been playing the same old repertoire that I’ve never lost, but also revisiting a couple of Poulenc Novelettes that had fallen just out of reach (I’ve never entirely stopped playing the C Major one; it’s one of my all-time favorite piano pieces), and a couple of Samuel Barber’s delightful Excursions. I’m rediscovering the bluesy one, and finding it much easier to find the feel for it than I did back when I was preparing it for my sophomore concert at CSUS ten years ago. Guess I’ve managed to mature musically since then, even though I haven’t been playing seriously in, like, forever. I’m also working on a Bach fugue, and of course some ragtime (Joplin and Bolcom) and frightfully fast novelty pieces (Confrey: “Kitten on the Keys” and “Dizzy Fingers”).

While I’ve been working on these, I’ve picked up some recorded performances of them from Amazon on MP3 for reference. I’m amazed at how poor they are. The Barber’s the worst: the only performance of his stuff you can get on MP3 is John Browning’s, and he’s really pretty atrocious. He plays the fourth one about ten times slower than he ought to, and he gets the rhythms completely wrong in the blues one. Oh, but I found it on a Horowitz album just now—that’s bound to be better. There, downloaded! Hm… definitely better, but still mostly sucks. He’s pretty much lost on the blues one. Though he’s pretty dazzling with the fourth excursion, which always reminded me of bluegrass and banjos. 🙂 Horowitz improvises it a little in fairly nice ways, though there are a few abrupt tempo aberrations I find a little strange.

I’m pretty sure these two albums were the only references I had back at CSUS, too; I can recognize some of my own poor past choices from them—it’s no wonder if I wrestled with the blues Excursion with references like these! I’ve ordered a CD from Daniel Pollack, but I’ll have to wait a few days to find out how that one sounds.

Meanwhile, I also got a couple performances of Poulenc’s Novelettes, both of which have serious flaws. Cazal’s is technically accurate, but lacking in emotion; Parkin’s has beauty, but some significant errors. Unfortunately, I spent about a week “repairing” my version of it to match the Parkin version (in his trills), only to later realize that he was in fact doing it wrong.

I’ve decided to go ahead and put up some of the MP3s I have from my CSUS performance from a decade ago, including the Barber Excursions. They don’t have ID3 tags, and you may need to turn the volume up to hear them.

So, at this point, I’ve loaded up my Pandora profile with all my favorite music. Note that most of what it plays isn’t the music I’ve selected (though of course it plays that, too), but various music that shares traits with music I’ve selected. Pandora’s generally very good at finding new music that doesn’t necessarily sound much like the songs I’ve picked, but sound great anyway (and therefore, it’s a good source for finding new albums to buy).

Our other favorite source for music was the International Music Feed channel we could tune into on our Dish Network satellite TV. It played new music from across the globe. We discovered Joss Stone and Amy Winehouse through that channel… sadly, IMF is no more. It was bought and assimilated by another music channel, which seems a lot duller and plays a lot of documentaries. *sniff*

When I’m working on stuff at home, I like to listen to music, and the speakers on my laptop suck. We don’t have an “entertainment center”, so that pretty much means we listen to music on the TV. That was a lot easier when there was a decent music channel… but you can surf the net on Wii (if you buy the “Internet Channel” for $5, and have a wifi connection). I was dismayed to discover that it can’t handle Pandora (runs out of memory), so I looked around for alternatives.

It turns out that finetune.com is pretty decent, and has a wii-specific portal, so I’ve filled up my playlist on FineTune, and am pretty happy with that. Unlike Pandora, it plays exclusively my selected songs, so it may be a more accurate reflection of some of that… except that has a smaller selection of music, so it’s missing some important (but lesser-known) interests of mine. The Delgados, Propellerheads, Lunatic Calm, and Nickel Creek are among the under-represented. Besides that, you can only have up to three songs from any one given artist, so there’d be a lot more Massive Attack and Crystal Method in there to make up for the one Brittany Spears song I’ve got in there *blush* (“Toxic”. What can I say?).

I’m spending a lot of time lately listening to Greydon Square, an ex-Christian, atheist hip-hop artist. Both the lyrics and his style are awesome, and he’s received kudos for his work from Richard Dawkins and Penn Jillette. You can check out his website or his myspace account, where you can also hear his music (my favorite tracks from The Compton Effect are Squared, Say, and Extian).

ThinkGeek sells this.

(Seen on Digg.) A British pianist’s masterful renditions of classical piano works have turned out to be fantastic hoaxes. She, and her husband who produced the albums, was passing off entire albums from other artists as her own performances. You can read the story at New Scientist; and the detailed, but entirely accessible, and totally damning, analysis at Pristine Classical.

Apparently, they used existing recordings, and tweaked the speed by a miniscule amount (so the timing could come out different), and adjusted the EQ and stereo balance. Despite all of these precautions, they were still found out through an automatic algorithm when a fan inserted their CD and discovered that iTunes automatically detected the disc as a different (the original) performer’s work!