What great memories I have of recording each of these Christmas Songs and Carols!
Roberta Silva and I collaborated to record twenty-two (22) Christmas pieces during four Christmas Seasons. These recordings are featured in five years of my past Christmas recording projects, and more than one recording was incorporated into other collections and projects.
For this Christmas-Project (2022), I collected all twenty-two recordings together for the first time. The combined audio-program is slightly over sixty-three (63) minutes long. I extracted each of these from five CD’s made in years past. I thought I might find some volume tweaking, at least between years, necessary. However, I left audio levels as they were originally mastered by me.
Rather than to debate with myself about program-order, I decided to present the songs in their original order by project and year. There are two exceptions: First, the version of “The Little Drummer Boy” included here is one to which I added instrumentation and “generated” vocal-harmonies that were not part of the original arrangement. Second, because Roberta’s performance of “Some Children See Him” is to me so wonderful, and usually brings tears to my eyes — I positioned it as the concluding work of this collection.
We improvised all of these arrangements except for “In the Bleak Midwinter” and “Some Children See Him,” which were arranged by Dave Grusin. I transcribed those using good speakers and ears, a sharp pencil, music-manuscript-paper, and lots of erasers. These two pieces are both on James Taylor’s Christmas Album, for which Dave Grusin arranged several of my favorite selections.
I concatenated all the songs into a single 63-minute-long audio file. For the bitrate-curious, I rendered the mp3’s that were output, at a handful of bitrate settings from 32kbps (32,000 bits-per-second) to 320kbps. 128kbps is “normal” with higher bitrates carrying more audio content that is “left out” in lower bitrate rendering. You won’t want to listen for long to the lower bitrate renderings, but I include them for those who might be interested in an a/b comparison. Be sure to listen to the 320 kbps one, it is the best.
Click on the mp3 player’s arrow to play. Then, <Click> in, or drag the player’s control-bar to advance or rewind.
The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine and siege of its Capitol, Kiev made me remember having played a piece, “The Great Gates of Kiev” by Modest Mussorgsky during the early years of my piano study. After rummaging through my music library, I could not find John Schaum’s “Brown Book” (Vol. F) in which the arrangement resides. I ordered the Brown Book online.
When I played “The Great Gates of Kiev” from “The Brown Book” as a child, I imagined grand portals opening to expose a splendid, shining city that was pronounced with two syllables rather than with only one, as is customary today. During my research for this post, I discovered that the gate portrayed in Hartmann’s painting was not the historic Grand Golden Gate that was largely in ruins by the 17th Century.
Mussorgsky composed Pictures At An Exhibition (1874) in response to a series of paintings by his friend, then-contemporary architect and painter, Viktor Hartmann (1834–1873). Mussorgsky’s original suite of compositions were written for solo piano. The best-known derivative orchestral arrangement was one by Maurice Ravel (1875-1937). I have a particular fondness for Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s version (1971).
Hartmann’s painting was his personal, proposed project that was to be called the “Heroes’ Gates” (“Bogatyr Gates”). Though his gates were formally proposed, they were never built. The historic “Golden Gate of Kiev” remained in ruins until the 1970’s when formal restoration began and reached some stage of completion in 1983 with the opening of its associated museum.
While searching, I found numerous arrangements and editions of this piece online at IMSLP (Petrucci Music Library). The piano-solo version I rehearsed and perform here is the original edition that was later revised and edited several times by persons other than the composer.
I have worked sporadically on this project since the Spring, 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. During this project, I experimented with selecting and then using different video “generators” that I attempted to aesthetically “match” to different sections of the piece. To render this, multiple recording passes were required, each pass producing a unique video from the audio. I then created titles and credits and concatenated the them using Fotomagico to create the final video.
I am attempting to avoid an overly detailed description of the multiple technical obstacles I overcame and the lessons I learned. Audio and video transitions between multiple videos was the most difficult aspect for me and is a skill on which I am still working to improve.
The virtual (software) piano I played is SynthogyIvory’s 10′ Italian Grand using a medium-resonant soundboard model. I individually generated each video using the audio software, Project Milk Syphon and selected visualization description-files (.milk) from a trove I have collected over time. These visualizations are a current incarnation of leftovers from the ancient Winamp visualizer that was ubiquitous at one time. The generated video, synchronized with its audio was then recorded using Siphon Recorder.
Because of a problem in which the resultant audio was being damaged during output, for each video, I was later forced to replace its audio with a different version that was pristine and that had not been damaged during previous processing. Involved with accomplishing this were issues necessary to maintain synchronization between the video and audio. Needless to say, it is imperative that the audio and video line-up perfectly or it is obvious to the listener/viewer. For this, extensive use of the Terminal command: ffmpeg was required.
I hope that you enjoy my productions of Moussorgsky’s “Great Gates of Kiev.”
I’m not sure whether my Mother taught “Scarf Dance” to me. If not, I taught it to myself as a child or early-adolescent. I have no memory of having ever performed this piece publicly. I remember that the piano-anthology/volume from which I learned the piece, was one that I never encountered during the time that I was collecting music from my parents’ estate, preparing for its closure/disposal. I only recently sorted through one of the boxes of music-items I preserved. That box of music contained a batch of sacred piano and organ music, a batch of my Mother’s compositions and arrangements that I never knew existed, and a batch of classical music that included a sheet-music version of “Scarf Dance” that was marked-up and was one of the same “Edition Beautiful” sheet-music, similar to many others that my Mother possessed and from which she received instruction while she was a music-student.
The composer’s name on my long-ago copy of “Scarf Dance” was C. Chaminade (1857 – 1944). It was not until I began rehearsing this piece to record it, when doing research for this post, that I learned (after all these years) that “C. Chaminade” was “Cécile,” a female.
When I saw Ms. Chaminade’s Wikipedia portrait, I was hauntingly-reminded of Jane Seymour’s character’s portrait in “Somewhere in Time” and the movie’s meme, “Come Back to Me…”
The sheet-music says that the tempo should be 54 beats-per-minute (b.p.m), where a half-note gets a beat. It is very unusual to specify the tempo of 3/4 meter by naming a half-note as the beat-unit. Rather, 3/4 tempos are more regularly specified as the tempo of a dotted-half, or the tempo of a quarter-note.
If the tempo-specification on the sheet-music was incorrect and it was rather intended that the tempo of a dotted-half should be 54 beats-per-minute (bpm), then the tempo of a quarter-note would be 162 b.p.m. Otherwise, if a half-note is 54 b.p.m. as specified, then a quarter-note’s tempo would be 108 bpm. At three quarter-notes per 3/4 measure, a dotted-half-note’s tempo would be 36.
I played/recorded the piece as I remembered it, without checking the tempo until after I recorded it and discovered that I performed the piece (ignoring some flexibility of tempo for phrasing) with the recording’s average tempo coming very close to the 54 bpm half-note that was specified. Additionally, my recording’s tempo seems very similar to an ancient gramophone recording from the Library of Congress.
I have had my Korg Kronos 2 for several months and have been familiarizing myself with its synthesizer-architecture and exploring its extensive internal sonic contents. This is the first time I have recorded it. My principal keyboards/synthesizers all have weighted, hammer-keyboard-actions that mimic the feel and playing-characteristics of a grand-piano. There are multiple grand-piano-sound-sets built into (the internal-memory of) the Kronos, that provide many adjustable parameters, including amount of sympathetic-string-resonance, lid-position, stereo-spread and damper-pedal-noise, to name a few.
The video was created using ProjectMilkSyphon to generate the video that is synchronized to the music. I recorded the generated video using Syphon Recorder. I then used the terminal-command ffmpeg to trim a little empty video from the beginning of the video, combine the video with the audio, and transcode the video to h264 and audio to aac. I then used Fotomagico to create titles, credits and the ending screen, and finally generate the video for this to be uploaded to YouTube. This workflow is still not automatic for me; but, it is getting easier.
I hope that you enjoy my recording of Scarf Dance.
The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine and siege of its Capitol, Kiev made me remember having played a piece, “The Great Gates of Kiev” by 
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