Disqus - Latest Comments for DSM

Re: Experiencing ‘Map of Rain Hitting Water’ in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy

DSM — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 21:41:57 -0000

Thank you, Brett!

Re: How likely to sing after radiation therapy for head-and-neck cancer?

DSM — Fri, 27 Jul 2012 17:36:38 -0000

So glad for your comment, Lauren! Gives hope and encouragement to many others! doug.

Re: Silent Steppe Cantata: Serendipitous transport, to places of unexpected illumination & healing

DSM — Tue, 24 Jul 2012 08:37:36 -0000

Thanks for the feedback (sorry DISQUS sometimes has problems posting comments)! The beauty of blog like CMT without ads or other ulterior stuff is that what I post comes purely from genuine interest and emotion, nothing else. It was your inspired composition and performance that captured my heart... as I believe it must do for anyone who allows the time to listen! Thank you again for this beautiful, beneficent work! dsm

Re: Chamber Music for Dressage Freestyle (kür)

DSM — Mon, 25 Jun 2012 14:55:42 -0000

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Re: Ingrid Stölzel’s Explorations of Time and Identity

DSM — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 05:39:22 -0000

More flute-clarinet-piano trio here:
(compositions by Moss, Ghezzo, Brooks, Mazurek, Oliver)
http://www.amazon.com/gp/pr...
http://www.innova.mu/albums...
http://itunes.apple.com/us/...
http://www.classicsonline.c...

or tárogató...
http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/p...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wik...

Re: Ingrid Stölzel’s Explorations of Time and Identity

DSM — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 05:18:31 -0000

It seems to me that Ingrid's composition would work well too with clarinet (or cor anglais or oboe) substituting for the soprano sax.

While Greenbrook Ensemble and others are commissioning new works and enlarging the repertoire for flute-sax-piano, an amenability to other ensemble configurations for which comparatively larger repertoire already exists is always a plus. The timbre of the sax in 'For the Time Being' is perfect, but clarinet timbre and expressive qualities would, I think, be wonderful as well.

• Barry - Aeneas and Dido (1995)
• Bruno - Fantasy on Themes from Donizetti’s Poliuto for Clarinet, Flute and Piano (1900)
• Cavallini - Reverie Russe for Clarinet, Flute and Piano (1870)
• Clinton - Duo Concertante for Clarinet, Flute and Piano (1860)
• Emmanuel - Sonate for Clarinet, Flute and Piano (1929)
• Fahrbach - Variations for Clarinet, Flute and Piano (1870)
• Lees - Tapestry (2003)
• Martinů - Madrigal-Sonata (1942)
• Mozart - Trio for Clarinet, Flute and Piano (arr. from K.407, 1782)
• Obiols - Divertimento for Clarinet, Flute and Piano (1870)
• Pfeiffer - Zwiegesprach for Clarinet, Flute and Piano (1870)
• Rutty - L’accordeoniste B (2005)
• Saint-Saëns - Tarentelle for Clarinet, Flute and Piano (1884)
• Salamon - Trio for Clarinet, Flute and Piano (2008)

http://imslp.org/wiki/List_...

--All of which, to my ear, would be very appealing with soprano sax substituting for clarinet. Just a thought... d.

Re: Tallis Scholars’ sound, or why 176 KHz/192 KHz HD sampling for choral chamber music is important

DSM — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 11:44:48 -0000

In response to an email from a CMT reader, superposition of pure sines of different phase does not complexify the spectrum... all you get from interference of the 2 sines is phase-averaging of the two sine waves, with no new phantom/virtual frequencies in the sum.

But summing waveforms whose spectra are already more complex than pure sine *does* produce a composite that has new, higher frequencies than were present in either of the 2 summed waveforms.

For example, if you sum two square waves of the same frequency omega where one of them is phase-shifted by pi/2 radians from the other, you get a three-level step-function with significantly more power at 2*omega and other frequencies, compared to the original.

Here's some R code http://is.gd/QHSnVH for a vocal signal [fundamental, plus first overtone (octave)]. If you phase-shift the signal and add it to the original, you get a new spectrum, which includes higher partials/overtones (see jpeg below).

Re: Theorbo-Dulcian-Viola Trio: Beautiful Performance; Beautiful Recordings

DSM — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 06:13:13 -0000

Incidentally, Platzer used the Bitcount CLEARTUNE http://www.bitcount.com/cle... tuner app to quickly tune his two theorbos prior to the performance. (This app is available for both iPhone and Android OS and delivers really fast response compared to other smartphone tuner apps, which tend to be excruciatingly slow.)

Re: Progress in Treating Musicians’ Focal Dystonia: 2008 Update

DSM — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 14:45:26 -0000

Couple of links to more recent papers... mostly to do with mechanisms/causes and diagnosis/classification, rather than treatment.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov...
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov...
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov...

Re: Midori: Close Readings of the Third Kind; ‘Deep Linking’ in Shostakovich’s Op. 134

DSM — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 07:43:50 -0000

In reply to a couple of emails from readers, no, Shostakovich's problem with his right hand was not focal dystonia.

As his condition progressed, Shostakovich's clinical findings increasingly resembled ALS (motor neuron disease; Lou Gehrig's Disease), although no definitive diagnosis was ever made.

Couple of links below, for your interest. These writings summarize what is known about Shostakovich's neurologic disorder.
• Bogousslavsky, J, et al., eds. Neurological Disorders in Famous Artists: Part 3. Karger, 2010. http://www.amazon.com/Neuro...
• Kalapatapu V, et al. Shostakovich and ALS. Front Neurol Neurosci. 2010;27:92-100. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov...

And a couple more links that you may also like:
• Ho A, Feofanov D. Shostakovich Wars. Whitepaper (326-page pdf), Southern Illinois Univ Edwardsville (SIUE), 18-SEP-2011. http://www.siue.edu/~aho/Sh...
• Ho A. Shostakovichiana page at SIUE. http://www.siue.edu/~aho/mu...
• Hamrick-Brown M, ed. Shostakovich Casebook. Indiana Univ, 2005. http://www.amazon.com/Shost...

Re: Flute-Cello-Piano Trio Repertoire: Bigger than You Might Imagine

DSM — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 08:33:45 -0000

Thanks, Liz.

By far my best suggestion would be Ursula Mamlok's 'Five Songs from Stray Birds', composed in 1963.
http://www.edition-peters.c...
http://www.newworldrecords....
http://www.ursulamamlok.com/

Friedrich Jaecker's 1999 trio 'Sphinx for voice, alto flute, viola' is very beautiful--if you are not dead-set on cello.
http://www.komponistenlexik...

You might also like Lyubov Terskaya's 2010 composition 'Romance for soprano, flute, cello' [plus bass drum and tape]
http://gamensemble.ru/reper...
http://www.youtube.com/watc...

Re: Art Song, Youth, and Omniscience: Stephen Costello, Tenor, & Danielle Orlando, Piano

DSM — Sun, 12 Jun 2011 09:45:50 -0000

Thank you, Ombra. For readers unfamiliar with HJ Series, 'who came before this' regarding North American debut in Harriman Series included Pavarotti in 1973 recital.

I think most of us have had 'rough nights'. And yet there are value and pleasure and drama... and especially a happenstantial glimpse of the character of the person, and of humanity more broadly... during 'rough nights'. I wrote the post above grateful for and propelled by the values of the whole experience, flaws and all... Costello's sincerity.

[Oh, Life seems shorter and shorter with each passing year. If only perfection pleases me, then I would spend most of Life unpleased... Yeah, that's the ticket! It's not my indiscriminateness, it's just that I really *am* a cheap date. ]

Re: ‘Empfindsamer Stil’ (Sensitive Style): Aleatory, Jouissance, and ‘Trance’ in the Music of C.P.E. Bach

DSM — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 09:45:49 -0000

Richard --

Thank you so much for your interest and comment.

CPE's extra-explicitness is actually part of the fascination for me that motivated this blog post. The gestures and their affective consequences, culturally-conditioned and context-dependent though they are, are amazingly robust and coherent despite the passing centuries. The sonic and gestural 'surface' reveals interesting [and maybe physiologically, neurocognitively inescapable?] things about how we are 'wired' as humans... a hermeneutics of musical expression and reception. Ur-Language!

But extra-explicitness [not just CPE... Rzewski, Ferneyhough, many others] propels the performer--and, one hopes, listeners--to new discoveries... discoveries of self, relations of the self to the physical body and its frailties and limits of response, and other things... on what seems to me a different "scale" than other kinds of less-explicit scoring. Long ago I used to play jazz piano, trumpet, ... very, very far from CPE.

So my remark about 'small-scale aleatorics' [of the fingers, connected to the ears and mind and heart, operating with nerve-conduction velocities of finite number of meters/second--] was exuberant, wild, speculative. I am only an amateur musician after all. I have no reputation to maintain.

But the remark was not a glib one. It was offered in genuine hopes of eliciting a reaction from readers who either (a) have had such revelations as this while playing, or (b) strongly reject the notion.

Your comment fulfills my hope, lo, these 2 years since I wrote the stuff above. Meeting people and learning things by process of sharing "long-tail" ideas like this [which have no mass-market appeal] is the first and best purpose of blogging, I think. And the fact that the connection can be made even at a distance of 2 years or more is wonderful. Makes me very happy indeed.

I own your recordings, Richard, but in my travels have never been in right place at right time to hear you perform live. My wife and I hope to go to Vienna late this year...
http://www.umtanum.com/Rich...
Is there a possibility you will be attending Boston Early Music Festival in June?

Again, thank you very much for your comment!

doug.

http://chambermusictoday.bl...
http://www.amazon.com/Herme...
http://www.richardfullerfor...

Re: Save The Music!: Writing Refactorable Compositions and ‘Refactor’ Methods

DSM — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 06:40:44 -0000

Thank you, John.

Pending Berklee's or any of the conservatories' adding courses on refactoring, for people who are new to 'refactoring engingeering' I would suggest Fowler's book (link above) as a convenient place to start.

And for people who are looking for practical, easy-to-use examples that illustrate good practices, have a look at Alessandro Cipriani's and Maurizio Giri's fine book (link above), Volume 1. You can download 10MB zip files for either Mac or Win environment on their book's support website ( http://www.virtual-sound.co... ). It is a fine textbook to use in Max/MSP-based electronic music courses or in self-directed learning.

While they do not speak of 'refactoring' or 'uplift' per se, many of their examples and exercises explicitly involve 'fixing' problems that have been seeded into the source .maxpat files. Other exercises tell the reader to 'reverse-engineer' a particular audio file's sound... fastidiously replicate its envelope and FX and timings. Which makes the student learn and acquire the proper sensitivities to efficient refactorability that I'm talking about above.

Hope to see you at Expo'74 in Brooklyn, John, in the Fall and thanks for your comment!

P.S. -- Here are links to Alessandro's and Maurizio's websites:
http://www.cnimusic.it/cipr...
http://www.giri.it/wp/

Re: It Was When the Nagging Became Music (1:41) that Love Became Clear to Me 腾讯QQ

DSM — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 17:31:42 -0000

Per Chiyao (Jackie) Lee, the music is instrumental arrangement of Chinese song called 水調歌頭, a setting of a poem composed by a Chinese poet, Su Shi, back in the Song Dynasty.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wik...ào_gē_tóu

Still not knowing who created arrangement or perform it in this advert vid. Will continue trying to find out.

Re: Morten Riis: Composition of/from/to Compositions

DSM — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 20:07:51 -0000

These Riis constructors seem to me to illustrate the difference between shallow_copy vs. deep_copy in C++. With the built-in assignment operator (=), assignment of one class object to another class object copies only the class members; it does not copy any data pointed-to by the class members. Passing an object by_value invokes the copy constructor, the built-in shallow copy by default. Passing an object by_reference does not trigger the copy constructor. If you want to avoid an infinite regression (recursion) and exhausting all free memory, you want to pass the object by_reference.

It is more efficient in time and space to pass by_reference. It is more efficient in space because a pointer takes less stack space than an object. It is more efficient in time because passing by_reference does not invoke a copy constructor.

The shallow copy may cause a lot of run-time errors, especially with the creation and deletion of object., which is why shallow_copy should be used very carefully and only when a programmer really understands what he/she wants to do. In most cases, shallow_copy is used when there is a need to pass information about a complex structure without actual duplication of data.

We must also be really careful with destruction of shallow copy.

Actually, shallow copy is rarely used, except when the copied structure is very large. There is a smart pointer that, in some cases, is an enhancement of the shallow copy concept.

Deep_copy should be used in most cases, especially for the cases when the size of the copied structure is small.

The default C++ copy constructor and default assignment operators do shallow copies, which is fine for classes that contain no dynamically allocated variables.

Doing deep_copies requires that we write our own copy constructors and overloaded assignment operators. These are thoughts that I believe inspired Morten Riis in his devising these particular pieces...

Re: Musicians’ Focal Dystonia Update 2011

DSM — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 06:17:55 -0000

Fixed a couple of 'typos' in the post above. Thanks, readers, for emailing me to point them out!

Re: Keve Wilson’s ‘Pure Imagination’

DSM — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 17:24:24 -0000

Thanks so much, Keve and Joe! Your revised answer consistent w/ what my ears were imagining. :)

Re: Nicholas Kitchen, Whale Rider

DSM — Sun, 23 Jan 2011 11:01:01 -0000

Peter--

• I am a younger audience-member, one of the many butts you want to get buying tickets and filling up the seats for your performances, whether they be in concert halls or bars.
• I am an atypical market for you, one who craves music that is not part of the overplayed, over-familiar canon.
• I am an amateur musician, one whose employment prevents my spending a lot of time practicing my instrument/voice but one who has a bottomless hunger for the musical works you produce, present, and perform.
• I am an amateur composer/arranger, who craves hearing new sounds of every kind, including some that you may not think of as music. But I do, and so do millions like me. Ambient birds, conversations, digital samples.
• I am an example of a family member who commissions a composition in memory of a parent or sibling or friend. I think of it as part of a 1,000-year tradition. Maybe the next commission will be for viola da gamba, or organum, or MAX/MSP synth.
• I am an example of someone who volunteers time and donates money to the arts. I am a recent Board of Directors member of a local arts organization, who after several years had to step off the Board because work-related travel prevented my attending all the Board meetings.
• I am an avid omnivore, of media of all kinds--one who would read your program notes or your newspaper column or your new book, provided it is not conventional, predictable, boring, or slavishly addressed only to the wealthy conservative classical music patrons of yesteryear.
• I am a bioinformatics/math/software_developer/music_theory geek, and you do not know what country I live in or what city I reside in. A lot of the time, I am in Boston, because that is where my wife works. We reside in a lot of places, and we participate in music whereever we happen to be. Our world is filled with all languages and all races and every idea under the sun. If you are going to appeal to people like me, you will need to embrace diversity.
• I am not impressed by credentials, where somebody went to school, or how famous you are. You and I are equals. All that matters is that what we do is exciting, new, intense, real, and meaning-filled. And, when appropriate, fun.

Your friend in music,

DSM.

Re: Keve Wilson’s ‘Pure Imagination’

DSM — Sun, 16 Jan 2011 06:52:09 -0000

This great sound! Probably not condenser mics--so sensitive as they are on the top end, picking up everything, too bright/brittle. Probably German large-diaphragm dynamic mics? Inquiring minds want to know!

Re: Prepared Piano: Subtle Effects by Hacking DIY Nocks with Sugru® Silicone Rubber

DSM — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 05:54:58 -0000

In reply to another email-sender, the easiest way to get the Sugru® into long brass tubes is to roll a small amount of it in one palm, like you did when you were a kid making "snakes" out of modeling clay. When the snake is more or less cylindrical, longer than the length of your tube, and has a girth that is slightly smaller than the ID of the tube, take one end of the snake between one thumb and index finger and lower it into the lumen of the brass tube, held vertically by your opposite hand. Then, whilst holding one end of the tube shut with one index finger, smoosh the other end of the snake further into the lumen, compressing the material inside. Some of the excess Sugru® will squish out the lengthwise slit, and the lumen will be entirely full of Sugru®. If your snake has some irregularities in its girth, you may need to poke some additional bits of Sugru® in through the slit with your finger to get the lumen uniformly full. Then proceed to push your bare copper wire through the center of the lumen lengthwise, as described above. Easy!

Re: Prepared Piano: Subtle Effects by Hacking DIY Nocks with Sugru® Silicone Rubber

DSM — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 05:30:58 -0000

In reply to one email-sender, yes, the maximum pitch-lowering for practical nock/tube-lengths and feasible OD's for clearance of adjacent strings could be even greater than the amounts I report above if you machined the nocks/tubes from depleted uranium.

Material_________Density (gm/cm^3)
silicone rubber............1.2 to 2.8
304 stainless steel..............8.0
brass.....................................8.5
copper...................................8.9
silver....................................10.5
lead......................................11.3
depleted uranium..............19.1
tungsten alloy............16.9 to 19.2
gold......................................19.3
platinum..............................21.4
iridium...............................22.6

(The latter two materials are not generally available and are very difficult to machine.)

Conversely, by using those very dense materials you could get the same magnitude of pitch-lowering that I get with brass in a much smaller form-factor by achieving the same weight with a much smaller volume of material. This might have some advantages in terms of more precise control over the timbre (harmonics) insofar as the placement of the nock/tube weight would be centered on a much shorter length of string.

Based on my results with brass, I would be very interested in tungsten alloy tubes to get bigger detunings of the bass strings, compared to what I can get with Sugru®-filled brass tubes of reasonable wall-thickness, cross-section, and length.

Am currently experimenting with brass tubing of greater wall-thickness, which is as easy to machine as the tubes pictured above. But the limiting factor as relates to the maximum detuning achievable is that you need enough room for elastomer and "give" in the lumen: the core needs to have enough silicone rubber in it so that the piano wire can slide easily on and off. You don't want to make the nock/tube wall-thickness very big such that the internal diameter (ID) is very small. If you do that, the nock/tube will be hard to apply and remove.

Thanks for the email!

Re: It’s Like That, Is It?!: Chopin Hermeneutics

DSM — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 13:15:35 -0000

Thank you, Roy. As an interested amateur, I'm relieved to hear that Peters' marketing is working to promote this wonderful new edition effectively. U.S.-based as I am, I often get discouraged by dwindling sales and closure of places like Patelson's behind Carnegie Hall and such. It is a delight to be over here on holiday and witness packed concert halls all the time and SRO audiences for RAM lectures like the ones you and Jean-Jacques put on. Thank you for your enthusiasm... you and Jean-Jacques provided a highpoint to our year! d.

Re: Halloween: Spooky String Quartets, Scary Piety

DSM — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 14:00:53 -0000

Was my own attempt at translation, in connection w/ my wife taking a course in French. Thanks for kind words. :) d.

Re: Sung Birds: Bird-based Recital Repertoire

DSM — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 08:24:11 -0000

Thanks so much for the suggestions and link, Dennis!

dsm.