I’m finishing up posting a digital album on BandCamp of piano solo arrangements of some of my favorite Appalachian/British/Irish folk hymns. I’m able to able to post videos of my playing the tunes on BandCamp that are also available there as well as mp3 files/albums for download and streaming.
This video is from 2021, we were in the latter stages of the pandemic. I was 55 pounds heavier than I am now, but I love this particular performance so much, it’s the one I wanted to use for this new digital album (The River Strong). More about that album soon.
You may have noticed an acoustic piano in the background of my recordings. A couple years ago I bought what’s called a “studio upright” from the Clearwater Steinway Gallery. It’s a Boston, which is made in Asia but designed by Steinway, and a model with no plastic parts. The entire action is wood. I’m very happy with it.
I mention this because people may wonder why I don’t use that for my videos. Aside from not being a good enough pianist to record flawless videos head to tail without needing to splice together different video takes (keyboard recording permits occasional error correction…more on that in a moment), recording an acoustic piano is to my ear one of the hardest things to do well, especially for a classical sound.
The best of that I’ve ever experience was the audio engineer, John Stephan, when I recorded some of my pieces at his studio, Springs Theatre Arts & Recording, before he retired. I’ve worked in a lot of studios across the US, none compared to his technique, microphone placement, and audio environment. There’s no way I could duplicate that sound at home. I’ve got a few things I’m snobish about: authentic key lime pie, New York style cheesecake, fried fish, banana pudding, grits, and recorded piano sound.
As I mentioned above, recording tracks from a keyboard allows for a certain amount of editing without having to edit the video itself. If you look at about 00:42 from the beginning of the track, you’ll see my right hand momentarily “panic!” I had a momentary lapse of concentration. I mention this because non-musicians (unfortunately some musicians LOL) don’t know what’s going on in a performer’s head when performing.
When a musician (singers especially, but also brass instruments, pianists, conductor, everyone actually) plays/sings a note s/he must literally, mentally hear–in advance of actually playing the note–the note they’re going to play a moment later.
And if it’s a polyphonic instrumentalist like a pianist or organist or conductor all the notes being player together at that moment must be “pre-heard.” This is true even for solo instrumentalists in an orchestra. My favorite trumpet player, Don Own, talked to me once about playing in an orchestra, how an orchestra player hears their part as if they were in the audience, not from just their chair.
As you might imagine. That’s all quite a task. More than anything as I’ve aged, it’s the momentary lapses of concentration that get to me as a performer. I do silent meditation a lot. The focus required for performing music is like that. It’s why being a musician is so addictive. Few things match the rush.
The description there reads: I’ve given this Native-American morning song a reverential treat, with four statements, each with a different musical texture corresponding to the directions east, west, north, and south. For the student learning this piece, the issues to be confronted are controlling the interpretive dynamic and tempo arch of each of the four statements and of the four as a unit. The third statement also presents the opportunity to learn how to distribute the notes of the melodic line between to two hands in order to have three contrapuntal lines.
We lived in an old, rambling two-storied* parsonage (my father was a Methodist minister) and we lived in the house owned by the church. I was in the first year or two of elementary school. Our house was big enough that there were front stairs descending into the hallway just inside the mudroom and stairs in the back emptying directly from my bedroom (!), down into the kitchen and continuing directly on down into the the basement (but that’s another story ).
Underneath of the angle of the front stairs was a triangular shaped little room with its own little triangular door.
I don’t remember if I ever actually ever even entered that room, or if I simply wanted to and fantasized about doing so. Memory is a very malleable thing. My emotional association with that room was not at all like the frightening little room under the stairs that Harry Potter was confined to. For me, the association with our little room under the stairs is warmth, comfort, books, a place to be away from the world and close the door behind me, a place all my own…emotional privacy.
I suspect that’s a false memory, built entirely of wishful fantasy.
Here’s a picture of me on the front porch of that old house, at that exact age, 8. You can probably intuit all there is to know about me just from that photo!
If you’re a church choir director, this is a good number for Pentecost. It can be done a number of ways: the basic configuration is the congregation and choir (in unison) singing the short refrain (a bulletin insert graphic comes with the choir parts) and the choir, or a section of the choir, or a soloist singing the refrains. The trumpet descant may be played on any soprano solo melody instrument, or if necessary by the organist (organists know what to do in order to do this).
I’m pleased to finally be able to have a demo of this version with full orchestration using the Cantai synth voices. There’s also a good video demo of the Lakewood UCC choir doing it as just a simple hymn. I like it that way ever bit as much as this fancy “downtown” version with organ and trumpet.
I write lots of secular music and arrangements, too. But, I’m honored even as an octogenarian to be able to have a church music director/keyboardist position. Bach, Mozart, Palestrina, Handel all had jobs as church musicians. It’s heartening to realize that even they had to get up early on Sunday mornings!
The choir at Lakewood UCC, where I’m the music director, did this last year and they did a terrific job. I changed four measures of the final score so I couldn’t use the tape of their live performance for the demo of the sheet music or I would have. They did that good of a job. The Cantai synth voices will have to do for the purposes of demon.
The text I cobbled together from various sources: Salisbury Book of Hours, 1514 (ref: Mark 12:30 and Psalm 40:8), various ancient Irish sources (Carmina Gadelica, Bridgid of Gael, other traditional Gaelic verses) plus original text of my own.
This is a very easy choral piece: just two parts, women and men…not even any chords. The range of the parts is narrow which keeps the sound good.
The issues coming from “AI” actually began a long time ago before the notion of AI even existed, with the advent of recordings. Up until then, music meant people in a room makes sounds for folks to enjoy hearing. I still believe that is the purpose of music.
But, with recordings came music preserved as if in amber. Suddenly every pianist is compared to Horowitz, every composer to Beethoven. At the same time, we’re blessed with getting to hear Horowitz (I never had the privilege to hear him in person) and I’ve only ever heard a select few of Beethoven’s symphonies performed, live.
So there’s these two parallel steams of musical existence: recordings and live performance. They intersect. I first heard Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring on records. When I was a kid, you could go in a record store and listen to any record in the store in listening booths. I spent hours in the St. Louis Stix, Baer, and Fuller department store listening to that piece. Had records not existed, I would never have heard it. Much, much later I heard it live. There’s no comparison. I heard things in the live performance—little inner voices wiggling around—that, even though I’d studied the score, I never really “heard” before.
Then came electronic music: the Hammond Organ, musique conrète, the Theremin, Oscar Sala, Karlheinz Stockhausen, the Columbia-Princeton electronic music studio, Bob Moog. All of which, progressed to keyboards in almost every home, and then home studios, now all residing in a laptop that plays sampled sound in convincing combinations.
How does this related to AI and the schlock AI generated (I won’t say “composed”) songs on streaming services? It leaves humans out of the equation.
There’s an ethical dilemma for me. Where do I draw the line. I created this demo of a song I wrote to my sister’s lyrics using a piece of software called “Cantai.” It sings the words. It bothers me that that’s a group of singers that won’t be singing that song. That’s a group of instrumentalists that won’t be playing violins, a piano, a glockenspiel, and fretless bass. A recording studio won’t have the income from me renting time, paying for musicians.
But then…I can’t afford to hire a studio, hire vocalists, instrumentalists. I salve my conscience by telling myself I’m making demos to hopefully convince some real human to perform my music. The pretend world of sampled sounds are as close as I’m going to come to getting to experience most of my music.
A good friend who devoted his life to designing and building important pipe organs in Texas and throughout the south despaired when he heard sampled organ sounds that he spent his life perfecting. What of the organs and organ builders whose sounds were robbed (sampled) for me to use on my laptop?
Fortunately, AI “composed” music and synthesized/sampled electronic sounds do not compare to the real thing. It’d be nice to think they’d never will, but someday in a Star Trek world they may. I’m glad Data realized that making music meant folks (including androids), in a room (perhaps on a starship), making sounds in the physical world for folks (and androids) to hear and enjoy, and to enjoy performing! My sister’s words paint a truth that aligns with that notion of what real music really is.
I guess I’m still not convinced we’re lucky the automobile was invented to replace the horse and buggy…for that matter, maybe the invention of the wheel wasn’t such.a good idea, either.
I’m in the process of doing the necessary work to distribute three new digital albums to the various streaming services. Part of that is visiting the four previous albums of mine that are already distributed to see if they’re so awful I should just pay to have them deleted from distribution (it’s something that you can do). That entails listing to them with new ears.
While doing so, I realized I still like what I did on this album, in particular this tune, Resignation.
Here’s a link to the complete album you can listen to YouTube Music.
Hal Leonard, the world’s largest sheet music publisher, runs a site called ArrangeMe which gives composers & arrangers a vehicle to self publish their arrangements of pop tunes–Hal Leonard owns the rights to a vast number of pops songs all of which are available to arrange through ArrangeMe–and of tunes in the public domain. As well, it provides a self-publishing platform for composers of their original works. When there’s a sale, the composer or arranger make a percentage and Hal Leonard gets a percentage.
If you go to the Compositions page of my website, you’ll links to those two sites for almost all of my compositions that are for instrumental solos, piano solos, organ solos, and choral/vocal music. (I don’t bother trying to sell scores of my symphonic music and concerti since those are not really something people are shopping for.)
Pianists seem to buy my folk song and hymn tune arrangements and organists my original music although that’s not always the case. It’s not gonna pay my mortgage, but I do make steady sales. My videos on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/@hiltonkeanjones) are my main channel for promoting my music. There’s probably other ways that would increase sales, but I’m not business savvy. Suggestions always welcome!
I love this tune: Sweet Rivers. The composer of the tune is anonymous and the tune is found in William Walker’s 1835 Souther Harmony, and Musical Coompanion. I could play it over and over again. It makes me happy and makes me smile. Check out the words and various instances of the tune in different hymnals at https://hymnary.org/text/sweet_rivers_of_redeeming_love. This is real old-timey music at its best.
The problem for most working pipe organists is that most interesting organ repertoire is too hard to work up new pieces on a weekly basis and usually too long for a service. In short, the interesting literature is suitable for recital but not church service use. Add to that is the fact that (notice I kept saying “interesting” in the forgoing paragraph) most stuff that’s the right length and difficulty for weekly use is beige arrangements of boring hymn tunes. Nothing wrong with hymn tune arrangements–I’ve written my share–just don’t make them beige and boring.
Anyway, two friends are getting married and they asked me to play organ at their coming wedding. I haven’t gone near an organ in quite a while. In fact, at 81 (this month) I’ve managed to live long enough to have two pairs of pipe organ shoes literally rot and fall apart. So, I ordered a fancy new pair of organ shoes (fancy: suede soles and built up heels) and to motivate myself to practice, I’m in the process of writing a bunch of new organ music that’s (hopefully) interesting and the right length and difficulty for weekly service use.
