A Tour Through Arch's Videos on YouTube

For years, one of my favorite pastimes was creating music files in a music editing program (Finale, from MakeMusic --this is not a commercial!!), which also plays the music, using sound samples, which sound very realistic, indeed, then creating videos with these pieces as the sound track, and uploading them to YouTube.  The video portion of the file was usually trivial, and was sometimes just a photograph, and other times a video of the music software while the music was playing, and yet other times, a graphic program that interpreted the MIDI files generated by the editor in terms of pretty moving designs.  (The software was created by Steve Malinowski, a fantastic musician who lives in California, and whom I have only met on the Internet.)

The very first video I ever uploaded was the Fugue in C major by J. S. Bach.  The pictures were images of Baroque organs from all over, many from US colleges.  This was a very primitive effort, but it was viewed several thousand times.  You can find it here.  Years later, I uploaded an improved version, with more sophisticated sounds, which is also on YouTube.  (What was, I believe, the main attraction with the early version was that it was very fast!  Of course, it is a computer, so I could set the speed to be anything, and I did set it going fairly fast.  But that was uploaded in 2008, when a lot of viewers did not quite understand that it was not some guy playing a real organ very fast.  That first one lasted just 3:04 minutes, while the more moderately-paced newer one is 3:45 minutes long.  The faster, early one has been watched 7,783 times, as I write this, while the more recent one, in HD, has been watched only 88 times.  Not that I care, particularly ...)

The next few videos were of my daughter and her group, Episodes, singing various original songs.  They were rehearsing in a garage, and I was recording it on a little hand-held camera.  The group is now defunct, but both the group, and many of the songs were really great.  The songs were all written by my daughter, Uma.

A year or two later, I created this performance of a Bach chorale-prelude called Num komm' der Heiden Heiland, or "O come, thou Saviour of the Gentiles."  It is a solemn organ piece intended for the solemn days of Advent (a sort of mini-Lenten season of fasting preceding Christmas, in certain German traditions), but here it is instrumented for oboe, English Horn, and trombones, all instruments with very dark colors.  The video portion is just a photograph.  If you want to hear the original, there should be numerous links alongside the YouTube window.  It is Bach BWV 659.  Bear in mind that the suggested videos YouTube throws up are individualized for the viewer, and what is suggested for me is probably different from what is suggested for you!

The next interesting video that comes along is this animation of Heighway's Dragon, which is a fractal, which is in this case a sequence of figures, and the actual fractal is the limit of the figures.  The music is a portion of a composition of mine, called Serenade.  Understandably, I uploaded more than a dozen versions of the piece, and this is just an excerpt from one of the earliest versions.

To get it out of the way, I ought to give you a link to the final version of Serenade, which I made for my friend Ako Shiffer, a horn player who attempted to play it with her wind quintet.  Unfortunately, they found it unpleasant to play.  This version is again played by computer.

The British folk song called Linden Lea was set to music by Ralph Vaughan Williams, the great Welsh composer.  This song is taught in many schools, and it was a favorite of my sister, who sings it incessantly when she gets it stuck in her brain.  I got to like it, and harmonized it for myself.  At about this time, I was also getting interested in Barbershop Harmony, which is a sort of singing by all guys, or all girls.  It's close harmony, plain and simple, but a distinguishing characteristic is that the melody is often in one of the inner voices.  In this clip, the tune is first in the highest voice, and the next verse has it in the alto voice.  The visual portion is just the sheet music, which you're welcome to follow along!

[Added 2015-1-26:]

Episodes played a cover of a song by King Crimson: Dinosaur.  Here's how it sounded.  Notice the six-string bass.  It was a five-piece group: keyboards, lead guitar, violin, bass and drums.  It was awesome, but various interests took them away from Tucson (not to mention that many of the members were graduate students).

Here is a piece that I wrote, based on a hymn of Johann Cruger.  It was written when I was just about 19, so there are many youthful mistakes.  But it is not easy to write in six parts, and I could not easily repair it even a few years ago.  Don't listen to the whole thing; a more recent version with fewer errors is here.

Here's Brazil by Xavier Cugat!  I love this piece.

Mr. Sandman, using MIDI.




More later.

Archie