Morning Prayer and Maine's Bounty

We finally figured out how to record music onto the computer! It was such a struggle to get the music from C's digital piano to the computer in any usable format (MIDI was not converting to WAV). Today I downloaded Audacity and recorded directly as C was playing - from the piano to the music editing program. We used the piece, Tchaikovsky's Morning Prayer, as background music for a movie of our Maine pictures and voilà! A video of some pictures from Maine with C playing Morning Prayer.

Prelude: Composer - Bach; Pianist - C

C just learned to play Bach's Prelude. It's a lovely song, but just looking at the three pages of notes gives me a massive headache. So I stay away from the piano and listen to it from a distance.

The reason for the photographs this time around in the video below, instead of C's fingers flying over the keys, is that this is a two-minute piece and he was not going to let me hover over him for that long. Plus he thinks that the small digital camera's primitive sound doesn't do justice to the song.

So C recorded the song and I tried to download it. The piano (Roland HP-207) records fine, I was able to download the song into a storage device and the song played fine on the computer, but it's not in a format that can be used in a video. I know way more than I want to about this stuff but the lowdown is this - the piano stores the music in MIDI format and it cannot be converted to a WAV or WMA format. So I sent the file to C's piano teacher who played it on his computer, hooked it up to an instrument, had that instrument play it and then saved the result in WAV format.

I used the file that he sent to make a movie using some pictures in my folder. Unfortunately neither the sound nor the pictures retained their original clarity. I wish they had come through better. I'm going to continue to try different ways to download C's performances in a usable format. In the meantime, here's C playing Bach's Prelude.



Updating to add links to related posts:

C playing Beach Buggy Boogie, Mazurka and The Entertainer.

Piano: Mazurka

C playing Mazurka. It's a mellow song, one that never fails to bring tears to my mom-in-law's eyes (granted she tears easily, but still).

Jazz in DC and a Chandamama Story

Last night we were at the Kennedy Center to catch a performance at the Millennium Stage. As part of the Jazz in DC series, Scott Joplin and Jelly Roll Morton were on tap, with pianist Aaron Diehl performing.

Friday evening rush hour traffic was worse than we planned for and we got there mid way into the program. The ushers showed us to a small space on this side of the rope cordoning off the seats where we could sit on the floor (all the seats were taken and there was an overflow crowd of at least 50 standing to watch the performance).

We got to hear five pieces. The music was infectious, completely enjoyable to listen to. A number of people in the audience were bopping to the music. It was hard not to. The woman next to us had a chicken strut thing going with her head. A couple of rows ahead in the seats foot-tapping was the choice of body twitch. And there was one woman who could barely stay in her seat. From foot to head she had a great dance going while seated.

It reminded me of a Chandamama story (I just found its website and it has stories on it! Yay!) I read a very long time ago.

Once upon a time, a king wanted to find out who among his subjects was the best connoisseur of music. So he organized a series of concerts that was open to the public. At the first concert every single person in the audience was shaking his or her head to the music. The king was annoyed. Not only could he not identify the winner, he became suspicious that a majority of the audience was faking it. So he put out an edict - no more shaking of the head, he decreed.

So at the next concert no one swayed to the music for fear of displeasing the king. They looked around, stared straight ahead at the performers, looked down. All but one man. With eyes closed, his head followed the tune and moved up and down to the rhythm. At the end of the concert, the king called him over and pulled him up for disobeying his rule.

Another day, another concert. Same scene as at the second performance. The one man continued to ignore the king's edict. So the king called him out again, but this time asked him why he continued to sway to the music when he had specifically forbidden it. The man explained that he forgot where he was or what he was supposed to do when he heard music. The music moved him and made it impossible for him to sit still.

The king was pleased. He had found his winner.

***********

If you like jazz and want to indulge in some swaying and bopping yourself, the Jazz in DC series is ongoing at the Millennium Stage. The performances are free and they usually go for an hour from 6 pm. If you can't make it, the performances are available by live webcast.

Beach Buggy Boogie

C loves ragtime music and his teacher's been obliging his interest. Here's C with Martha Mier's Beach Buggy Boogie.

The Entertainer: Composer, Scott Joplin; Pianist, Big N

Big N's piano teacher introduced him to Scott Joplin's The Entertainer a few days ago. Big N's been studying it and loves it. It's a lovely piece of music. Without much ado, here's Big N:

Roland's HP-207 Digital Piano

I don't know a lot about all the cool stuff digital pianos enable you to do (and it is a lot), but I know enough to say that we are mighty pleased with the Roland Digital Piano (model HP-207) we acquired when we returned from India.

After the rather dismal experience we had trying to keep our old piano tuned and in condition in Bangalore, a piano that would never require tuning sounded appealing. That and the fact that digital pianos also allowed the pianist to experiment with varied instrument sounds propelled us toward a piano store that also sold digitals. Once there, the salesman promptly took us to the most expensive on the floor. We smashed his hopes - as gently as we could. Not only was it too expensive, it also had too many features that were not necessary for someone my son's age.

We saw a few more models on the floor, but the HP-207 seemed the most appropriate for our needs. The sound is awesome, the keys feel like and have the same weight as those of an acoustic piano. You can plug in headphones when you are practicing or lower the volume if you want to be quiet; you can play the drums or the guitar or the harpsichord (just a few of the more than 300 sounds promised by the manual); produce police car sounds or airplane sounds; you can record your own compositions; make use of the pre-recorded songs in the memory to learn new songs, etc., etc., etc. I'm sure there are a whole lot of other features my son has not discovered yet (the manual is hidden away safely for now).

We spent some time debating whether an instrument with all these features would be a distraction, but our son's teacher laid our doubts to rest. In his experience, having the other features (such as other instrument sounds or the ability to record a piece or a child's own composition and play back) on hand were valuable in the battle against boredom.

That observation has borne out. My son actually spends a lot more time at the piano than just practising his pieces - to fiddle with the settings, discover sounds, make up songs, etc. And it is a lot of fun to listen to all the different tunes wafting from a corner of the house.

What makes the world go round?

My father and my son, Big N, love hanging out together and spend all their time talking. Neither my husband nor I can figure out what they find to talk to each other about or how they can sustain each other's attention, patience and interest for as long as they do, but from the sporadic reports we get from each of them, at least two things are obvious: one, they cover a wide range of topics; two, Big N feeds off of my father's immense store of general knowledge and my father revels in Big N's energy and natural curiosity.

On one of his recent visits, my father taught Big N a lullaby that I grew up listening to. It's simple and lovely, but the meaning is profound. It asks (in loose translation),

Who makes the sun come up?
Who makes the moon turn?
What are those that our eyes see twinkling in the dark sky?
If you think about all these things, you realize there is something [bigger, more powerful than us]

Over the past few years, whenever I've remembered the lullaby, my mind has immediately recalled that heartbreaking Bee Gees song, "How Can You Mend a Broken Heart," and that one particular line in it, "What makes the world go around?" Even the tunes of the two songs, with their plaintive strains, are very similar.

After two days of falling asleep to the lullaby, one evening Big N sat down at his piano and plucked out the song on the keys. I was puttering around in kitchen preparing dinner and my father was busy with the newspaper and Little N. My father, who is generally happy that Big N can play the piano but has no clue about any of the songs he plays (they're all Western folk and classical songs), burst into applause when he heard it. That he was thrilled does not even begin to describe his reaction on hearing one of his favorite songs played on the piano.

We immediately called my aunt who sang this song to her siblings (my father being the youngest of the lot) when they were growing up. She has never seen Big N and Big N has not really spoken to her much on the phone given the language gap.

But there we were that evening, Big N excitedly telling his grand-aunt on the phone what he had done and was about to do again for her, my father and I taking turns to translate each of them for the other, Big N playing the lullaby on the piano, me holding the phone close to the keys, each of us trying to grab the phone to find out first hand what my aunt's reaction was, my aunt listening to the song over the phone and saying she couldn't believe what she had just heard (and I imagine, shaking her head), that she couldn't believe that Big N actually liked the song, her wanting to find out how it had all happened, and her declaring, "After all, he's my grandson, right?"

When we had finally hung up the phone, Big N said that was the happiest day of his life, my father had a big grin on his face, my aunt also probably had an equally big grin on her face many miles away, and I was just happy looking at the delight on the two faces on either side of me.

What makes the world go round? This comes mighty close to it.