Organ

Apr. 5th, 2006 09:34 am
beige_alert: (Bike)
There was an organ recital last night at Madison, Wisconsin's Overture Concert Organ. It was a great event.

Though I'm a life-long organ fan, this was actually the first time I'd heard one in person. It's quite an instrument, in a beautiful concert hall. Resident organist Samuel Hutchison gave very interesting introductions to each piece.

It's fun to watch. That big pedal solo in Bach's Toccata, Adagio and Fugue in C Major, for example. I knew it was a pedal solo. I have the sheet music. But I tend to forget that all that action is just in the pedals. There is something oddly fascinating about the magic buttons that change the stops. All the stop control move, there is a quiet thump from deep inside the instrument, and, suddenly, a brand new sound.

The only piece I was familiar with was the Bach Toccata, Adagio and Fugue, a grand show-off piece. Everything else in the recital was just delightful as well. I had not previously heard Duruflé's Prelude and Fugue on the Name of ALAIN, and it's a really nice piece that I need to find a recording of. Guilmant's first Sonata is most impressive, as well.

As an encore, he played a piece that, alas, I don't remember the title nor composer of, but it was hilarious. A mashup combining a very familiar vaguely-nautical tune known to anyone who's seen any animated cartoon show with a boat in it mixed with bits of Bach, parts of Vivaldi's Four Seasons, and a bit of the toccata from Widor's 5th organ symphony.

Madison is some 75 miles from Milwaukee, so I didn't actually get to bed until midnight, but it was certainly worth it. Today is a beautiful sunny day, so I took my bike to work and can avoid driving any more for at least a day.
beige_alert: (guitar)
I could probably exaggerate the wonderfulness of the Gizmodo Hard Drive Dying Dance music competition, but it would be hard. Hitachi, to help people with dying hard disk drives diagnose their problems, has recordings of the noises made by dying hard drives available. Gizmodo challenged people to turn these sounds into music. And people did. Go listen. The Odeo pages have a flash thingie to play them, but also provide a link to a normal MP3 that gets almost hidden by the AdBlock tab if you have AdBlock running on Firefox---so look closely.
beige_alert: (Default)
Geez, I obviously went through some sort of Men Without Hats phase at some time, because I have six CDs from them. I discovered this while ripping CDs for iPod use, and I now have nearly 250 megabytes of hatless goodness. Including too many remixes of Safety Dance, a song that you probably remember if you are a certain age and lived in the US.
beige_alert: (frosty)
The ice skating was fun. Good music for high-speed ice skating includes the second allegro from Bach’s Concerto No. 2 in Am, BWV 593, which is a Vivaldi concerto for two violins that Bach stole borrowed and reworked for organ, and geBORGt’s “Stausong” and “Alea Iacta Est,” since anything sung reasonably rapidly in German is good go-fast music.

I also now have 1.6 kg of chocolate covered peanuts, chocolate covered hazelnuts, and just plain chocolate. I got the volume discount for buying lots at once!

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