Following a Musical Passion
I am still following my musical dreams...for those who have not previously visited here:
In recent years I’ve learned to do what most music students these days at least tap into, and that is to work with music notation programs. Today there is an amazing array of sound fonts either for sale or free on the Internet, allowing both professionals and amateurs to create at home and on a computer likenesses of the great orchestras and bands heard around the world, and at a very reasonable price. Even the great organs of Europe are being sampled so that anyone with a good notation program and the ability to copy a public domain score (publishers are the best source I’ve found for establishing free use) can create something exquisite or at least quite lovely for sequencing or accompaniments. Today’s notation programs also allow a person—once that person has mastered the essentials—to quickly arrange or compose materials and play them back for the purposes of critical listening. Such tools offer a chance for optimal results.
For me, the great thing about being able to create accompaniments and either record to a small recorder or directly to the computer, is that the accompanist is always in. As a former teacher pointed out to me, the cost of a good notation program is less than the price of hiring an orchestra for one recital.
Nothing of course compares to live performance, but the availability of notation programs, sound fonts, and music editing programs has been liberating for me. I don’t try to compare what I do, and what many thousands of others do on the stage or in the best recording studios with a fine live professional performance, but the results are still often very acceptable. Nothing I create approximates what the great divas can do. But the joy is in soaring musically, and in intellectually being able to use today’s software programs for creating my own musical moments.
On this site I will share musical projects I have going, and will include interviews with friends in music who are still young enough to be out in the performing sector or old enough to be influencing the musical world yet today in significant ways. And I will include other topics, too. Recently I completed over-dubbing accompaniments for two J. S. Bach soprano cantatas. It has took me eleven months to learn the first, and a month to learn the second even though they are performed in reverse order on my non-commercial CD. I also worked with the flute microphone and recorded the Marcello Concerto in D Minor.
When I create a recording it is shared with family and friends, as this is a hobby for me. I enjoy hearing how these folks use the recordings once they have a CD. Some just listen, but others like to sing along. Some carry the CD in the car and listen while they travel. When I was younger I really enjoyed being in live performance. At this stage, today’s technology still allows me to continue to fulfill my musical dream.
A few updates on some of the students will be found at the end of their articles.
Jean and Friends News...FALL 2009
From Arizona and the Great American West
Dena Holland
Dr. Yen-Yu Shih
Dr. Shumin Lin
Kenny Miller, Tenor
Professor David Britton
ASU Studio 303 in performance
Dave Spearing
Additional URLs will be posted here. The following link is for one of my photo archives.
Welcome to my web site.
Another year has come and gone since I started this web site, and at this point I am going to be expanding the site to include more pages of interviews and more pages of photographs.
Interviews II will be coming this fall with a new page that will include three additional friends: Greg Amerind, from ASU who is also one of the conductors of the Phoenix Boys Choir; Anne-Katherine Olsen who is now a student at the very special San Francisco Conservatory, and an ASU grad, and a new friend, Eric Christopher Perry, a multi-talented ASU master's student who is a singer, instrumentalist and conductor.
Courtney Gilson-Piercey
Click on the bar below for a sound recording from BWV 51, Mvt. l recorded by me a few years ago. The Kalmus copyright free orchestral edition forms the basis for the accompaniment. The sounds are from Finale using Garritan and Native Instruments fonts.
The next bar offers the concluding movement -- parts a and b.
A third selection is offered here...Mvt. 1 from the Marcello Concerto in d minor. This accompaniment is based on the score from Virtual Sheet Music, and was used with permission to create the accompaniment in Finale with Garritan sound fonts. The flute playing is my own.
Link to my You Tube site:
Some folks have not been able to get sound from my regular site, so I am starting to post my songs on You Tube. I also have three numbers there by Colte Julian that were filmed for ASU Studio 303, and another number there by a favorite Bach pianist--Bradley Lehman.
