25

Dec

Christmas Music from Midnight Mass 2011

Seraphim - Petites Heures de Jean de Berry

Two thoughts about programming for music in the middle of the night: 1) Plan something easy. I have never made so many mistakes as when I planned overly ambitious music so late in the evening. 2) The Sewanee Composers Project is a great sacred music resource!

The SJMP is also an interesting business model. By purchasing an annual license, you have access to their entire library online including unlimited reproduction rights. Many of the pieces have sample recordings, too.

From their website:

A new way to think about church anthems
Since 1992 St. James Music Press has been publishing some of the finest church anthems being written today. THE FINEST! And we’re not just bragging. Anthems from SJMP have been heard on national broadcasts, performed at cathedrals and churches throughout the world, and premiered at major music conferences throughout the country. Our catalog does not contain praise-songs, choruses or renewal music. It is, however, filled with new traditional anthems and fresh arrangements of varying difficulty which have been tried and tested by many fine church choirs.
We want you to photocopy our music!
Unlike many publishers, we are committed to each and every anthem that we publish. You won’t like or use them all and that’s fine. We all have different tastes. But if your choir sings traditional anthems on a regular basis, you won’t find a better resource than St. James Music Press. And now – our entire catalog is on-line and searchable. Need an anthem for the third Sunday after Epiphany when your entire alto section has decided to go on a “spiritual makeover” weekend hosted by Noylene Fabergé, the Christian Beautician? No problem. It’s only a couple of mouse-clicks away.
Find the Sunday in our Liturgical calendar, look for the voicing you need, listen to a few, and print out some that you like. Or print them all. Then photocopy enough for your choir (permission granted!) and they’ll sound like a waffle-house full of angels with Gabriel serving pancakes!
Eight thousand churches can’t be wrong. Join the St. James Music Press family.
Anthems by some of the the finest composers and musicians in the business. Cantatas, Psalm settings for congregation, masses and service music, childrens’ choir music (our award-winning Viva Voce! program), organ music, handbell music, music for brass and organ, organ solo, musicals, anthems for small choirs (our Ten Panicked Singers series), descants and harmonizations, evening services, introits, benedictions…the list goes on and on. And NEW pieces being added each and every month. We’ll send you a monthly email alerting you to new offerings as well as suggesting some pieces you may have forgotten about. All instrumental parts included, of course!
Listen to everything. Download whatever you want.
Or download everything! MP3s for making choir CDs, PDFs for printing, ZIP files containing the congregational files you’ll need for your bulletins.
Wow! Want to give it a look?
It’s free… No, we’re not kidding.
Okay, you can’t print anything out, but you can look at and listen to everything in the catalog. Not just a couple of pages…the whole thing! Our recordings are, in many cases, live recordings from church services and performed by church choirs (large and small) across the country. Most are not professional, but they’ll give you a very good idea as to how the anthem sounds.

154 days ago Short URL Comments

Choral Music/Recordings/St. Andrew's Choir

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23

Dec

Media Files for Loyola Lessons & Carols 2011

The Playlist

When I conduct concerts or services, I make a special effort to record and publish the results. Technology has made these tools very accessible. This service was recorded with a Sony PCM-D50, a simple $500 handheld recorder. I edited it in Apple’s Soundtrack Pro, posted audio files to Soundcloud, and made videos in Final Cut Pro to post to YouTube, all within 2 days of the service itself.

156 days ago Short URL Comments

Choral Music/Loyola Choir/Music Education/Recordings

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19

Dec

A Bouquet of Lessons & Carols

Photo by Steven Speciale


Each year as Christmas nears, my high school choir offers a Lessons & Carols service to the community. Notice, I didn’t write “concert”. I do my best to provide the choir “performance” opportunities with a service context. It gives the work we do an extra layer of meaning and purpose that is harder to convey in a concert setting. I also think the cathedral context for this music, as well as the magnificent pipe organ, makes this an unparalleled experience for them.

I will post selections from the service in bite-sized bits over the next few days. Merry Christmas!

Before our final dress rehearsal, we always take an hour to have dinner at Papa Cristos, a local family-owned Greek restaurant that has been in the neighborhood for over fifty years!


160 days ago Short URL Comments

Choral Music/Loyola Choir/Music Education/Recordings

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13

Dec

An Unwitting Collaboration: Props from Video Artist David Montgomery

While checking my email this morning, I found a nice note and blogpost from artist David Montgomery. He wrote about a video on which he unknowingly collaborated with me. I took audio from a concert where I played John Cage’s “In A Landscape” and by applying “Cagean” procedures to David’s Dandelion loops, created a music video.

I sent the short film to David. He was very complementary!


Steven Speciale is an inspired music teacher and choir director at Loyola High School in Los Angeles. When I post my work to the Internet Archive I think of it being used for VJing or video remix though I always hold out hope that it could be used in education. Steven Speciale managed to combine all of the above in brilliant fashion. I guess it shouldn’t be a surprise that someone from LA, home to LAVA (one of the most established video art coalitions in the US), who is a mainstay at SoundWalk in Long Beach would make the most innovative use of the Dandelion Free Culture video loops to date.

Personally, it is very satisfying and validating to have one’s work acknowledged by colleagues. The reality is that none of this would have happened without the culture of sharing promoted by the open-source movement, and by extension, social media. David Montgomery would appear to live in Florida; I live in California. Our paths only crossed in this virtual realm. Because they did, we both have benefited, and because we benefit, my students benefit.

166 days ago Short URL Comments

Internet Resources/Music and technology/Music Education/Recordings/Sound Art

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07

Dec

Fiskabur 2011

With the export of Movement of Jellyfish by Loyola High School student Leopoldo Magana, Fiskabur 2011 has fulfilled my original intent: to create and execute a cross-curricular project where students across disciplines contribute to the final product, and the final product has “legs” as its existence furthers other educational objectives.

Fiskabur Ontogenesis

After a lecture to both the music classes and physics classes on the Physics of Music, the music students constructed piezoelectric microphones while some of the Physics students built musical instruments.

The music students borrowed the newly-made instruments, sampled them with their homebrewed-microphones, and composed loops. A small-group of the music students went to the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach and filmed many exhibits which I put on our YouTube channel.

Drawing inspiration from these videos, the music students composed soundscapes and music with their composed loops. These loops were loaded onto reactive apps of their design through the RJC-1000 software. Along with still pictures of the fish that inspired the compositions, the music was given a layer of sonic augmented reality.

The apps were loaded onto iPhones, iPads, and iPods, taken back to the Aquarium of the Pacific, and “performed” and recorded in front of the fish that inspired the music. A team of student filmmakers accompanied the composers to gather footage of the project and the creatures themselves.

All of the resulting loops, videos, samples, and RJDJ-pieces were posted on the internet with Creative Commons licenses so all of the musicians and filmakers could share resources.

The Movement of Jellyfish video embedded above is the first all-student product to emerge from Fiskabur. It will be hosted on our YouTube channel, a website dedicated to Fiskabur 2011, and offered to the AP Biology classes as a resource for animal locomotion, one of the curricular points for the course.

Special thanks to my Loyola colleagues: Lance Oschner, Fr. John Quinn, & Craig Bouma for their participation and support. Thanks to the Long Beach Aquarium of the Pacific, and Marilyn Padilla, in particular, for their permission and support of our filming and recording on the premises.

172 days ago Short URL 2 Comments

Aquarium 2011/Music and technology/Music Education/Recordings/Sound Art

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