Monday, January 1, 2024

2024 Musical Projects

Here are my musical projects for 2024, starting with those that I'm continuing from previous years.

Continuing Projects

Scales

When I sit down at or with an instrument, I play a scale, provided I know the instrument well enough that I can play a scale on it.  I go in the order of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier and move on to the next one on Sundays.  For the first week of 2024, I'll be practicing G major.  When I practice organ every day, I improvise to a backing track in the same key (or the relative major if I'm practicing a minor key that week).

This is my blog for hymns and (occasionally) classical sacred music.  On Sunday, I post a recording of a hymn tune (I've been making my way through The Lutheran Hymnal), playing (usually) the four-part arrangement with mandolin (soprano and alto), guitar (tenor), and electric bass (bass).  On Wednesday, I have a post tracing the Biblical sources of a hymn in The Lutheran Service Book, and on Friday, I have a short post about a musical feature in a hymn.  On rare occasions, I post about classical sacred music on Monday.

For writing the posts on the Biblical sources for a hymn, I'm going to follow the system I devised last year and (try to) write a post every Sunday and for every time the hymn is included in the recording of the daily chapel service from the university I want to attend.

Because I've been consistently writing about musical features in hymns, I've almost run out of new things to post.  Most of what I have left are features in hymns that are for specific seasons, and I plan to wait until they're seasonally appropriate to write about.

Cover Projects

Initially, the goal for most of these was to learn every part to every song, and while I'm still working on that, the focus now has shifted more to writing about various features I notice.  Here's a list of the projects and what bands they cover:
Byrd Dimension hadn't had the same sort of status as the other projects, but last year, I decided to make it a full-fledged project (partially because my cousin's band is named after a bird, and I feel I have to work at least as hard as he does).  In the last month or so of 2023, I listened to all of the Byrds albums from Fifth Dimension to (Untitled) plus The Byrds Play Dylan, and I have a slew of notes that I want to flesh out into posts this year.

I've been reading the updated edition of Andrew Sandoval's The Monkees: The Day-by-Day Story, and I listen to the albums and watch the episodes when I read about their original releases and broadcasts.

For every time that old high school classmates (a sometime singer-songwriter and a self-styled author) post about their projects, I figure out a part from a song by one of these bands and listen to an album (cycling through the projects and in a roughly chronological order within each project).

I also have a few specific sub-projects for this year:
  1. I don't know if I'll be able to do this, but I want at least to try to figure out the trombone parts in the Zombies' "This Will Be Our Year" by carefully studying the slide positions in videos of live performances (as far as I know, there are only two:  the 2008 Odessey and Oracle concert DVD and the 2019 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony).
  2. I want to make videos demonstrating the organ part in the Beach Boys' "Be Still" (with notation) and the piano solo in the Moody Blues' "Please Think about It."  

FAWM and 50/90

Like I said last year, I'm still more interesting in playing other people's music than in writing my own, but I guess I'll attempt FAWM and 50/90 again.

Bach Cantatas

On Sunday, I listen to a Bach cantata, going in order by BWV number.  Occasionally, I follow along in the notation and jot down some notes.

This year, I'll be listening to BWV 111 through BWV 166, but the box set I have omits a handful between those numbers.

Mandolin Monday

Every Monday, I post a recording of a mandolin piece on Instagram and Twitter, and I upload a slightly edited re-run on YouTube.  I plan to continue doing selections from Francis O'Neill's Dance Music of Ireland, although I may do something different every now and then.

Hohner Pianet

In 2019, I started a blog where I write about the Hohner Pianet, a German electric piano from the 1960s, and, as a continuation of the original demonstration disc, record pieces using Pianet samples on my Nord Electro 5D.

I plan to post a few pieces from Telemann's 168 Keyboard Pieces that I recorded last year, but currently I have no plans to do any more recordings for this project (aside from one of the Telemann pieces that I want to re-do).

I also plan to write a post about Electric Light Orchestra's use of the Hohner Clavinet, which I'd intended to do last year but didn't get around to.

Telemann Lieder-Buch

In March 2021, I started working through Telemann's Fast allgemeines Evangelisch-Musicalisches Lieder-Buch, a collection of some 400 hymn tunes.  Along with learning to play the pieces, I'm modernizing the notation.  I post a tune every Thursday.  I want to maintain my lead (I'm a year ahead in recording the tunes) and ideally increase it.

Mellotron

Last year, I started recording selections from Telemann's ouvertures (TWV 55) and Corelli's trio sonatas (Opp. 1-4) using only Mellotron sounds.  I plan to continue this, posting one piece from each collection every month:  the Telemann on the Friday on or after the 14th and the Corelli on the following Friday.  Occasionally, I do other pieces entirely with Mellotron sounds, but currently, I don't have plans for anything other than the Telemann ouvertures and Corelli trio sonatas.


Projects Specific to 2024

Nielsen: Salmer og aandelige Sange

In July last year, I had the idea to record chorales from Bach's cantatas by multitracking my Moog.  In the notation I have, though, each vocal part is in a different clef, and I didn't think it would be worth the effort to transpose each part to a clef I can read more easily.  In September, though, I remembered some chorales by Carl Nielsen that I'd run across years earlier, and I started recording those instead.  I held off on posting them so I could build up a reserve and so that I could post all of the pieces in the same calendar year.  I plan to start posting (on Tuesdays) what I've already recorded and to finish recording the rest of them.  Currently, I have five pieces ready to post and five I need to mix and edit videos for.

Zombie Media

A number of years ago, I started a blog to collect performances by and interviews with the Zombies.  It had lain dormant for a while, but I started doing some more work on it last year.  This year, I want to work consistently on transcribing some of the interviews so that specific topics are easier to find, either for me or for anyone else doing research on the band.  I got the idea partly from the Beatles' Get Back book (which I got for Christmas in 2022 and which I started reading to-day).  The book is basically transcriptions of conversations that the Beatles had during the recording of Let It Be, and I felt that if there's a book of conversations that the Beatles had during the sessions for just one album, there should be transcriptions of interviews that the Zombies have done over the course of many years.  My plan is to transcribe a minute or so of audio for every Beatles reference I run across.  I've been working on transcribing a 2017 interview from the Grammy Museum (I started with that one because the video is no longer publicly available, but I'd downloaded it years ago), and after I finish that, I'll prioritize the interviews that are oldest or feature the most band members and work my way forward.

Get Back

Along with reading the book Get Back, I'm going to watch the documentary again.  So far, I've seen it only once.  My plan is to watch a day's worth at a time, on the day it happened.
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