Tuesday, December 31, 2024

2024 Musical Projects Review

Here's how I did on my 2024 musical projects.  In late October/early November, I started having some computer issues, and these seriously affected some of my progress.  I was able to hobble along using my old computer, but I'm still limited in what I can do.

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).
Early in January, I decided that for every time one of my cousin's bands has a live show, I'm going to record my nightly improvisation and post it.  I'm leaving the videos unlisted (with some exceptions), but the playlist is public.

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.
In late April/early May, I temporarily ran out of small features to note in hymns (aside from seasonally specific hymns), so instead, I started recording and posting my own arrangements of hymn tunes, in the same sort of style as James Bastien's Great Hymns Arranged for Organ, which I'd gone through last year.  So far, I've done "Westminster Abbey," "Beach Spring," and "Jesus ist kommen, Grund ewiger Freude."  I've come up with arrangements for "Wo Gott zum Haus," "Freu dich sehr," and "Southwell," too, but I haven't gotten around to recording them yet.

By early October, I'd reached a point in writing about the Biblical sources for hymn texts that I had posts scheduled for about two years in advance (when I didn't have any features to write about for Friday, I wrote a sources post instead), so I adjusted my schedule and started writing a sources post only every Sunday (sometimes more if I saw that the next hymn would be easy to write about).  My hope was that this would free me up some to work on other projects with tighter deadlines.

When I started having computer issues, I took a break from recording the tunes from The Lutheran Hymnal.  I'd done one every week since July 2019.

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."
My posts on Byrds songs were published one a week from the beginning of the year until the beginning of April, although I'd finished writing them by the middle of February.

I guess I forgot to mention this at the beginning of the year, but as a part of my Monkees project, I read Micky Dolenz's I'm Told I Had a Good Time: The Micky Dolenz Archives, Volume One.  I started on 1 January and finished on 17 October.

I didn't get around to any of my sub-projects.  I never even tried to figure out the trombone parts in "This Will Be Our Year"; I intended to begin work on a video about the organ part in "Be Still" in November, but then I started having computer problems, which prevented me; and the more I thought about a video on the piano solo in "Please Think about It," the more I thought it wouldn't be worth it.

I got The Beach Boys (the first official book by the band) in April, and like I'm doing with The Monkees: The Day-by-Day Story, I've been listening to the albums after I read about their release, although I've been procrastinating on Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!) because it feels out of season to listen to it in winter.  I'm up to Smiley Smile in the book now, so I have some catching up to do.

I maintained my tradition of watching the Zombies' Live from Studio Two on its anniversary on 18 September, and I think I started a new one with Argent's appearance on Set of Six, which is dated 29 May 1972.

I made a few recordings to demonstrate what parts I've learned
I reached a point where I now know at least a bit of every song on the Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour and the Alan Parsons Project's Vulture Culture.

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.
I wrote two songs for FAWM:  "Pairs Generate a Quaternity" (my attempt at a sort of eighteenth-century country dance) and "Under My Eyes" (played with the same types of instruments from the Zombies' Decca period).  I wrote only one song for 50/90:  "Diluculum saluberrimum" (something like a small-scale version of Bob Dylan's "Nashville Skyline Rag").

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.
As usual, I don't have much to say about this, but I did do it.  

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.
In December last year, I'd found a 1795 manuscript of traditional Welsh, Irish, and Scottish tunes on the Royal College of Music's Internet Archive account, and in mid-March, I started alternating between these tunes (for which I'm also modernizing the notation) and the tunes from The Dance Music of Ireland, with the occasional tune from flutetunes thrown in.

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.
I ended up re-recording a piece from the 168 Keyboard Pieces after discovering that I'd misunderstood the notation and unknowingly played a wrong note.  I went into more detail here.  I also did two Haydn pieces using Nord's String Melody II samples along with the Pianet N sample (Divertimento in C major, Hob XIV:3: II. Menuetto and Trio and O Let Me in This Ae Night, Hob. XXXIa:61, an arrangement of a Scottish folk song), the chorale from Schumann's Album für die Jugend (with a tremolo effect), and my own (Zombies-influenced) arrangement of "God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen" (with Nord's Vox Continental sound for accompaniment).

I've been working on a post on ELO's Clavinet, but research is taking longer than I expected, so I haven't finished it yet.  I should have it done by the end of January, though.

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.
I tried to record a tune a week on average.  I exceeded this goal most months but merely met it in March and didn't even get close in November (because of my computer issues, I recorded only one tune).  Making videos for the tunes takes up considerably more time (especially now that I have to use my old computer), and I'm only about a month ahead in that process.  I think I'm a bit over halfway through in recording the tunes, though.  There are 433, and I'm in the 220s, but some numbers have more than one tune (which I've been marking as A and B).

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.
I tried to record at least one piece from each of these collections every month (and was successful until I started having computer problems), and I workt ahead until March next year.


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.
I finished recording these near the beginning of November and posted the last one at the beginning of December.  Here's a link to the playlist.

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.
I didn't really get started on this until the middle of March.  I finished transcribing the Grammy Museum interview near the end of March.  Next, I did the BBC Mastertapes programs, which I'd actually started transcribing in October 2022, about a year before starting the Grammy Museum interview.  I finished that near the end of May.  Then, I did the appearance on the Summit, which I finished in mid-July.  I did some work on the Rock Solid podcast but took a break for most of August and instead transcribed some articles that the Argent Facebook page posted.  Doing text-to-text was faster than audio-to-text, and I hoped that this would help me catch up some (I'm not sure if it did).  Instead of a minute of audio, I did about a column for every Beatles reference I came across.  Around October or November, I sort of temporarily abandoned the Rock Solid podcast, transcribed a short appearance for radio.com, and then started on The Story of the Zombies from 2015.  I have only about ten minutes left.  Despite working on this project fairly consistently, I'm still about seven months behind.

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.
Although I have the movie on Bluray, I watched it on Disney+.  Since my internet was out one day (14 January), I had to double up on the next day.  I finished reading Get Back on 24 May.  I also read Paul McCartney's 1964: Eyes of the Storm (from 1 January to 28 July).


Other Things to Note

Like I've done some other years, I listened to a thirteen-disc box set of Chopin's piano works (daily starting 1 March, Chopin's birthday), and starting on the anniversary of Bach's death (28 July), I listened to a seventeen-disc box set of his complete organ works, followed by the complete organ works of Buxtehude (six discs), both at the rate of a disc a week.

I maintained my three specific days of listening to particular vinyl records:  one from my grandfather's collection on his birthday (I took a break from Lawrence Welk this year and listened to the Ink Spots instead), the Apples in Stereo's Fun Trick Noisemaker on 12 October, and the Bill Evans Trio's Portrait in Jazz on 28 December.


I figured out 179 parts, but I never wrote down some of them and might have forgotten them by now (only twelve, some of which I filmed videos of, so I do have some record).  Like I did last year, I made an effort to figure out parts to songs that were posted or alluded to by various bands my cousin is in.  Here's a list:
  • The Beatles - "Your Mother Should Know" - piano phrase first at ~0:47
  • The Beatles - "Your Mother Should Know" - chords
  • The Beatles - "Drive My Car" - piano (but very roughly and because I didn't write it down, I've since forgotten it)
  • The Beatles - "Drive My Car" - chords (which I also never wrote down and have probably forgotten by now)
  • Simon & Garfunkel - "Scarborough Fair/Canticle" - vocal melody for the first verse
  • Creedence Clearwater Revival - "Born on the Bayou" - chords
  • Buffalo Springfield - "For What It's Worth" - chords
  • Electric Light Orchestra - "Mr. Blue Sky" - guitar solo, although I later discovered I have it an octave too low
  • Cab Calloway - "Minnie the Moocher" - trumpet (?) in the introduction
Because he mentioned Paul & Linda McCartney's Ram as a favorite album, I listened to it again and learned some guitar phrases in "Smile Away."  For similar reasons, I listened to all of the Who albums I have (and bought My Generation) and learned some parts:  the French horn in "Overture" from Tommy, some guitar phrases in "Pure and Easy," the recurring guitar phrase and chords in "A Legal Matter," and the bass in the choruses of "Who Are You."
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