Nothing new here...move along

Two weeks to whip the house into shape and host the Mexican Train group here. We can do it!

More tag/labels than text here...it's all good.

Modern Art Songs

M, our choir director, lent me a book of contemporary art songs...lyrics by poets, music by the likes of Samuel Barber, Charles Ives, etc., who probably are not considered modern any more, but whose music is pretty wild. I looked through the entire book and found two songs that are possible; the best, I think, is one written in honor of Leonard Bernstein's birthday. It mentions pickled herring, so you know it has to be a good one!

The dining room cum music room is still partly strewn with sheet music from the early 20th century. I have played through it all, and have kept out several songs. Perhaps one of them will work for church.

But in reaction to the modern music mentioned above, I pulled out Mom's Music: The Universal Language, which she might have had as a textbook in the 1940s. The illustrations are very familiar, and I must have looked at it when I was young. Many songs that she sang around the house are there...Summertime, Smoke Gets In Your Eyes, and so forth. They all seem eminently more singable than the more contemporary ones. Except that one with the pickled herring...

Wurlitzer 4600 goes to new home

Waiting for the guy's friend now so they can move it out the front door and into the van...

...and it's gone!

Back on the job

Job? We don't need no stinkin' job...

I've discovered (isn't Google wonderful) a share-ware program for cataloging CDs: collectorz.com

The program is a  (free for few features, some $ for more, more $ for still more) download, and does not live on-line like LibraryThing. I suppose since there was such a brouhaha about 'file-sharing' that is a good thing...less temptation.

I suppose I am more than half-way through, and I was lucky enough to find duplicates that Charles adopted, so the 'pure' collection is (mostly) going to be stripped of dupes.

Open the program | push the button to log disks | pop a CD in the drive | the program reads the code number off the disk and pops the CD tray out | insert another disk, etc.

When you have a good stack done...keep it down to 10 or fewer to make it easier to correct discrepancies...push the "search" button. The program goes out and retrieves title, cover art, track lists and times, etc., etc. for each CD...if it can find it. If it can't find it, you can enter it manually by editing the record after you have saved the list to your database. That's why I suggest being conservative about the number you do at once; you'll have to research which entry stands for which disk, and it's easier with a light load or a short stack.

There is a 'comments' type field into which I can enter the box number the CD is packed into, much as I did with books. Many many fit into one box, though, so it won't be quite so critical. As the list is being built, you can specify genre (making them up if you want more than they come up with), so re-shelving at the other end will also be pretty straightforward.

Music Mashup

Started "final boxing" the Music today...sheet music in Box 1; band music (and some piano) in Box 2; Vocal sheet music in Box 3. Or something like that. Feels good to be this far, but there are still bends in the road before we see Mount Joy.

The elephant is out of the living room

Actually, it isn't an elephant, it's a piano, and it wasn't even in the living room, because I don't think the beams would have held. 

But my childhood piano, the Hardman baby grand, has now embarked on its trek to its new home with Pete's family in RI.

When I was six, I started piano lessons, and, having no piano, practiced at the neighbor's. I do not recall the event of the upright piano arriving in our house, but I do remember that it lived in the dining room. Being a smallish dining room, the piano was nearly smack up against the corner of the room, leaving just enough space for a small child (me) to hide from our babysitter. THAT was a whole other story, involving police and never seeing the babysitter again...I think everyone was pretty upset. But I was only hiding, not running away.

Sometime after that, our friends the Harrisons were replacing their baby grand, and sold my parents the Hardman aforementioned for some small amount of money. Of course, we had to move it, and I do not remember that, either. But it took up residence in our living room, there being not enough room in the dining room for it along with a dining table. And there it stayed, until about 1973 or so, when Dad and V shipped it to me in Massachusetts. THAT was a big event, and I had a tuner come in and recondition it...at least to the extent that one can recondition a piano in situ. She said it was nearly concert quality, despite the cracked soundboard.

I don't remember how we moved it to our new house in 1976, but we did...I seem to CONVENIENTLY forget the heavy lifting, as befits the princess that I must appear to my public... LOL. And then, sometime in the late 1990s, we moved it to Portland. Well, we had its insides reconditioned (the technician removed them and took them to his studio in the back seat of his pickup truck) and new plastic keycaps to replace the split and missing ivories. And when we built the addition in the back of the house (with the only actually LEVEL floors in the whole place), we had movers move it from the front room to the back room.

So imagine my surprise when, upon my gifting it to our grandniece and nephews, their Dad and his brother came to move it in a U-Haul truck. They had carefully and thoroughly researched the project, and deliberately and painstakingly wrapped it, shrinkwrapped it, bound it to a piano dolly, and hauled it right out the back door on the truck ramp, which luckily fit right in through the back door!

I guess this post is in memory of my many happy hours at the keyboard. The sightreading exercises stood me in good stead for my amateur singing and my typing...my eye-hand coordination is super. I am sad to see it go out of my life, but happy for its sake...as it moves through its 9th decade on earth as a Hardman baby grand, it is going to a young woman who will play it every day, joyfully. I also hope that she will play duets on it with her brother. What fun.

I will content myself to again practicing at the neighbors' house...K has invited me to use her instrument, and I have started to imagine scheduling myself to do so. I will assuage the guilt I felt when I came across my old practice schedule (hardly filled in at all), and I am looking forward to it.

Progress, Fingering, and a little Vocalizing

I come to the part of my packing when I examine ALL the music in the house. Not in detail, and I'm not even sitting down to play much of it. The piano will go (God willin' and the crick don't rise) to nephew Peter's family on Saturday, so it's all future fingering I'm practicing.

As the repository for

• a satchel (since discarded...the leather deteriorated) of Mom's Massachusetts Youth Symphonic Band music from the 1940s (instrumental parts for MANY instruments)
• a carton of sacred music of varying stripe from Ruth Perkins's collection
• vocalises...Lutgen, etc.
• a handful of recorder and ukelele and guitar music
• M's violin and fiddle music
• vocal sheet music ranging from the late 1870s to the 1960s from Uncle F, Mom, Ruth, Grammy Carter, etc.
• quantities of piano exercises, etudes, and simplified Rachmaninoff, etc., including a book on figured bass
  
• many Oxford University Press collections (in triplicate) from our summer Choral Symposia with Sir David Willcocks through the years
• many masterworks...Bach, Beethoven, Siegmeister, Britten, Bernstein, Mozart, Vaughan Williams, Haydn, Handel, etc. etc....also in at least duplicate
• folk song books, Scout song books, part-song books for glee clubs, choirs, and groups
• hymnals from the Congregationalists, the Tabernacle, the Presbyterians, the Spiritualists, and the Unitarians (among others!)

I especially love the sheet music...lovely covers, stylized according to the decade of publication, photos of "as made famous by" Rudy Vallee, Bing Crosby, Kate Smith, and many many of whom I have NEVER heard. The occasional music for something done in revival by Mama Cass...Dream A Little Dream of Me...and so forth.

There should be no doubt that music is in our genes...