By Matesic aka Steve Jones
I’m conscious of having contributed a disproportionate number of recordings to IMSLP lately (disproportionate to my musical ability, that is). Definitely not “performances”, because there’s only one player involved and the “cello” is a really a viola in digital drag, these are intended to be realizations in sound of just a few of the previously unrecorded scores that proliferate daily on this amazing site.
The printed notes are one thing, but how many of us are really able to “hear” scores in our head? To make matters worse, the majority of string chamber pieces are preserved not as scores (if a score was ever published) but as individual parts, calling for stupendous feats of simultaneous reading or memory. A sound picture is surely worth a thousand blobs on the page. Having got my head round the basics of the Audacity program and learnt how to play the viola in a variety of clefs (just the one for the violin), I couldn’t resist the temptation to “realize” some of the pieces that seemed to have little or no chance of performance, let alone recording, by professional musicians.
It’s a time-consuming business (Wilm’s nonet was something of an epic), but what astonishes me is how few of the pieces I’ve tried have ultimately struck me as not worth the effort. My top recommendations have to be the string quartets by Maximilian Steinberg (classmate of Stravinsky) and Alexis de Castillon. Amongst my countrymen I feel I should give a special plug to Henry Rowley Bishop, John Lodge Ellerton and George Alexander Macfarren, but the man who stimulates the most affection is the even more obscure Percy Hilder Miles, whose composing career seems to have stuttered and slowly died after he failed to win the hand of his pupil, Rebecca Clarke. If only he’d managed to complete his cello concerto in time for the 1908 Proms…
Encouraged by certain of your editorial brethren (Eric, please stand up), my target for 2011 is to record and upload a “new” piece every week. For goodness sake don’t expect immaculate performances – just something that will give interested parties an impression of what the piece sounds like, hopefully without too many wrong notes and “train-crash” noises. There must be others out there who could do a similar thing for different sectors of the repertoire. Go on!
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Many kudos indeed. Despite the disclaimer, the recordings really are pretty good.
Dear Steve:
I live in Mexico. I saw and listened few of your works. Gernsheim op 91 and string quartet number 3 of Godard. Your work is very important. There are a lot of works forgotten!!!! I hope soon listen more works from your, for exqample Cui quarttet 2 and Castillon. All your work is in software??? excuse me the question. I want listen one day the Blumenfeld quartet, his Sinphony op 39 it’s wonderful!!!! I had worked piano scores in Sibelius. Works by Fuchs, Dubois, Lazzari, Castro, Juon, etc. All the best for you. Please I hope some day that you write me to e-mail.
Angel Ramirez
Hi Angel
Many thanks for the encouragement. Yes, this is all recorded onto my hard drive using Audacity software, a cheap electret condenser microphone and the Griffin iMic connector. I did have a go at the Blumenfeld quartet a while ago, but found it rather disappointing. Still, it often happens that I completely change my mind about a piece with more acquaintance (e.g. the wonderful quartet by Sinigaglia), so I may come back to it later. There’s just too much choice!
All the best
Steve
Hi Steve,
glad I found this article, as your “bedroom band” rendition of Percy Hilder Miles’ sextet made me really curious. You’re doing an amazing job! I’m a viola player myself and also am the proud owner of a digital (Zoom H4) recorder and a laptop with Audacity installed. Could you please publish more (or send me a mail -> myfirstname (below) at xs4all dot nl) about how you go about mass-producing these recordings? I’m not so hot at reading the bass clef yet, but with a bit of practice, I cannot quite get rid of the delusion that I could do OK in time. I spent last Christmas break digitising Prince Heinrich XXIV zu Reuss’ string sextets in Sibelius, so I now have (almost complete) scores & MIDI-soundprints of those. But your approach seems more direct & faster…
cheers, Kristofer
Hi Kristofer,
At last Percy Miles has another listener! I find some passages of the sextet very haunting, although it sure is hard to play off the score.
It took me a while to learn the tricks, but I always start with a click track, usually at constant tempo although sometimes put together in sections. After roughly recording every part to get a feel for the piece (usually starting with the first violin, the cello mostly recorded an octave higher on the viola and dropped 12 semitones using the pitch change option of Audacity) I go through it altering the tempo at constant pitch wherever it’s dictated by the music. I then mute each track one at a time and re-record everything from the cello up with many many stops and starts to get everything more or less note-correct. Very nasty passages may go down almost one note at a time! Then I go through it again making patches and tweaking the dynamics by a few dB to correct the balance. If the whole thing sounds a bit tired I find I can get away with boosting the tempo by up to about 8% without it sounding too artificial. Finally I mix it to stereo, add some reverb and convert it to mp3. The whole process takes maybe 6-12 hours for a 4-movement quartet – much quicker than creating a MIDI soundprint and possibly also more musical…
Apart from that, I located a stash of Percy Miles’s manuscripts in the London Royal Academy of Music and am slowly transcribing them. Unfortunately the stupid copyright law prevents them being published until 2039! Hoping to find a way round this eventually.
All the best and thanks for the kind words,
Steve
Hi Steve,
Excellent work!
Do you have a score available (in addition to the string quartet parts) for your 4tet arrangement of Ravel’s Ma Mere L’Oye?
I would love to use it for my students in my conducting class.
Thanks!
JM
Hello Steve,
I can’t but thank you and congratulate you for your work. Believe me, i totally understand what you do for i’ve done the same thing for years (a one- man string quartet recording), except in my case it’s me doing recordings of my own arrangements of pieces by not so known composers, or, pieces i love and think work great in the string quartet format by well known composers. Also, i use Pro Tools and a different equipment. Anyway, the point is, i know how it is to play with yourself, and it’s not an easy task, specially considering the fact that you do pieces that are probably being recorded for the first time and there are no refference recordings available, wich of course is absolutely fantastic. I’m sure thanks to your recordings many of these pieces will start getting noticed. It would be great to share with you some of the pieces i’ve done, specially the ones by latinamerican composers such as cuban composers Ignacio Cervantes and Ernesto Lecuona, and the few i’ve done by Béla Bartók.
Greetings from México,
Alex
Hi Alex.
I’d love to hear your recordings and maybe we can swap tips. Why not upload them here? Alternatively you could email steve@sandrock.fslife.co.uk. For me the satisfaction comes from the feeling of receiving a coded message across the ages, and these guys practically all had something to say. The first look is frequently daunting (not so much technically as working out how the thing is supposed to go) and I sometimes get a bit punched out by the more complicated ones, but like building a model from a kit of parts the instructions are all there on the page!
All the best,
Steve
Steve,
This is terrific stuff! I really appreciate your hard work. They are much better than MIDI realizations, and they allow us to hear so much fine music that has gone (and likely will go) unrecorded.
It seems presumptuous to make requests, but perhaps you could sniff around the quartets of Rubinstein. Only the first two have had commercial recordings.
May I also be a bit presumptuous in making a suggestion? I would use less reverb on the finished product. The decay time is very long, like an empty cathedral. Beyond that, I can’t tell you enough what a neat project this is!
Best of luck!
John B.
Hi John
Very gratified to get your appreciation. I believe I’m on target to average one “new” piece per week in 2011. Of course that still leaves plenty of gaps, e.g. Rubinstein, although I have to say so far I’ve found his quartets and quintet a bit bland.
Reverb seems to be a very personal thing – another of my correspondents reckoned I should apply some! One day I hope to find out what all the options available on Audacity are supposed to do.
Cheers
Steve
Hi Steve,
thanks a lot for 30 minutes of joy! I did a lot of work on the quartets of Friedrich Ernst Fesca which I then only knew by horrible midi-”performances” or by barely less horrible attempts on the piano. So I’m so happy to hear my favourite quartet (d minor, op. 12) in your really astonishing overdub recording. Maybe your “Viola-Cello” is a little weak
, but all in all it’s precious, since you undoubtedly understand what you are playing.
Thanks again and keep on playing!
ps. what about trying the quartet in B minor op. 2,1?
Hi Markus,
Quite a piece, isn’t it? So far nothing else of his I’ve looked at seems so interesting, but I’ll keep looking. Recently it’s been late romantics I’ve found most rewarding, but Ferdinand David’s sextet was exciting too.
All the best,
Steve
Hello Steve. Your work is commendable. We have made ??available music in the score but otherwise separate parts. Being Italian, I hope I’ll hear the quartets of Cambini and Bartolomeo Bruni (of which I’m editing all the quartets were 48 of 60). Could you explain how do you get sound from the other parts? Is there any software that reads scores??
Hi Giuseppe
I don’t think I fully understand you but thanks anyway! Some notation software like Finale Printmusic is supposed to be able to read scans of printed scores which can then be converted into parts and played synthetically, individually or all at once. I didn’t have any success when I tried it, but that could just be me.
Obviously you can only get a rough idea of a piece from synthesised audio. All my mp3 recordings are played the old-fashioned way (i.e. using real instruments!) from the pdf parts displayed on the screen. I use free Audacity software for the multitracking, editing and mixing.
I haven’t tried any 18th century quartets yet, but maybe one day soon?
All the best
Steve
What a great contribution! Back in the late 80′s, I used to make one-man quartet recordings with the technology of the day (I DO play all four instruments.) I was always frustrated trying to get the expression in at the earliest possible point; perhaps I’ll try again now that the “software” has improved so much.
Please keep it up. You’re a very fine violinist. I too am enthralled with the Merton “collection,” and have begun adding at least one piece per concert to my monthly recital series here in Portland Maine. My best to you!
Thanks Jon, I really appreciate the encouragement. After the first hack-through to a steady click track I’ll usually spend an hour or two bending the tempo by a few percent here and there before recording the final version. Sometimes it works better to incorporate the tempo variations in the click track from the start. With Audacity the stops, restarts and patches can be virtually inaudible, and with as many chances as it takes to get a passage more or less acceptable this is SO much easier than real performing!
Cheers
Steve