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-   -   Mark Walsen - Children's Suite for piano (http://www.notation.com/vb-forum/showthread.php?t=2897)

Mark W 11-17-2009 05:03 PM

Mark Walsen - Children's Suite for piano
 
Wow, it has been a long time since I've shown up here in the Share Your Music section of the forum, where I used to regularly listen to and respond to the music you all have been creating with Notation Composer. In the next couple of months I'll report to you what I've been up to here at Notation Software; but a hint now is that I'm finally building a team that will accomplish a lot more than what just Sherry and I could do alone in the past.

This post points you to the Children's Suite for piano (1977) that I've published in MP3 format at Soundclick: http://www.soundclick.com/bands/defa...?bandID=512028

Here are notes that I wrote about the Children's Suite at Soundclick:

No. 1 - Prelude
This Children Suite was one of the compositions I wrote while studying under Pulitizer prize winning composer Dr. Robert Ward, at the North Carolina School of Arts, when he was chancellor there. It was first performed by Earl Meyer, a piano instructor at the NCSA, who performed widely in North Carolina for four decades.

The prelude has a childhood summer feeling, sometimes lazy, sometimes fun-loving. If you listen carefully, you hear in a few places a familiar short children's "nah nah" musical phrase, mildly taunting another child.

No. 2 - Hide and Seek
Gosh, I'm going to sound like a really old guy with this "when I was a kid..."

When I was a kid... a dozen of us would get together to play Hide and Seek, or Kick the Can, starting each round pretending to close our eyes to not see where the others ran off to hide. You'd count by fives to 100 or 200; and if you had any style, you'd sing out the "Five, Ten, Fifteen, Twenty" phrase heard at the beginning of this piece. Also, you'd probably cheat (in addition to peeking through the hands over your eyes) by accelerating the pace of your counting-- thus the accelerando of the "Five, Ten, Fifteen, Twenty" phrase at the beginning of this Hide and Seek.

When I was a kid... we could run through every's yard, into their backyards, high-jumping hedges between properties to leave younger players behind. If kids did that now, every homeowner in the neighborhood would be calling the police. I haven't heard "Five, Ten, Fifiteen, Twenty" since I was a kid.

But I wrote this as a 23-year old without any lamenting of the good ol' days. I was just fondly looking back a few years that I could still count with my two hands, with childhood still fresh in my memory.

No. 3 - Rocking Chair
A very young child needs a nap in the middle of the day. So do 5-piece musical collections, including grand symphonies, often have a calm piece as the center third piece.

No. 4 - Toy Soldiers
Any piece of music suggesting military is required to use a lot of open 4th and 5th sounds, suggestive of horns. Explosive percussion helps also. The piano can pull this off because, technically, the piano is a percussive instrument.

My very favorite activity as a young boy was playing with toy soldiers of any era-- WW III, Civil War, Indians and cowboys, Romans, you name it. I'd make forts out of any scrap I could find and would saw into blocks, and use as cannon balls or hand granades, to wipe out in one minute the enemy that took me a half hour to set up.

No. 5 - Fire Dance
This piece finishes the Children's Suite with a high amount of energy. Just as the whole Chidren's Suite is a reflection backwards in time on children, so also does this last piece take pause in the middle to reflect back to the early part of the suite. Can you hear that happening?

---
Back in 1977 I did hand-calligraphy with special ink pens to notate the Chidren's Suite, and I still occasionally play the piece reading from that score. Does anyone know of a good notation software app I could use to prepare a nice printed copy of it?

Cheers
-- Mark

dj 11-18-2009 12:17 PM

Re: Mark Walsen - Children's Suite for piano
 
Well, there's Finale ($400-$500) or Sibelius ($1200+).

It takes a special kind of guy to create good notation software, one who understands both computers and music. Not a lot of those around.

There's another one I've got on my computer some where: Notation Composer. Not bad.

David

mgj32 11-18-2009 06:10 PM

Re: Mark Walsen - Children's Suite for piano
 
Hi Mark,

I'm glad the sort of childhood represented here waited for you before becoming the extinct species it appears to be now. Nah nahnah Nan Nah evokes a whole era perfectly. Good choice. Was I the only one who never cheated at hide and seek? Took me well over a half a century to finally be able to say "no wonder." "Toy Soldiers" is pleasing, and you've managed to keep the "toy" the key to it. In '44 and '45 we had lead soldiers, and locally made tanks and trucks of wood. I'm sure we heard our parents talking about strange sounding names from the South Pacific and many places associated with Europe, but we had no conception of what was really going on in any of them. Our soldiers could get back up and engage in battle after battle. The whole suite catches the innocence of the era very well. You might have called the last piece "Indian" dance. I've heard some rather sophisticated drum playing, both in the hand--actually under arm small drums--individuals might use to accompany a "social" song, but especially in Pow Wow drums, where 4-8 play in unison and amazingly vary accent and tempo, without a hitch and without a conductor.

Did you record the performance? The piano is either real of by far the best piano soundfont I've heard.

I will download the suite and put it together in a single file, which I'm sure will be played many times.

Welcome back,
mgj

dj 11-18-2009 11:03 PM

Re: Mark Walsen - Children's Suite for piano
 
Hi, all:

My dad was a POW, wounded very badly in Italy. When we played soldiers and I asked him to make me a submachine gun out of wood, he also made, and required that I carry, a stretcher. Just to keep it a bit real.

As always, Mark, I am blown away by your keyboard skills and your compositional ability.

David

Mark W 11-19-2009 05:58 AM

Re: Mark Walsen - Children's Suite for piano
 
Hello MG and David,

It's fun to be on the other end of show'n'tell, getting your replies, especially after my having been fairly absent from the forum and this Share Your Music section for a long time.

I've told Sherry privately that I might be transitioning into a phase in life that I have been longing for over the last couple decades, to return to doing some of my own music. Last evening I was about to record a piano collection named Intervals for Piano, that I wrote around 1978, and realized that the last piece still wasn't done. In 30 minutes I finished a collection of piano pieces that had been left unfinished for more than 30 years. Well, actually, when I was sitting in jury duty today, I conceived one more piece that needs to be added at the end; it will tie everything together in collection.

Yes, these are recordings from my own Yamaha C6 grand. A few days ago I splurged, and with Sherry's advice, got a Tascam DR-100 hand-held digital recorder at Amazon for just a few more dollars than half of its not-so-cheap list price. This amazing little recorder accepts input through XLR jacks from my Rodes NT5 mics, if I don't want to use its two pairs of built-in mics. I did absolutely no post audio processing, other than zipping the 24-bit 48Mhz wave files. So, no, Gary doesn't get credit for the sound. There's even the realism of slightly out-of-tune strings on the piano (or maybe not so slightly for more sensitive ears than mine).

The Intervals for Piano pieces, which I'll probably record next, are a little bit more difficult to play. I'm thinking that I might record them via MIDI from the Yamaha C6 which also is a Disklavier. I'll record the MIDI into Composer, and fix up inevitable wrong notes there. It won't be so bad that I still haven't gotten around to implementing metronomeless transcription in Composer, because I just need to change pitches, delete notes, maybe add a few, and change the MIDI note-on/off times-- none of that really requires that the rhythms are accurately represented. Then I'll play from Composer back to the Disklavier, as though I'm a virtuoso pianist, completely cheating, and record the real acoustic piano with the Tascam DR-100 and Rodes NT5 mics. The only hitch in this is that the fidelity of the Disklavier MIDI recording and playback can't promise to be perfect. But, I figure slight imperfections in timing and velocity of notes isn't nearly as bad as some of my bloopers. I'm too lazy to practice these pieces again to get them to a level that deserves any audience except the closest of friends.

Soon, I'll start learning about audio editing, and Sherry has been giving me some references to how I can learn more about this. You see, I'm really just MIDI guy, not an audio guy. But that is changing. For example, I have the new mind-blowing Melodyne Editor by Celemony, which just arrived in stores on Nov 16. It makes wave audio look like editable MIDI, so that you can correct specific notes in polyphonic audio. No kidding.

Cheers
-- Mark

mgj32 11-19-2009 06:52 AM

Re: Mark Walsen - Children's Suite for piano
 
Hi Mark,
"a phase in life that I have been longing for over the last couple decades, to return to doing some of my own music." I remember suggesting, if not urging, this 4-5 years ago. So I guess I can sit up in the sleeping bag, throw a log on the fire, pour a glass of Merlot, and raise the glass to you, a more happy camper.

I'm just a midi guy, too, still looking for extra channels, of course, but otherwise satisfied. I see more and more names of more and more devices that can be put together to do fantastic things--your Melodyne Editor sounding like the ultimate--but every hour I spent learning, would be an hour taken away from working on many projects I have in mind, some of them pretty well worked out in concept. At the moment I am more than half way through the draft of an oratorio based mostly on the wealth of music produced by the Civil War, trying to catch and contrast the feelings of all sides, to surround a love story that starts with the Benjamin Hanby song, "My Darling Nelly Gray," and becomes fictionalized, though possible. It started as Symphony No. 3, and so it remains in title. I am very lazy about changing titles and re-filing.

Good luck with the audio editing. Sherry knows a ton about it and can certainly point you down some productive paths.

all best,
mgj

djimtio 11-26-2009 03:18 PM

Re: Mark Walsen - Children's Suite for piano
 
Hi Mark
Just wanted to say congrats on your second (artistical ) life.Most ,if not all,people are granted a second life fulfilling their long cherished wishes only after having followed a long winding path leading to enlightenment.
Seems like you have made it !
Happy music making and may the Lord Buddha keep inspiring you.
Regards

Djim

Mark W 11-26-2009 04:03 PM

Re: Mark Walsen - Children's Suite for piano
 
Hello Djim, MG, and David,

It finally feels like I'm joining you all in making music. Djim, thanks for your blessing on my beginning of, or return, to a journey with music making that might hold for me joys similar to those you all have everyday with music.

Last week I had two days of idle time in jury duty, waiting to see if I would be on a jury (which didn't happen), and so the first day I took a book on C++ programming. I still love to do programming, and I'm doing more of it than I have in the last several years-- I'll be making announements about that later. But on the second day of jury duty, I thought I'd try something I've never done before: compose away from the keyboard. So, with the Parallel Intervals for Piano piece fresh in my memory, I started to write one last interval piece, for octaves. It was fairly easy for me to do in my inner ears, without the keyboard to confirm what I was writing, because the octave piece reuses the themes from all of the other interval pieces. When I got back home, I found that I couldn't trust my inner ears very well, and had to rewrite some of the octaves piece and then finish it at the piano. But it was a small taste of what I had longed for my whole life-- to be able to compose in my head away from the keyboard. MidiNotate and Composer were conceived as tools to compensate for my deficient inner ear.

The final octave internval piece is done, and so last evening I started recording the entire set. On Thanksgiving today, I hope to get some recording of the piece done; and will indeed be very thankful for the luxury of being able to do this, knowing how so many people in the world are thankful just to be able to have food on the table.

I tend to be a glutton about eating on Thanksgiving day, and similarly, I'm already starting to be a glutton about music making. At the same time I'm returning to music writing, I'm also returning to playing 8-hand piano, with the help of the Internet to invite local pianists to play on my two pianos: http://www.meetup.com/Bellevue-8-Hand-Piano/ I hope someday to transcribe some of my favorite orchestral pieces to 8-hand piano. It will be relatively easy to do, starting with orchestra MIDI files that others have already labored over.

This is really fun!

P.S. If you wonder where Sherry is in all of this, she has been on the side, trading emails with me, with much encouragement about my return to music making. Sherry has been hugely inspiring to me in many ways.

Cheers
-- Mak

Ralph Sirvent 09-08-2011 02:24 PM

Re: Mark Walsen - Children's Suite for piano
 
Hello Mark, I would like to see the score for the parallel intervals you posted on your site. Where can I get those? My e-mail address is ralphsirvent@yahoo.com I would pay for these if necessary. I just want to learn how these work. They seem to be how hymn writers write their music and may be related to voice leading. That is what I'm trying to learn the about along with some other principles of music. Thank you. Ralph Sirvent

Sherry C 09-09-2011 12:53 PM

Re: Mark Walsen - Children's Suite for piano
 
Hi Ralph,

Mark passed away this past January (you can see this other thread).

He and I were very good friends (I'd worked with him here at Notation Software for many years) and we often shared our personal music projects with each other. From what he had told me about the parallel interval pieces, he had some scribbled scores that he had not gotten into Notation Composer yet. He had done the audio recordings in anticipation of doing some testing with the Melodyne Editor's MIDI export feature to see if he could get a good .mid file from the audio recording. During that testing he had intended to get the scores into Notation Composer either via recording directly using a MIDI keyboard (he had a really nice Yamaha disklavier) or by note entry using the mouse so that he could directly compare the Melodyne export with the "real" thing. Sadly he did not get to finish that project, nor a few others he was working on.

ttfn,
Sherry


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