The Borba piano arrangements
A cough in the dark from a long-dormant forumite.... Ages ago I mentioned I had all these half-completed JoCo piano arrangements. I finally got as far as putting two on YouTube:
Creepy Doll
I'm Your Moon
I'm hoping to supplement them with others at some point. Also I acknowledge that the "style" wouldn't be everybody's cup of tea - we're talking here about a niche within a niche. But hey, I enjoy doing it ;-)
ETA: Wedding Night on Skullcrusher Mountain
ETA: Dance, Soterios Johnson, Dance
ETA: Millionaire Girlfriend #2 (Caroline)
Creepy Doll
I'm Your Moon
I'm hoping to supplement them with others at some point. Also I acknowledge that the "style" wouldn't be everybody's cup of tea - we're talking here about a niche within a niche. But hey, I enjoy doing it ;-)
ETA: Wedding Night on Skullcrusher Mountain
ETA: Dance, Soterios Johnson, Dance
ETA: Millionaire Girlfriend #2 (Caroline)
Comments
Absolutely brilliant, Borba! My hat off to you...
(Sheet music link?)
:-)
(speechless)
The one that I wish I could now get finished is Skullcrusher Mountain. It's just missing a bridge, but nothing I do feels like it fits. Spoiler alert: it's titled "(Wedding night on) Skullcrusher Mountain."
Also, nice decision to make the bridge of Creepy Doll soft and quiet, the opposite of how it's originally played.
(But wait.. if Tchaikovsky copied JoCo, doesn't that mean that Nutcracker Suite is now under the CC? :-p )
MMMMEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!
:-)
:-)
* while watching yourself in the mirror (gotta drink a bloody strained metaphor to the dregs...)
@Caleb: Interesting observation about the soft bridge in Creepy Doll. I haven't thought about it that way myself, although funnily enough I was very conscious of doing such an inversion in I'm Your Moon. In IYM, the bridge is the part where things come out in stark relief, the voice sheds its reverb, and it feels incredibly intimate and honest. Since I did the verse in a bit more of a "clinical" manner, I figured the bridge may as well dissolve in emotion.
Haha! I just noticed that you included my critique of I'm Your Moon in your YouTube info. Um, you're totally forgiven for the F-natural. It's growing on me. :-) So, I noticed that you decided to go with the A instead of the original B at the beginning of each verse, e.g., A on the "rea-" of "reason" but B on the "mat-" of "matter." Just your own personal flair? Splitting the difference on JC's vocal slide?
ETA: Borba, have you told JC about these, or submitted them as user content on the site?
I did email the links, and Scarface suggested I submit them as user content, which I valiantly attempted, although I'm Your Moon didn't seem to work - I'm guessing some parser borked on the apostrophe in the URL. Yeah, like everyone else making their own stuff, I'd love JoCo to hear them, because I imagine they will elicit some kind of facial expression!
BTW, I'm trying to come up with a cover band joke for "moto perpetuo" and failing. My Bach cover band? My Baroque cover band? My basso continuo cover band?
P.S. Borba, as a music student, did you have to suffer through Grout's History of Western Music? I'm rereading it now in prep for my Yale audition.
Speaking of Baroque cover bands... this thread had reminded me that I started working a while ago on a Baroque arrangement of (ironically enough) "The Future Soon". I've pulled it out and started working on it again, and I'm at the end of the second chorus. It's (loosely) in the form of an Italian Baroque Oboe Concerto -- I guess you could call it "Bach To The Future (Soon)" (sorry!).
@Colleenky: Yes, I was a Grouter too. I don't remember it as suffering, but then again I don't much about it anyway. Let me guess offhand that Grout, like every other history book out there, has the illustration of Pythagoras and the bells/anvils etc, and of course The Guidonian Hand!
ETA: @Caleb and Angelastic. I agree that it's got a lot in common with touch typing. Maybe the biggest difference is that one can pretty much cover the whole QWERTY keyboard using finger and wrist movement, whereas the arms and even the torso come into play with piano. Extend for organ and big percussion setups. One embarrassing side effect of the sheer physicality is that I am now reminded of how much weight I've recently put on every time I get to the Creepy Doll refrain, since I have to move my torso really fast, and the inertia is way more noticeable than it would have been ten years ago!
I have to confess that it's just plain fun to play things with big jumps and to see it work. Before the novelty wears off, there is always a few minutes of "I can do THAT?" ;-) Skullcrusher's last verse is currently getting quite wild in that regard.
Ha! Guess where my Grout is currently bookmarked. The Guidonian Hand! No Pythagoras with bells to be found, though. Oops. Spoke too soon. There he is on page 37, but it's not the classic illustration. (The Guidonian Hand has been mentioned on these here forums before. And it was so long ago, we didn't have hyperlinks. Seriously.)
Caleb, you read Piston's Harmony *voluntarily*? I mean, Grove's can be kinda interesting, but *Piston*?!
(the video is just 1:22 long, but it took me literally all day to make)
As soon as sheet music is available, I want a copy! Money no object!
:-)
Edric
Got another chance to shout out about his amazing work on my Song Fu song...
http://juliasherred.com/2009/11/joe-covenant-lamb/
I've been made featured *band* of the month !!!
Wedding Night on Skullcrusher Mountain
:-)
I recognized the last one on the first time through, but it took a while before I was able to recall what the rest of the piece was. I was able to figure out the second one with a little bit of Youtube research, but I haven't got a clue what the other one is... Drummer Boy??? (kidding!) :-)
:-)
And correct, Edric. Would you perhaps like to post your answers and request (assuming you have one!) on YouTube, saving me the trouble of posting it and looking like I made you up? ;-)
By the way, I *am* working on notation. Got a bit of Creepy Doll done, and although it will still take a while, I will happily share work in progress with anybody - just send me a PM.
ETA: Bry, I must admit that "Wedding day at Troldhaugen" is really only known to pianists. But perhaps that's why I felt compelled to include the strong hint in the title. And darn it, it makes a good title!
He said: "Also helps that it contains one word of the video name and shares a composer with the last."
I should've said first, of course, that I'm amazed as always by Borba's compositions / performances thereof and would very much like to hear more. Also, hint on the second quotation?
Borba has some modest skills (to say the least).
It's one of the pieces in Qvfarl'f Snagnfvn.
So go ahead and post the solutions for me on YouTube, Borba. (If you don't want me to sound completely fictitious, you could link my name to my website -- but you don't have to.) And let me think for a day on my "request." (I promise I'll pick something sincere -- not something like "W's duty"...)
:-)
In fact -- once I chose the song I would request, it seemed so amazingly obvious that I can't believe I didn't think of it right off! What more perfect match for someone with the awesome classical skills that Borba possesses?
Ladies and gentlemen -- stay tuned to this forum thread for the (eventual) premiere of . . .
"Dance, Soterious Johnson, Dance (NPR Remix)"
:-)
(The time is fourteen minutes past the hour...)
Edric, I'd be happy to oblige, although it feels like cheating, since I already did the arrangement last year, and it's just awaiting repolishing and recording. I was going to do that anyway, so feel free to change your mind ;-)
ETA: Will post a link to an amazing piano rendition of NOBM later - can't access YouTube at work...
Also, semi-randomly, this is the most fun and impressive party piece arrangement of a classical piece I've heard in ages. Well worth a listen for some perspective of what human digits are capable of, although admittedly this piece falls in the "smoke and mirrors" category, written for a high impressiveness:difficulty ratio.
ETA: More relevantly, following up on the quoted titles... Troldhaugen was the name of composer Edvard Grieg's house. I always saw it translated as "hill of the trolls", although I recently saw it as "Troll Knoll", which is a lot more catchy. Either way, troll references are always good baiting material for online efforts.
That second link just exploded my brain!
As long as we're on the topic of amazing but tangentially-related classical music links on Youtube, I really like this arrangement of the 1812 Overture for solo melodica and violin. This same guy has also done a lot of multitracking of Bach and Vivaldi, such as the 3rd Brandenberg Concerto for 10 melodicas. Who knew they made a bass melodica!
Glad to hear the Mozart-Volodos exploded your brain too. It's one of those things where familiarity breeds... not really contempt, but one gets a bit jaded, and it's hard to recapture the initial jaw-drop. (Confession: I have actually learned that piece, and played it as an encore at a concert last year. Not remotely as well as Yuja Wang, of course, and I'd be embarrassed to record it without another few months' practice, but still, it's an immense amount of fun, and guaranteed to leave people with a positive impression!)
As a few old forumites may remember, I actually did this (in semi-intentionally crappy audio) back in April 2008 already, but Edric's request was a good excuse to dust it off.
ETA: Just noticed how cute the video ID for Skullcrusher Mountain is? aDOGRCW0lFs contains a dog and is covered in W0lFs.
Also, I just uploaded a new old one that I shared a while ago in an audio-only incarnation: Millionaire Girlfriend #2 (Caroline). This is a tip of the hat to Mike Lombardo, and a symptom of my infection by his, uh, infectious song "Caroline" a few Song Fus ago.