are a compromise between an awareness of historical performance practice, and what is practical for a lone musicologist and musician who has chosen to live and work in the forest in northern Sweden (you can see what it looks like here).
On the one hand, the Yahama musical instruments corporation, Apple Computer and Ricci Software have made it possible to offer a varied instrumentation with both whole and broken consorts (homogenous and heterogeneous combinations of instruments), a fairly convincing harp sound, and recording-multitracking-editing of convincing quality at an affordable price.
On the other hand, the music has the characteristics of sound which has been produced on a synthesiser: tuned to today's equal temperament, after a moment's duration each sound starts to vibrate in a mechanical/electronic way, the machine doesn't do bowed strings or voices very well.
The presentations are intended to be listened to a few times, to give the student an extra and much-needed dimension to the process of learning, and to stimulate the musician to giving them a normal live performance, rather than as 'entertainment' music to be listened to repeatedly. In the trade-off between sound quality and file-size, I have thought mostly of those who - like me - still have to use a telephone and modem to access the internet, and I've opted for the smallest file-size which gives a quality you can listen to: and actually I'm still amazed at what the MP3 format can offer, compared with what we were working with a couple of years ago - especially when handled by Adobe's LiveMotion and Macromedia's Dreamweaver ...
In determining the quality of musical performance - togetherness, balance and so on - I have followed Henry Ford's maxim "I don't want it perfect, I want it Thursday"; surely everything can be made better if it is allowed to consume more time: but there are many other projects clamouring for attention, too. At least the overall experience is hopefully a whole lot more human than the completely automatic one which MIDI files offer.
| And then if by chance you would like to simply listen to the seven frottole as a sequence, they're presented here, accompanied by a slide show of 30 paintings and drawings from the same time. |
|
