What's better than a cello?

One of the interesting ways my musical toolbox has evolved over the years, purely due to practical reasons, is that more and more my solution to musical problems is to create my own arrangements for all manner of things. Something one of my choirs is singing doesn't quite fit the forces we have? Just re-work it. Modern software tools are so efficient, and for some reason, entering notes into the computer is genuinely pleasurable and satisfying to me. I could list hundreds of examples, and dozens of the blog posts here are evidence of this predilection. The reason I find this interesting is that, when I was an aspiring pianist in college, it never would have occurred to me that I could do any of the things I do now as easily as writing a paragraph. [To be fair, there are plenty of things I'd assumed I'd learn to do well that I never did.]

What's Spookier than Erlkönig?

Will keep this brief in order to get it in for Halloween 2026. As I mentioned last post, the developing software Cantai has been improving enough that I've found myself wanting to re-do some old blog projects which featured virtual singing. Following Hocket Love in the Uncanny Valley from a couple of weeks ago, we now return to a bigger project - the transformation of Schubert's iconic ghost story Erlkönig from a minor key to a major key. You can read all about how that was first inspired here, with follow-up posts:

Hocket Love in the Uncanny Valley

You know, even with the proliferation of AI and the explosion of ideas disseminated across the World Wide Web, I feel confident I'm the first to use the blog title you see above. I have written a little before about Cantai (here, here, and here), a developing software tool which "sings" notated music from directly within a notation program like Dorico or Sibelius. There have been significant improvements in the past months which have made it a very useful tool, seemingly all of a sudden. I can now produce practice audio for my church and school choirs which allows singers to hear more closely what musical lines should sound like sung. (I have often underestimated how challenging it can be for less experienced singers to hear a part played on piano, with its sharp attack/decay feature, and imagine how that should by sung with vowels and consonants and all that.)

Mechanical Musing

 A few days ago, the winds of social media algorithms brought this video my way:

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It's not very often that a strongly worded YouTube title actually delivers on its promise, but I'd say this curiosity easily qualifies as "Ravel's strangest piece." Honestly, it's one of the strangest pieces by any well-known composer relative to that composer's general output. Frontispice was written at a dark time in 1918 amidst the devastation left by World War I. As the YouTube video above notes, the music is quite mechanical in the way its individual components seem to exist in their own independent spaces, tonally and rhythmically. 

Only 364 More Days!

Today, someone posted a cartoon (by Jeffrey Curnow) from yesterday about the concurrent birthdays of composers Anton Bruckner and Darius Milhaud on September 4. The cartoon pokes fun at AI, but I figured I could do this without AI at least as badly as AI could do.