A little birthday music

Yesterday I posted twice regarding Bach's birthday, but I hadn't known that there's another great composer born a day (and 245 years) later on March 22. So, between rehearsals this afternoon, I put this little tribute together. I bribed my house violinist to record it with me after dinner, and here it is, with two hours to spare:



[Lyrics will be much easier to read if you follow full-screen.]

For the record, this is my fourth re-imagining of this tune.

See also:

à la Bruch:

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à la 12-tone

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à la Messiaen
 

worth at least 1000 words

OK, as a last-second Bach's Birthday gift, and a promise of things to come, here's a little image I've been working on:

It is nothing less than all 257 measures of Bach's Chaconne in D Minor, which might just be the greatest piece of music ever written. And it's all there on one page. If you click on that image above, you'll be able to see a much higher-res version, where are all the notes are actually pretty clear if you zoom in closely enough. Or, you can download the same thing in PDF format.

I have much more to say about this kind of thing, but for now I'll just say that I find it quite beautiful as a sort of snapshot representation of this:

Happy Birthday, JSB!

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See also: Looking Bach (from earlier today)

Looking Bach

Today is Bach's birthday, and I was surprised to realize I've never done a post about my posts on Bach. (MMmusing is very meta, and what's more meta than posts about posts?) I've given Stravinsky the retrospective treatment, but the truth is that I've probably written about Bach even more than The Rite of Spring. So, for this first day of spring, here's a collection of ways in which I've mused about Bach, from the sublime to the truly ridiculous:

[See also: YouTube playlist of Bach videos.]

First, my two most popular YouTube videos.

• Bach's Neverending Canon
• Bach's Crab Canon

Next, a series of posts exploring Bach's magnificent Cantata No. 4, including four annotated score videos.

• Good Friday Bach
• Und singen Halleluja!

Sometimes, I sit down and play Bach on the piano:

•  Piano Blogging and the Art of Impossibility
• video, with score 
• Allemande from Partita in D Major
•  blogged about here

Here, an imagined combination of two closely related Bach movements into a single duet:

•  Bach Doubled
• (and a perverse combo of a Bach gigue played at two wildly different tempi)

I've spent a good bit of time engraving Bach's music, which has led to:

• This discussion of my piano transcription of a chorale prelude
• The Joy of Engraving, re-setting Bach from C-sharp major to D-flat
• This just popped up, featuring a computer program which animates a Bach fugue with popping kernels and offers the possibility to play with the music in various ways.

I've also done a little bit of composing using Bach as source material:

•  My Jesus, Joy of Man's Desiring
• performed live with trio in recital
• The Good, the Shred, and the Ugly (Bach + Pop Goes the Weasel)
• This also features my attempt to imitate the sound of a viola by playing the cello as badly as possible at half-tempo and then doubling the speed.

Finally, a couple of examples of visual manipulations of Bach's face and name:

• Unlikely Doppelgänger
• Ambigramania

And there's something new in the works! But that will likely appear on a day that isn't Bach's birthday...

UPDATE (still on Bach's birthday): Here's one new thing for today, about which I'll have much more to say: The Bach Chaconne on One Page