♬♪ A Voyage Around My Ears ♬♪
The Bach Translation project proceeds apace.
This morning, I completed the translation of cantata BWV 140, which is probably one of his best (and is definitely one of my favourites). Cantatas 141 and 142 weren't written by Bach, so BWV 143 is next off the runway. [...]
I've been toying with the idea of producing a new translation of the texts to all of Johann Sebastian Bach's cantatas for over 10 years now. Their poetry is neither particularly lovely nor, to modern ears, inspiring -but I think having an understanding of what texts Bach used as the foundations to his glorious music is nevertheless important. From them, you get a profound sense of how the Lutheran theology of the day (and no doubt the rotten state of 18th Century medicine and social provision) set a cast upon Bach's mind, and the minds of his contemporaries: a peculiar-to-us longing for death, a trusting relationship in a God who might chastise but would not be cruel and so on. Above all, I think, a quite fatalistic outlook on life: it's beyond our control, what will be will be, it's all for the best and God's ordaining it behind the scenes anyway.
Just as an appreciation of Dickens' literature is enhanced in not-particularly concrete ways by having a broad understanding of the social context of his times in mid-nineteenth century England, so I believe one's appreciation of the music of Bach's cantatas can be enhanced by an understanding of the words he was setting. [...]
If you're reading this, it means that my move to self-hosting my website has gone more-or-less according to plan!
I've been paying a reasonable amount to Linode for many years now to run a server in New York on which to host this site. It's not a lot of money (US$12 a month, if you're really interested), but since this site is now merely a hobby and nothing at all to do with earning an income, it didn't seem to be a good idea to keep shelling out the dollars for it when I have a loft full of spare PCs, servers and laptops (most definitely in the geriatric category, but all capable of running a decent 64-bit Linux distro in 8GB RAM) that could be tasked to do the job for free instead. [...]
I have bought more complete sets of Bach Cantatas in my time than is probably good for a man! I started with the Leusink Cycle that was included in the Brilliant Classics 'complete Bach' set and is now available as a separate purchase: I would strongly advise any Bach newbie to avoid that cycle like the plague. The performances seem, on occasion, to have been thrown together with little rehearsal and with no real regard to 'choir tone'. Some voices stand out like sore thumbs; worse, the entire set of boy trebles have a weird tendency to 'hoot' -a most disagreeable sound indeed!
I then bought the complete Gardiner set: Gardiner is a solid conductor who you can generally rely on for performances of excellent quality and with sound musicianship. There is usually, also, a good deal of musicological learning underpinning the performance practice used. I certainly preferred my Gardiner Cycle to the Leusink (which went in the bin)... but they weren't really very exciting performances. They were, frankly, a bit dull. But the packaging was spectacular, so... you know: you pays your money and makes your choices! [...]
The Classical CD Ripper (CCDR) has been updated and a new version (Version 3.0, for anyone keeping count!) is now available for download. Upgrading consists of merely deleting your existing copy of the shell script, downloading the new one in its place, and remembering to make it executable (chmod +x ccdr.sh).
The changes from the previous version are extensive. Out goes all the coloured text and other attempts to prettify its output: it's a text-based application, so deal with it! [...]
This blog post's title is a bit of a stretch! For starters, I almost exclusively use FLAC audio files for my primary music store, so my need to be able to handle other audio formats is not exactly great. Still less do I need to handle so many different audio formats that you could describe a tool that handles them all as truly 'universal'!
But I do have need to create MP3 copies of my FLAC music files -because I upload them to OneDrive and am able to play them from there on my phone. If I'm listening to music on my phone, it means I am visiting family, staying in a hotel, at an airport or on a train: so the loss of audio 'fidelity' inherent in the transition from lossless FLAC to lossy MP3 is tolerable. Those environments are not suitable for audiophile ears at the best of times! [...]
Never mess with old code and expect the results to be perfect!
The recent spate of software updating I posted about last time resulted in an "improvement" in the CCDT code that handles making file names "NTFS-safe". The improvement turned out to alter file names after they had been selected for tagging, but before they were actually tagged, meaning that when it came time to modify the tags associated with an audio file, the modifications were written to a file that no longer existed. Result: failed modifications! 🙁 [...]
As we are all now experiencing 'lockdown woes', I decided I had time enough on my hands for it to be worthwhile for me to look again at my various bits of music management software. The Classical CD Ripper and Tagger scripts accordingly got a work-over: little tweaks to make each program work slightly more in ways that suit me than not! I use the Tagger program on a daily basis, so it's important to me that it works efficiently, which I think it now does 🙂
I then tackled the Flac Checker script, which hadn't been modified since October 2019. It has been in daily use since then, but the output was messy and that made it harder to spot corruption happening to my collection of digital music files than it should have been. I have accordingly re-worked the program so extensively that it's now up to version 2.0. I am confident that I've improved the logging sufficiently that any corruption detected will be extremely obvious and easy to locate. [...]
The new catalogue of Mozart's works is now finished.
All items have been categorised (though some will no doubt disagree with my categorisations for various pieces). Where the scores exist, incipits have been prepared from them and assigned to the appropriate catalogue items. Where recordings exist, 40-second audio extracts have similarly been prepared and assigned. [...]
Today would have been Mozart's 264th birthday... and, quite by chance, it happens also to be the day that I've finally finished the first draft of the new Dizwell catalogue of his works.
The last few vocal works have now been excerpted and incipits found for each of them, so that makes 674 incipits prepared, uploaded and applied to the database, along with 635 40-second audio excerpts for most items. (The difference between the two numbers is that there are a handful of works that are now known to be 'not by Mozart'. For those, I've applied a 'blank incipit', but not bothered with an audio excerpt: simple maths tells you that there are 39 such works). [...]
Having begun the process of re-cataloguing my collection of Mozart music just before Christmas (see the previous blog post), I thought it about time I posted a bit of a progress report. Naturally, what began as merely an exercise in re-naming things (for example, 'Requiem, K626' would become 'DZ 02082 Requiem' using the new Dizwell numbering scheme), rapidly became a full-on musicological cataloguing process... since I needed a good list of 'new names' with which to rename my music files to begin with.
As I hope the graphic at the left of this blog post indicates, I'm now about half-way through that cataloguing process. That is, if you visit the new catalogue, you will see green '+' buttons next to each listed composition. Click one of those, and for about half of the listed works, a 'hidden screen' will appear that shows a score of the first few bars of music for the piece (an 'incipit', from the Latin for 'Here begins...') and contains a link to an extract of an audio recording of the work (all extracts last for 40 seconds and are presented as 128kbps MP3 tracks, so are not 'hi-fi' quality). [...]
In the world of musicology, I doubt anyone is quite so famous as Ludwig Ritter von Köchel, pictured left. That's because he catalogued Mozart's music in the 1860s and thus bestowed on every Mozart composition then known the 'K' numbers that have adorned them ever since. Mozart, of course, being the veritable God of classical music, Herr Köchel therefore has acquired some of his glory by reflection!
So, whilst non-musicologists might talk about Mozart's Symphony No. 41 -or, conceivably, his Jupiter symphony- those in tune with their inner Köchels know it as K 551. Similarly, Mozart's Requiem is now given the Köchel number K 626. [...]