Mark Walsen - Children's Suite for piano

[djimtio]

Hi Mark
Just wanted to say congrats on your second (artistical ) life.Most ,if not all,people are granted a second life fulfilling their long cherished wishes only after having followed a long winding path leading to enlightenment.
Seems like you have made it !
Happy music making and may the Lord Buddha keep inspiring you.
Regards

Djim

[Mark W]

Hello Djim, MG, and David,

It finally feels like I'm joining you all in making music. Djim, thanks for your blessing on my beginning of, or return, to a journey with music making that might hold for me joys similar to those you all have everyday with music.

Last week I had two days of idle time in jury duty, waiting to see if I would be on a jury (which didn't happen), and so the first day I took a book on C++ programming. I still love to do programming, and I'm doing more of it than I have in the last several years-- I'll be making announements about that later. But on the second day of jury duty, I thought I'd try something I've never done before: compose away from the keyboard. So, with the Parallel Intervals for Piano piece fresh in my memory, I started to write one last interval piece, for octaves. It was fairly easy for me to do in my inner ears, without the keyboard to confirm what I was writing, because the octave piece reuses the themes from all of the other interval pieces. When I got back home, I found that I couldn't trust my inner ears very well, and had to rewrite some of the octaves piece and then finish it at the piano. But it was a small taste of what I had longed for my whole life-- to be able to compose in my head away from the keyboard. MidiNotate and Composer were conceived as tools to compensate for my deficient inner ear.

The final octave internval piece is done, and so last evening I started recording the entire set. On Thanksgiving today, I hope to get some recording of the piece done; and will indeed be very thankful for the luxury of being able to do this, knowing how so many people in the world are thankful just to be able to have food on the table.

I tend to be a glutton about eating on Thanksgiving day, and similarly, I'm already starting to be a glutton about music making. At the same time I'm returning to music writing, I'm also returning to playing 8-hand piano, with the help of the Internet to invite local pianists to play on my two pianos: http://www.meetup.com/Bellevue-8-Hand-Piano/ I hope someday to transcribe some of my favorite orchestral pieces to 8-hand piano. It will be relatively easy to do, starting with orchestra MIDI files that others have already labored over.

This is really fun!

P.S. If you wonder where Sherry is in all of this, she has been on the side, trading emails with me, with much encouragement about my return to music making. Sherry has been hugely inspiring to me in many ways.

Cheers
-- Mak

[Ralph Sirvent]

Hello Mark, I would like to see the score for the parallel intervals you posted on your site. Where can I get those? My e-mail address is ralphsirvent@yahoo.com I would pay for these if necessary. I just want to learn how these work. They seem to be how hymn writers write their music and may be related to voice leading. That is what I'm trying to learn the about along with some other principles of music. Thank you. Ralph Sirvent

[Sherry C]

Hi Ralph,

Mark passed away this past January (you can see this other thread).

He and I were very good friends (I'd worked with him here at Notation Software for many years) and we often shared our personal music projects with each other. From what he had told me about the parallel interval pieces, he had some scribbled scores that he had not gotten into Notation Composer yet. He had done the audio recordings in anticipation of doing some testing with the Melodyne Editor's MIDI export feature to see if he could get a good .mid file from the audio recording. During that testing he had intended to get the scores into Notation Composer either via recording directly using a MIDI keyboard (he had a really nice Yamaha disklavier) or by note entry using the mouse so that he could directly compare the Melodyne export with the "real" thing. Sadly he did not get to finish that project, nor a few others he was working on.

ttfn,
Sherry