American Romantic, Edward MacDowell’s Polonaise

Edward MacDowell (1860 – 1908) was supported by his Mother and won an international scholarship to study in Europe. Accompanied by her, he left the United States to study in Paris at age 17.

He remained in Europe, composing and teaching for eleven years. There, he had a reported association with Liszt, who heard Edward and may have provided guidance and some sponsorship.

In 1884, MacDowell married an American student of his (Marian Griswold Nevins) while still teaching in Frankfurt. He returned to the States in 1888 and became quite popular and in much in demand as a concert pianist.

MacDowell was held in such esteem that he was commissioned to teach music at Columbia University, which hitherto had no music studies, and he founded the music-studies program there. Unfortunately, his tenure was marred by accusations against him that caused him to resign. In the aftermath his health, both mental and physical, suffered and he was struck by a horse-drawn cab in 1904. He never recovered. His wife proved to be a more than capable partner and eventually continued management of their foundation after he was no long able to do so because of his health.

Mrs. Katherine Jones first taught me this piece. It is likely that I learned it to play for the National Federation of Music Clubs yearly festival competition, probably around my ninth-grade year.

I later received coaching on this piece in August, 1966 or 1967 from my Cedar Lake, IN music-camp piano instructor, Ms. Dorothy Spaulding.

Finally, I played this piece again sometime around 1971 when I accompanied two choral organizations at the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH). For a time, it was customary that I played an interlude during costume changes in our UAH choral concerts and performances. This was one of the pieces I played to keep the natives from becoming restless.

A Polonaise has a characteristic “dotted” rhythm and is usually in a triple meter. This particular Polonaise is in 3/4 meter. Until I was researching to write this post, it had never occurred to me that the name, “Polonaise” has an association with Poland. It does, and is one of the traditional/national dances of Poland.

There are eleven additional pieces in MacDowell’s Op. 46 suite of “virtuoso” studies. The Polonaise is the last of the pieces and is the only one of the twelve with which I ever became familiar. It is probably a good thing that I never heard the term “virtuoso” when I was learning it — or, it might have slowed my learning, or not…

Here is an audio-only recording of the Polonaise.

Christmas Memories from Roberta Silva & Stan Owen, Jr.

What great memories I have of recording each of these Christmas Songs and Carols!

Roberta Silva and I collaborated to record twenty-two (22) Christmas pieces during four Christmas Seasons. These recordings are featured in five years of my past Christmas recording projects, and more than one recording was incorporated into other collections and projects.

Home for Christmas – 2001
Home for the Holidays – 2003
The Christmas Rose Is Blooming – 2007
The Spirit of Christmas – 2008
Simply Christmas – 2009

For this Christmas-Project (2022), I collected all twenty-two recordings together for the first time. The combined audio-program is slightly over sixty-three (63) minutes long. I extracted each of these from five CD’s made in years past. I thought I might find some volume tweaking, at least between years, necessary. However, I left audio levels as they were originally mastered by me.

Rather than to debate with myself about program-order, I decided to present the songs in their original order by project and year. There are two exceptions: First, the version of “The Little Drummer Boy” included here is one to which I added instrumentation and “generated” vocal-harmonies that were not part of the original arrangement. Second, because Roberta’s performance of “Some Children See Him” is to me so wonderful, and usually brings tears to my eyes — I positioned it as the concluding work of this collection.

We improvised all of these arrangements except for “In the Bleak Midwinter” and “Some Children See Him,” which were arranged by Dave Grusin. I transcribed those using good speakers and ears, a sharp pencil, music-manuscript-paper, and lots of erasers. These two pieces are both on James Taylor’s Christmas Album, for which Dave Grusin arranged several of my favorite selections.

I concatenated all the songs into a single 63-minute-long audio file. For the bitrate-curious, I rendered the mp3’s that were output, at a handful of bitrate settings from 32kbps (32,000 bits-per-second) to 320kbps. 128kbps is “normal” with higher bitrates carrying more audio content that is “left out” in lower bitrate rendering. You won’t want to listen for long to the lower bitrate renderings, but I include them for those who might be interested in an a/b comparison. Be sure to listen to the 320 kbps one, it is the best.

Click on the mp3 player’s arrow to play. Then, <Click> in, or drag the player’s control-bar to advance or rewind.

Title mp3 Audio BitRate (kbps) / File Size (MB)
Roberta & Stan Program – 32kbs (Worst) mp3 32 / 15.3
Roberta & Stan Program – 64kbs mp3 64 / 30.6
Roberta & Stan Program – 128kbs (“Regular”) mp3 128 / 61.1
Roberta & Stan Program – 160kbs mp3 160 / 76.4
Roberta & Stan Program – 192kbs mp3 192 / 91.7
Roberta & Stan Program – 256kbs mp3 256 / 122.2
Roberta & Stan Program – 320kbs (Best) mp3 320 / 152.8
Click on the mp3 player’s arrow to play. Then, <Click> in, or drag the player’s control-bar to advance or rewind.​

Title mp3 Audio Original Project
Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas mp3 Home for Christmas
The Christmas Song (Chessnuts Roasting on an Open Fire) mp3 Home for Christmas
Silent Night / It Came Upon a Midnight Clear mp3 Home for Christmas
O Holy Night mp3 Home for Christmas
Silver Bells mp3 Home for Christmas
What Child Is This? mp3 Home for Christmas
O Little Town of Bethlehem mp3 Home for Christmas
Let It Snow mp3 Home for Christmas
The First Noel mp3 Home for Christmas
Let There Be Peace On Earth mp3 Home for Christmas
I’ll Be Home for Christmas mp3 Home for Christmas
Hark, the Herald Angels Sing mp3 Home for Christmas
Please Come Home for Christmas mp3 Home for the Holidays
Favorite Things mp3 Home for the Holidays
Go Tell It On the Mountain mp3 Home for the Holidays
Home for the Holidays mp3 Home for the Holidays
Angels We Have Heard on High mp3 Home for the Holidays
The Most Wonderful Time of the Year mp3 Home for the Holidays
The Little Drummer Boy mp3 The Christmas Rose Is Blooming
Little Willy Evergreen mp3 The Spirit of Christmas
In The Bleak Midwinter mp3 Simply Christmas
Some Children See Him mp3 The Spirit of Christmas

Merry Christmas, 2022 from Stan Owen, Jr. & Creative Minds’ Music

The Great Gates of Kiev

The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine and siege of its Capitol, Kiev made me remember having played a piece, “The Great Gates of Kiev”  by Modest Mussorgsky during the early years of my piano study. After rummaging through my music library, I could not find John Schaum’s “Brown Book” (Vol. F) in which the arrangement resides. I ordered the Brown Book online.

When I played “The Great Gates of Kiev” from “The Brown Book” as a child, I imagined grand portals opening to expose a splendid, shining city that was pronounced with two syllables rather than with only one, as is customary today. During my research for this post, I discovered that the gate portrayed in Hartmann’s painting was not the historic Grand Golden Gate that was largely in ruins by the 17th Century.

Mussorgsky composed Pictures At An Exhibition (1874) in response to a series of paintings by his friend, then-contemporary architect and painter, Viktor Hartmann (1834–1873). Mussorgsky’s original suite of compositions were written for solo piano. The best-known derivative orchestral arrangement was one by Maurice Ravel (1875-1937). I have a particular fondness for Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s version (1971).

Hartmann’s painting was his personal, proposed project that was to be called the “Heroes’ Gates” (“Bogatyr Gates”). Though his gates were formally proposed, they were never built. The historic “Golden Gate of Kiev” remained in ruins until the 1970’s when formal restoration began and reached some stage of completion in 1983 with the opening of its associated museum.

Hartmann -- Plan for a City Gate.jpg

My recording of John Schaum’s arrangement from the “Brown Book”
that I played as a child.

While searching, I found numerous arrangements and editions of this piece online at IMSLP (Petrucci Music Library). The piano-solo version I rehearsed and perform here is the original edition that was later revised and edited several times by persons other than the composer.

I have worked sporadically on this project since the Spring, 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. During this project, I experimented with selecting and then using different video “generators” that I attempted to aesthetically “match” to different sections of the piece. To render this, multiple recording passes were required, each pass producing a unique video from the audio. I then created titles and credits and concatenated the them using Fotomagico to create the final video.

I am attempting to avoid an overly detailed description of the multiple technical obstacles I overcame and the lessons I learned. Audio and video transitions between multiple videos was the most difficult aspect for me and is a skill on which I am still working to improve.

The virtual (software) piano I played is Synthogy Ivory’s 10′ Italian Grand using a medium-resonant soundboard model. I individually generated each video using the audio software, Project Milk Syphon and selected visualization description-files (.milk) from a trove I have collected over time. These visualizations are a current incarnation of leftovers from the ancient Winamp visualizer that was ubiquitous at one time. The generated video, synchronized with its audio was then recorded using Siphon Recorder.

Because of a problem in which the resultant audio was being damaged during output, for each video, I was later forced to replace its audio with a different version that was pristine and that had not been damaged during previous processing. Involved with accomplishing this were issues necessary to maintain synchronization between the video and audio. Needless to say, it is imperative that the audio and video line-up perfectly or it is obvious to the listener/viewer. For this, extensive use of the Terminal command: ffmpeg was required.

I hope that you enjoy my productions of Moussorgsky’s “Great Gates of Kiev.”