Dear pianists,

Here is my first contribution to the piano society. And it could be the fist composition of Arcangelo Corelli on the website of te piano society. I selected the "Folies d'Espagne" for you to enjoy.

The recordings are made in my own home, a monumental tower in Leersum, the Netherlands, on the studypiano of my girlfriend. You will find a broadband version of the video recordings, attached to this post. The file is 26 MB in size and will take some time to download!

Please look at this contribution as my audition for membership of the piano society. I am looking forward in presenting other recordings in the future.

I look forward to your feedback!

Peter Schuttevaar

See: http://pianosociety.com/cms/index.php?section=905

Nice. Is this an original Corelli score ? I know of a transcription of La Folia for piano and violin but never heard of one for piano solo. Did Corelli write any solo harpsichord works at all ?

Hello Chris,

Thanks for appreciating my contribution.

I realy don't know if it's an original score by Corelli. I studied the thing a long time ago from a textbook, borrowed from library of the conservatory where i studied. Unfortunately, i don't have the original text anymore.

There are many versions of the Folia by Corelli. I believe the original was for a chamber orchestra. But one never realy knows with Corelli. Het chewed so long on his compositions that the latest versions sometimes seem to be the earliest (or the most simple version). The version i played on the piano comes very close the the one for chamber orchestra.

And as you perhaps know, there are hundreds of variations on the same them by other composers. I believe there is one for piano by Rachmaninov.

But i like the clarity and sincerity of this old version.

Greetings from Peter Schuttevaar

It is a nice recording, you play it well and you probably put in a lot time making it. Did you move around the video camera for each take? The sound quality is also better than usually heard from video cameras. External microphones?

As you say, there exist many variations of the Folie and I recognized this nice little melody right away. But I cannot say from where really.

Peter, this debut submission is of high quality and we certainly want to welcome you as a pianist on the site. But --- this is a bit unusual in that it is a) a rather large WMV video, and b) an undetermined arrangement of a piece by a composer who (I think) did not write for the keyboard. This is why I am taking some time over a decision to put it on the site.

As for a), we do have some videos on the site, but with the explosion of people creating videos we must get more careful about admitting them. Obviously we do not have the disk resources that YouTube has This video would be ok to have on the site as a sort of 'signature video' but I hope that you are not planning to submit many more videos. BTW, it would be preferred if a video was in MPEG format, so that non-Windows users can also see it (I am assuming WMV works only with Windows, but could be wrong here). And MPEG is also smaller, I think.

As for b), we only have composers on the site who wrote original keyboard works. I am not aware Corelli wrote any, and if we were to have a Corelli page with only this arragement on it, it would look a little out of place. Of course if there were to be also some original Corelli pieces, that would change things.

So what are your plans for next recordings ? My suggestion would be that we give you a place on the site once you have submitted some conventional recordings (i.e. mp3's of original pieces) and that we can then a link to this video on your personal page (as opposed to including Corelli as a composer). Personally I think one video per pianist is sufficient, unless you'd put up a particulary spectacular show, in which case we'd probably make an exception. Let me know what you think.

Hello Robert and Chris,

Thanks for the positive feedback. I'll try and answer your questions.

RECORDING TECHNIQUE:
I change camera positions according to what i think will look interesting. I do not use the sound recording of the video camera at all. instead, i read audio signals and video signals reperately and simultaneously into my computer and create an initial AVI out of it. This recording was a trial of this technique. I had to improvise it. I only had one day to make the recording (using mplayerc) and do the cut and paste (simply using ms moviemaker). Since the recording of the Folia i have perfected this technique and i am now able to get studio-like audio quality along with the video (using Rode microphones and an edirol soundcard).

WITH REGARD TO CORELLI NOT WRITING FOR HARPSICHORD:
There are many angels from where you can look at this. Busoni rewrites a violin work of JS bach to piano solo (as does Bramhs for left hand only). Not an original piano piece.

VIDEO
I prefer video above audio only. I think it is more interesting to look at the performance and it is more challenging to make. Apart from that, i can reduce the size of a video file to about 2,5 Mb per minute without compromizing audio quality. That is about 2,5 times the size of audio only (compared to 128 kbit audio streaming). So i think the bandwith should not realy be a problem. And to be honest with you: video is the future of internet.

FUTURE PLANS
Since i am very busy with the development of my business called Vitha (i am an entrepreneur) i will manage only a few recording each year. (I will be able to use these recordings for promotion of my business activities also). So you don't have to fear many recordings from me. I plan to make e series of recordings using different locations, like churches and old town houses, etc... I will try and gradualy involve the owners or users of these facilities into the recording proces and make it more and more a coproduction. To me that is part of the charm.

The next recording will be the French Ouverture of JS Bach, probably in an old neo-roman church in my area (i am still negotiating). Probaby somewhere in March.

Greetings from Peter




http://www.folias.nlr

I meant to ad the URL www.folias.nl to my former post. The site is dedicated to listing al known versions of the Folias.

Greetings of Peter

Hi Peter,

I don't know how to view the file but it would be great to put (a fragment of?) the audio-file only at the website La Folia, a musical cathedral. In my perception the combination of visual music is very distracting to get into the core of the music itself.
The Corelli-arrangement for piano might be the publication of Vytautus Bacevicius dated back to 1951. He added two interesting variations himself (var. seventeen and eighteen) and left out some variations unsuitable for the piano (normally 23 variations).
You are right about the Folia-variations of Rachmaninoff and Franz Liszt for piano solo. But there are really some more great Folias especially written for the (forte)piano. Three of my favorites are the one by Anton Reicha (1770-1836), the Finnish composer Toivo Kuula (1883-1918) and David Arditti (1964- ). Unlike the Corelli-variations these compositions make full use of the features of a (forte)piano.
If you ever drop by the Royal Library in Den Hague you might find a piece by the Russian composer Anatolij Drozdov (1883-1950) composed in 1940 and based upon the Folia-version by Caspar Sanz. I never have seen the sheet music and hope to pick up a photocopy some day. The total of 21 pages size 30 cm and the year 1940 (Publisher's No. M. 16583 G, NMI12.2, collection Hugo van Dalen, Volume 71) looks extremely promising to me. But I am just a Folia freak and no piano adept.
folia@chello.nl

There's a Mac freebie from Microsoft called Flip4Mac that enables QuickTime to play WMV:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/window ... nents.mspx

Ok Peter, discussion time !


Yes, many angles indeed. Let's just look at it from our angle. It is not so much that this is not an original piece, but that it seems to be an unknown arrangement. The comparison with Bach-Busoni and Bach-Brahms is pretty lame, as all three were great composers for the keyboard, and these transcriptions could be filed either under Bach or under the arranger. But I still maintain that Corelli, who as far as I can see did not compose any solo keyboard works, should not have a page on PianoSociety. Had for instance Brahms done your Folia arrangement, we'd store it under Brahms rather than Corelli. On the other hand, even if we knew who composed your arrangement, that would not automatically mean this person could be listed as a composer here. That would depend on whether that person would also be a composer in his own right.



Whether or not video is the future of the Internet (rather than a slightly exhibitionistic hype) is open for discussion - and it is not a dicussion that belongs here. Even if you're right, I am not sure video is the future of PianoSociety. We know that millions of people listen to music on CD, MP3 player or iPod day and night, but I can't see people watching piano videos all the time. I do not agree that watching somebody play is per definition more interesting than just hearing the music. It is nice to watch a video of a new pianist, so that we know who we are listening to and how he does it, but that is mostly all there is to it. People will repeatedly listen to an audio track if they like the music, but they will not repeatedly sit and watch you play it - unless perhaps there was something particularly spectacular going on. For example, I'd certainly want to listen to your Folia again, but not watch it again, as I've seen it.

So you prefer video to audio. I appreciate it's more of a challenge, perhaps more fun, and certainly better suited to promoting your enterpreneurial endeavours. But we really prefer audio here.

We have discussed this issue internally, and come to the conclusion that we should allow one video per pianist, mainly for the purpose of the pianist presenting himself to the public. This does not have to be a 'regular' recording or 'regular' repertoire. These videos would be linked directly from the pianists' personal page and do not necessarily have to be on a composer's page. So your Corelli arrangement would do fine here. On the other hand, it sounds like your upcoming Bach in a church may be more interesting, but of course such a 'personal' video can always be replaced. In the case if the Bach Overture, we'd like to have the soundtrack also filed on the Bach page, seeing as your audio quality is pretty good.

I realize that some of the content of our site violates the rules I laid down above. For example, there is a Rimsky-Korsakov page simple because in the past someone submitted his own Bumblebee arragement. And there are pianists who have several videos on the site, filed together with regular mp3's. All that is historical and we can not very well remove them now just because we've changed the rules.

Technically, these new rules also mean that you will need to submit at least one regular audio recording, of regular repertoire, in MP3 format, before we can include you on the site. But in this case we can create your page anyway, as you submitted before we laid down the rules, and wait for regular recordings to arrive later. So, if you want to be a pianist under these conditions, please mail me your bio information and I will take care of it.

Nice bending rules you have here! Let say I am more objective because I like all music and not piano music in particular. On the one hand there are so many objections against a neat arrangement of a trio sonata by Corelli and on the other hand there is an encouragement for a cheap imitation of a harpsichord-piece by JS Bach on the piano?!? Perhaps Debussy would sound great on the electric guitar? I guess someone must have composed some original piano music in the past? I guess I will never understand those piano-players

Rules change by time and it is not until we have an issue that we feel a need to make or change a rule. It is not easy to decide everything in advance and expect that to last forever.

And perhaps it is videos that will be the thing in the future. But with over 1,000,000 hits on the main site and over 400,000 downloaded recordings per month (that is one download each 6:th second) what we have now cannot be terrible wrong. I know the the videos we have on the site are download more frequently than the mp3 (comparing to how many they are) so that is probably one proof that many people, including myself, likes to watch videos. But my eyes get bored faster than my ears and I have listened to, for example, Goulds Goldberg variations many many more times than watching the videos which I also have.

We carefully follow the development on Internet and try to adjust according to that but if we begin to host a lot videos, we will have another problem and that is performance. We rely on Donations for existance. The site (domain fee, server cost and bandwidth) cost is $1,330/year but with a large set of videos, we would probably have to upgrade the bandwidth from 10 Mbit/s to 100 Mbit/s and have 10 times (or even more) the disk space. That would probably raise this cost with 5-7 times. Well disk is cheap people may say and that is true for home PC:s. But with a server running 24/7, you need raid (two discs running in parallel) or SCSI which is not at all very cheap. Cheap discs break and I had enough of such problems. Also with videos, you need a lot CPU and memory as is performance demanding. But enough babbling from me. The cost would raise and we simple do not that kind of money.

Then we have the second issue which is what kind of composer Corelli really was but Chris has said enough of that already. It might be so that we expand the site in the future and become classicalsociety (Yepp, I own that domain and I have registered it in advance) but at the moment, I do not have enough time to do so.

So this is not anything against you so do not take it personally. Please look upon the issue somewhat from our side as well.

To finish, I was most impressed by your playing and your video was interesting to watch so keep up the good work.

This is not a case of bending the rules, more like trying to lay some down where there were none. It is also not a case of us not 'liking' non-piano music - though obviously, this being PianoSociety we are a bit biased towards the piano. This however has nothing at all to do with the discussion at hand.


Indeed it is hard to understand 'those piano players' If you are a puritan about Bach on the piano (I really thought that particular hatchet was buried some time ago...) this may not quite be the place for you. Mind you we would happily host harpsichord recordings (as we do organ recordings) if only someone would submit them. Lastly, if you have objectively (!) followed the argument, you know we do not have 'objections' to the music submitted here. There is lots of great music that we appreciate but nonetheless would not have on this site.

Hello Paul, Robert and Chris,

Again many thanks for all the postive feedback and the suggestions.

I understand the argument about the bandwith constraints. Perhaps we can work out a solution in the future.

I accept your rules and will send my profile to Chris. Just give me your e-mail adres. And I hope we can work together fruitfully in the future.

As for the discussion on what an original piano performance exists of, i maintain that any pianotranscription of any composition that stays close to the essence of the original composition is an original piano composition. My arguments are:
1) The piano is an instrument. It is not the music itself. It is used to communicate musical thoughts. Piano music is therefore a fact, under the condition that the musical thoughts of the composer are succesfully conveyed to an audience by means of the piano. Hence, a piano transcription is only a means of making the piano transparent for the musical thougths that are within the composition. The underlying musical thoughts are not changed.
2) The key factor in making an original piano performance is the pianist. His actions are infinitely more influential with respect to the actual communication of the musical thoughts, then the transcription itself is. Therefore the transcription itself is only of limited importance in the proces of musical interpretation, which is in fact a proces of rethinking the original musical thoughts. This circumstance also explains why there are so many anonymous transcriptions, especialy in the baroque period. The honour was for the musical thinker (the composer) and for the rethinker (the interpretor).

Greetings of Peter Schuttevaar

I won't argue with that - your arguments are as good as ours. But we need to make choices sometimes, especially where people seek to push the boundaries of what is customary on PianoSociety.

If you mail me your bio and picture on cbreemer@hotmail.com I will create your page, put the video up the site, and link to it directly from your page. For next submissions, we'll have to look at them on a case by case basis. It can always be an option for you to extract the audio part amd submit it as mp3. Or, host the videos on your own website (which you'll do anyway) and we just provide a link to them.

BTW You can email to any forum member vie the 'email' button.