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I watched this on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKejfYzB3ak
Several things strike me:
1. My god, the picture and sound quality really ins't that hot. :-/
2. You really can't record bass notes, can you?
3. OMG, how many stops are there on that organ?! o_O
4. The organist appears to have really short, stubby fingers, and yet he
seems easily able to reach all the notes. I have exceptionally long,
boney fingers and I'm really struggling to play some of the really wide
chords and arpeggios. Is an organ keyboard a different size or something?
5. Oohhh, so *that's* how you change volume on an organ? You use a
different manual?
6. What are all the metal spikey things dotted around the foot pedels?
Anyway, after watching this, I viewed all the other videos. It turns out
that this is about the best sound quality of them all.
Also, *immediately* after watching this, I tried playing it on my
keyboard - the way it says on the score. With the 4-note block chords
and the full arpeggio. And my god, it _really_ sounds very similar you
know! I can still hardly believe I can actually hit those big block
chords *and* play the difficult arpeggio *and* play it in time *and*
play it at more or less the actual speed too. O_O
Seriously. This tocatta is the stuff of dreams. When I first heard it
performed live at the Royal Albert Hall in London last year, I just
thought to myself "OK, well obviously that's impossible. I mean, no
human being could possibly play that. Except for maybe one or two
exceptional people on the plannet." And now, after a mere month of solid
practice, I can *almost* play it myself. For real.
Every week I try to play some new part of it. Maybe learn a few more
bars, or most recently trying to play the arpeggio as well. I keep
finding parts that are really hard and that I struggle horribly to bend
my fingers round and hold in my brain. And then, a week later, I find
myself casually playing the "impossible" parts as if there were nothing
unusual about it.
It's as if anything - absolutely *anything* - is possible. I can't begin
to explain how powerful that is! It's as if no matter how hard this
tocatta gets, if I read carefully and practice hard, I can play just
about everything in the score.
Bariers do not exist. Limits fade into insignficance. The possible
transcends the impossible. And my own mortal fingers can play that which
before was reserved for gods.
I have produced a recording that features me, live and unedited, playing
complex organ music for 2:30 straight, fluidly and accurately, with only
2 pauses in the entire performance. And it didn't even take all that
many takes to pull it off! I don't care *what* you say, playing a
complex non-repeating slab of anything for 2:30 without missing a beat
is some nontrivial achievement!
But that's old news now. You've all heard it already. In the last few
days I have slowly gained the ability to play the full score as the
composer intended. (Minus the pedels, obviously.) Next week, who knows?
But that's nothing. Last month, I wrote a program in C++. And it ****ing
worked. (Astonishing, I know...) And then Warp actually installed a
Haskell compiler, and wrote his first Haskell program. And it worked.
And 2 hours ago, I applied for a Haskell programming job for a financial
institution in London. (Yes, these jobs do, in fact, exist. Even in the UK.)
What will tomorrow bring?
Well, actually, I'm kinda hoping that tomorrow or some day near it is
going to involve me playing this bitchin' tocatta on a real pipe organ.
Cos *damn*, that would be pretty sweet, eh? And god damn it, if I can
absorb 6 pages of dense musical score, learn C++, convince an ardent
critic to actually try out Haskell, and apply for an actual programming
job involving actual Haskell, all in the space of a month, who's to say
I can't find somebody crazy enough to let me play with their organ?
Try and stop me, ******s! >:-D
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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