Things don’t look good for me to create more new piano recordings in my home studio in the immediate future, so I’m going to have to stall — but I figure I might at least stall with something good!

This is a piece from the most recent Keys Please! concert. It adds a nice little bit of variation to the blog: not only is it not Cantrell, Chopin, or Brahms, but … it doesn’t even have a piano in it! (Yes, I’m really going out on a limb.) It’s also stylistically different from what I’ve published so far, hopefully in a refreshing way.

It’s from my buddy Todd. He says of it:

[This song] I have to share credit for, because I did not write the words. I was at my mom’s at Thanksgiving, and I found some old articles my dad wrote when he was alive, for the newspaper, the Forest Lake Times — and they’re about snakes. … This is about an expedition he took, and I thought, “This would set really well for cello and voice.”

Todd uses some inspired bits of semi-improvised sound painting, beautifully performed by Jacqueline, to accentuate the miniature drama in Carei’s reading of this little story. I hope you’ll find it as charming as I do!

Todd Harper
Rattlesnake Song No. 2
Jacqueline Ferrier-Ultan, cello
Carei Thomas, narration

Download (3:35 / 4.2 M)

Music lovers take note: Jacqueline plays in a wonderful cello duo called Jelloslave, and they have a new CD!

I’ve added a two new things to my web site that may be of interest:

New Music-Only Podcast

For those of you not up on all the tech-y stuff, this site has a “podcast” — a feature that lets your computer automatically download the music and save it to your music library or portable music player.

Until now, the podcast has featured a spoken version of the written commentary that goes with each piece. This works well for people listening, say, at the gym or in their car. However, while you might want to listen to the music over and over, I really doubt you want to hear my introductions all that often. (My voice is just not that exciting.) Because the podcast always included the commentary, people who wanted just the music still had to manually download each track. Aaron wisely suggested that I do a music-only podcast as well. It’s a great idea, and I finally got around to doing it.

So now, over on the right (under the “Syndication” heading), you’ll see two links: one for a podcast with commentary, and one with only the music:

• If you are listening on the go, and want a radio-show-like format with spoken commentary, subscribe to the podcast with commentary.
• If you want to automatically download just the music to add it to your listening library, subscribe to the music-only podcast.

And heck, if you want the spoken commentary for the first listen and the music for future listening, well, subscribe to both!

Recording Method Explanation Updated

I finally updated my description of how I make my recordings to reflect all of the work I did last year to improve the mastering process. Although I made revisions throughout that whole area of the site, the bulk of the new information is in the section on mastering.

This is primarily of interest to others making their own recordings, but may also be of idle interest to anyone who is curious what goes into producing the finished product you hear.

Ahoy there. It’s been a while! I’ve been busy. It’s a sad fact of life that I have bills to pay, and in spite of the tremendous generosity of some of this podcast’s listeners, a whole year’s worth of donations to In the Hands don’t even cover a month’s rent. So, I’ve been working — which is not entirely a bad thing: it’s a good job, I like the other people, and I’m working on interesting stuff … but it’s just amazing how much time a job takes! Forty hours a week is a lot.

Anyway, having settled in to the new schedule of this job, solved my car woes, completed another successful Keys Please, and done some traveling (I went to Québec and practiced my French!), I’m now turning my attention back to my poor, neglected site. To get things started again, here’s an old recording freshly remastered with the new process.

This is a late Brahms intermezzo. (Regular readers know how much I love that!) As I wrote before, it’s a wonderfully ambiguous piece. I suppose not everybody might think of ambiguity as being a compliment or a desirable thing, but I do. One of music’s magical abilities is to be ambiguous in the way that life is ambiguous, that the moment-to-moment experience of consciousness is ambiguous. We have a very natural desire to understand music, to try to figure out what it “means” and what we’re supposed to think about it. Music, however, doesn’t like to be pigeonholed that way. In real life, we don’t experience emotions one at a time, or in black and white — we usually make sense of them in retrospect, finding names and narratives only as we look back on experience. Music works that way as well, and gives us a way of distilling and becoming comfortable with all the confusingly multiple moment-to-moment ebb and flow of our minds and hearts. It is a way of looking back on our own experience without flattening it the way ordinary words can. It’s often hard to say even whether a piece is basically happy or sad — and that is a wonderful thing if you embrace it.

Certainly embracing it is certainly necessary in this piece. It’s hard to say exactly what it is, or what it’s about, or to name how it feels, but the raw experience of it — if we don’t try to name it — is wonderful.

Johannes Brahms
Intermezzo Op 117 No 2

Download (5:22 / 6.4 M)

Next up, I’ll be sharing some excerpts from February’s Keys Please, which will be a fun change of pace for In the Hands. There will even be instruments other than piano; brace yourselves!