A Sad Event

Berta Hopfner, my grandmother, died on 9.May 2010, following a stroke. She was 91 years old. I could book a flight on short notice with Easyjet, leaving on 11.May from Manchester (MAN) to Munich (MUC). From MUC I could rent a car, to drive the 2 1/2 hour distance to the town of Iphofen.

The evening before I left UK for the travel, Monday night, I looked through a bag with old pictures, and I scanned a few into my computer, to share them with other family members.

The church service and the funeral were set for Wednesday, 12.May. The night before I thought that it would be nice to play a video in church, and so I too the Windows ZP Moviemaker, imported the Dvorak Largo of which I recently had created a rendition (because this music was her favorite piece), and added a few of the pictures, in chronological order. This was done at night, between 02:00 - 04:00. Next day I asked if they had a screen and a projector (in Germany they call these projectors "beamers"). The church did not have any of the equipment that I would need, so I checked the internet. Came across the site erento which would provide links and information to providers of equipment for rental. I entered details of my request, and a few minutes later received an email with the address of a supplier in Wuerzburg: Seissiger Veranstaltungstechnik. I called, and yes, they did have the equipment available. So I drove to Wuerzburg, picked up the stuff, paid, and drove to the Stadtpfarrkirche Iphofen to assemble it. The setup included: a 2.40m x 1.80 screen, a "beamer", two active speakers with a signal converter box (from line to mic), and a frame for placing the projector. My brother arrived to help me with the setup.

It was a few minutes before the church service began (14:30), everybody was already seated, and the projector did not show any image, just a red-blinking LED. We would be able to only play the music, without video... but in the last minute, after another power switching circle, the LED blinking changed to green, and the image appeared on the screen.

After the priest hat mentioned about her life, silence set in, and I started to play the video.



The sound of the speakers was very good; the video on the screen was unfortunately not very well visible, because incoming sunlight caused a slight reflection.

But this idea was well received, and the people who attended the church service gave very positive feedback afterwards. The funeral went without any incidents, and we said "Farewell" to my grandmother.

I returned the equipment to Seissiger in Wuerzburg, and I distributed the video on a CD to our closest relatives.

Dvorak: "From the New World", 2nd movement

My beloved grandmother, Berta Hopfner, is not very well: she is almost 91 years old, and now had three strokes within a short time. Her all-time favorite music is the Second movement from Antonin Dvorak's Symphony no.9: "From the New World". Everytime when I visited her, she asked me to play this piece (in my own improvisatory way) on the piano or on the organ.

To make her a joy and to cheer her up in her present condition, I decided yesterday that I would take that old MIDI file which I had made of this music 15 years ago, and would turn it into a recording with the new MAESTRO-2 system. It took me 13 hours to do this. Was not too difficult, the main work had already been done: getting all the notes into the file. I even did not change the tempo much: my rendition from 1995 was already up to my current standards. I had to edit new expression curves, and used some of the specific samples from the GPO-4 set (trills for strings, for example).

Now the music rendition is completed, and I already uploaded it to the web site. I did not yet make a special page for it, just placed it into the file collection.

The latest recording of this music is available here at www.virtualphilharmonic.co.uk/Dvorak_S9M2.php.

My grandmother is the only one in our family who has some significant musicality: she played piano and taught many students in Iphofen how to play this instrument, until a few years ago. Both my parents do not exhibit a significant musicality strain, so I must have gotten the music bug from her only. I hope that listening to this music will bring her into good spirits.