Ravel's "Ma mère l'oye" (Mother Goose) recorded by VPO

Maurice Ravel's orchestral suite "Ma mère l'oye" (Mother Goose) is based on children's stories. It was first written as a piece for piano, but Ravel later created an orchestral version. There is a long orchestral version which was intended as a ballet music, and there is a shorter suite in 5 movements. I have dedicated the past month to work on the latter 5-movement suite and have created a rendition with the Garritan Personal Orchestra samples. Work on this suite was not easy: although the instrumentation is set much lighter than for example a Gustav Mahler symphony, there are several technical difficulties in it: the strings have many parts with fast notes, 1/32 and 1/64. Overall, the instruments need to be played very light-hearted, to keep that airy feel of the music. There are several wind solo instruments which need to be played "with emotion". There is lots of flagolet in the strings, and some of the instruments appear to exceed their natural range (or is this just sloppiness of the editors at Durand, who did not properly assign the right instruments?).

The recordings of all five movements of this suite are now complete, and I have bundled this suite with another suite by Maurice Ravel: "Le Tombeau de Couperin" into the album "Maurice Ravel - Vol.One". My recording of the Le Tombeau suite had already been completed in November 2011, but its 20 minutes duration was too short for a full album.

Since a few days this album has become available on the commercial music outlets. This time Spotify was first, followed by iTunes a few days later. I am now waiting for the album to appear on Amazon.

Slow Mahler - Out of Context

The last two years, 2010 and 2011, have seen many performances and new recordings of the Symphonies by Gustav Mahler, due to the fact, that in 2010 his 150th birthday was celebrated, and in 2011 the 100th anniversary of his death was commemorated. Since these symphonies are among the music that I cherish most, I felt compelled to contribute with my own recordings, which, as always, are renditions of the complete orchestral scores by using computer-controlled sampled instruments. My first album release of a complete Mahler Symphony happened on 7.July 2010: his Symphony #1 which I subtitled as "From the Life of a Lonely One" ("Aus dem Leben eines Einsamen"), the original subtitle of Jean Paul's novel "Titan" which was Mahler's inspiration for this Symphony #1. Most often, the Symphony #1 is titled "Titan", but I think that the longer subtitle much better reflects the mood and musical content. The complete symphony is available on iTunes.

But since that release of this symphony in 2010 I had not been able to commit time to complete the rendition of another symphony. These works are just too gigantic. But I did have time to work on a few new individual movements from his symphonies, and I reworked some of the previous recordings which I had created. All of these were slow movements, because of a simple and trivial reason: I can get them done faster, because they contain not so many notes. Even the last movement of Symphony #9 was quite quickly recorded. What took longer was to shape the expression until it sounded acceptable to me. And then in September 2011 I decided to combine these into a new "temporary" album: "SLOW MAHLER - OUT OF CONTEXT". I am fully aware that these movements normally need the context of a whole symphony, and taking them out of this context may not be the most sensible thing to do. But I put them together under the common theme of slowness: they show the development of musical expressiveness, from the "Blumine" in Symphony #1 through the emotional rollercoaster of the 4th movement of Symphony #4, to the final resting in the Finale of Symphony #9. And therefore, this album does show a certain cohesiveness.

I plan of course to complete all symphonies eventually, and work is currently done on creating a rendition of Symphonies #2 and #4 - but this may take a while. In the meantime I invite you to enjoy the album that I have created for you. It is here on iTunes at the address: http://itunes.apple.com/gb/album/slow-mahler-out-of-context/id476151493
or on Amazon UK: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Slow-Mahler-Out-of-Context/dp/B00608G1B8/ref=sr_shvl_album_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1328484020&sr=301-1

Amazon is fast - "My Music 2010" online there

In February 2011 I had uploaded my album "My Music 2010" to CD Baby, and it was immediately available there. After that, CD Baby was supposed to distribute it to all major online music distributors (OMDs) such as Amazon, iTunes, Zune, Spotify and others. But I had forgotten co click one last button there... and so the distribution did not happen. I noticed this only last week - and then rectified this immediately.

Since then I have once in a while checking, and today I saw that this album is now available on Amazon. Quite fast!

It is not yet available on iTunes.

The pricing is beyond my control - it is determined by the individual OMDs; I only was able to set the price at CD Baby.

This album in this constellation of tracks is NOT available as such compilation on my web site - only the individual files can be obtained from my site and have to be collected manually to be assembled into this collection. So there is some benefit for the buyers of this album!

My Music now Commercially Available

On 10.February my new artist page on CD Baby went online. I had signed on with them, and have created my first album: My Music in 2010. This album contains 8 tracks with the most recent renditions of music which I had created in 2010.

These music tracks are now for sale, on CD Baby, but soon also on all their online music distributors which they have partnership agreements with. This includes iTunes, Amazon, Zune, Spotify and many others.

Does this mean I will no longer make my music available for free on my website? No, it does not. All the tracks which are available for purchase, are also available on my website. The agreement with CD Baby is not exclusive, I still can do with my music recordings whatever I want. And I have decided to offer them here still for free. Does this make sense? Not from a purely business point of view: In order to ensure that everybody pays for my music, I should remove it from my web page and have it only available through online pay sites. But I want to pursue another business model: I want that as many people as possible have the opportunity to listen to my music, for free, before they would pay; and if they like the music, they can then move to a site where they can then express their appreciation through a purchase of one or more tracks.

This may be a slightly optimistic assumption, that anyone would want to pay for something that they can get for free. But I do have a believe in the good of mankind, and I am sure that there will be a few people who will be clicking the purchase button on some of those online sites. If using iTunes or Zune, then this will also make it easier and straightforward to manage the music on the mobile device, so there is actually some additional value in the purchase rather than only getting the free MP3 files.

So for the time being, there will be the free versions on my site, and there will be the commercial versions of the same renditions online for purchase at various Online Music Distributors. I plan, however, to release a few special recordings only for purchase. One such album is already in the making.

What am I going to do with the little revenue that I might get from the music sales? I plan to use it for keeping my music equipment up to date. Software needs updates, I also need to purchase some more tools, and there are cost related to web hosting. All my music activities are currently running at a loss, and it would be great if I could stop this and at least break even.

The album that I am releasing now is My Music in 2010. I plan to do this now at the end of every year, to document my musical work for each year. I have no physical CD, these albums are all only available online.