I had to stop posting excerpts from my Piano Practice Room Radio to my YouTube channel because the algo kept snapping back claiming I was stealing copyrighted content. Apparently my playing sounded too much like Van Cliburn,...
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I would make hours-long videos like this for women who said they loved piano music and wanted to hear/see me play. It had no real-world effect. The women watched the videos over and over but remained null and void, stayed home,...
Read MoreI wouldn’t know who but the reason is obvious why someone is illegally dumping their pianos. Disposing of pianos legitimately through private carters is expensive. By leaving them here City Sanitation is obliged to haul...
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An old college friend stopped by last night. Was nice to talk about piano music with an informed professional for the first time in I don’t even know how long. Informed talk about piano lights up something in my brain, something that had stagnated for a number of years. Solon Pierce passes through NYC every […]
Read MoreAll the audio at Practice Piano Radio is of me playing, mostly at home practicing alone, but some concert recordings are included as well.Source: Piano Practice Room Radio
Read MoreLately I’d been sending audio of my Piano Practice Room Radio stream with live video of my streaming Astoria webcam showing the street outside. Unlike the streaming webcam you see in that previous link the video that goes...
Read MoreGot into a long-and-drawn-out exchange with someone last week. The discussion concerned webcams,...
Read MoreCleaning up the desktop, all kinds of rubble sitting in front of me all this time. Not a masterful performance but it’s not a piece that benefits from mastery. Or is it? I don’t even know.
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Somehow I have managed to mostly avoid the keyboard music of Antonio Soler, the Spanish composer often compared to fellow countryman Domenico Scarlatti. Based on my evolving journey through Soler’s music I find the...
Read MoreThis is what I did with yesterday’s unexpected extra hour (I forgot about the daylight savings time thing). This piece has fistfuls of notes but it’s not too difficult until the end with the long stretches in the...
Read MoreI am not altogether satisfied with this but I’ll take it, after 2½ hours spent trying to record this Grieg piece earlier were all messed up. The piano is plugged into a mixing board which in turn plugs into the field...
Read MoreIt’s a simple piece by a not so simple composer. Can you guess who? Having not made a video in a while I remember why I don’t do it more often. It’s just hard, for me at least, to mentally switch gears from...
Read MoreNuvole Bianche, by Ludovico Einaudi Trying out these post formats in the Extra WordPress Theme. Also rekindling my debate-with-self about whather Einaudi is classical or new age or something altogether different....
Read MoreThese two takes of the same short piece are from December, 2004. I find nothing else on them, but feel reasonably confident this is something I could have written. If you the composer to be someone else please let me know....
Read MoreI remember watching “A Boy Named Charlie Brown” on TV in the 1970s, not thinking much of it (even as a kid I never cared much for the Charlie Brown movies). Then this came across. Schroeder was among the great...
Read MoreJust messing around with this piece by a composer new to me. Ludovico Einaudi’s Ancora is an often played piece by the Italian composer. My rendering is not perfect, and the pageturns can be an irritant, but this is...
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It’s me pecking at a honky-tonk style piano from my second room in New York, some time in...
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Audio of me playing “Tides of Manaunaun” a bunch of years ago. I took some pride in...
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I’ve never done one of these follow-the-score videos, so if it looks a little ragged, well,...
Read MoreI think these are from 2004. The “Duetto” is among my favorite of Mendelssohn’s “Songs Without Words”. To me it creates the illusion that 2 people are playing at the same piano. Mendelssohn - Song...
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It’s arranged by J. Adams Smith but I don’t know if that means s/he is also the...
Read MoreI finally found a Piwigo them that I do not hate. I think I overlooked it because of its bland-sounding name: Bootstrap Darkroom. But it is decent looking and should be a long-term fit for the new photo dump subdomains I set up this week. px.sorabji.com has been around a long time but for some […]
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Before deactivating Facebook I did what I always do at that time. I downloaded all my stuff, about 500mb worth, though I swear the download was a lot bigger the last time I did this. The only thing keeping me connected to Facebook these days was the “Guess the Score” group, which was a lot […]
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I have not made up my mind about this matter yet, though the sense of shock it might have evoked has faded some, pending more information and perspective. In 1920s Virginia it seems as if white nationalism was all the vogue, with virtually nobody questioning the beliefs of eugenicists and their ilk. So was Powell’s […]
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For years I’ve had on my shelf what I thought was a notable obscurity. John Powell’s Sonata Teutonica, procured via special order through the old Patelson’s music store, fills 64 pages of an Oxford University Press publication edited by Roy Hamlin Johnson. I gave the piece and its composer some consideration on account it being praised […]
Read MoreHow is that even possible, to sleep 14 hours when I was not especially tired, then wake up feeling more or less normal? Maybe it’s because I did a good amount of writing yesterday in a style that is not comfortable for me. That kind of thing wrings my brain dry. The call above is […]
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Listening to tapes I made in Atlanta in 1997. These might have been my first ever “walking around” recordings, and from the sound of the first few minutes they are not very good. It’s the same problems I try to deal with today, in isolating or preventing altogether the sounds of my physical movement from […]
Read MoreA long time ago, from a music conservatory far far away, I took out a classified ad in a national music magazine. It was a small ad, 5- or 6-lines deep and probably ¾” wide. The ad invited composers to send me their piano music, which I might play at a “well known conservatory.” I […]
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First serious try at sitting at the piano and talking, lounge style, even if I don’t play lounge music.
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I do not know who wrote this. It’s possible I am the composer but I kinda doubt it. I don’t know why I would have not noted the composer of this unless it was myself, but I get lazy. This is from December, 2004. Not a bad tune but it could use a less monotonous […]
Read MoreThis recording, from 6 years ago, has me playing a piece I can no longer identify. Nice little tune, though. Innocuous.
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I spent the last 24 hours listening to a stash of piano recordings I made 7 years ago. I have no memory of any of them. I posted some of them to Soundcloud, an account I guess I will not be cancelling after all still cancel after all. The last recording was this one, from […]
Read MoreThis is more in the spirit of what I had in mind with the previous posting. What? Yeah. https://soundcloud.com/sorabjinyc/practice-room-lecuona-rising
Read MoreI’ve long been interested to know if there is an audience out there for this kind of thing. It’s me playing piano, but not masterfully so. Not even close. But not exactly incompetently, either. I am PRACTICING. In the solitude of the practice room I make mistakes, stop and start, make stuff up, and so […]
Read MoreAnother bit of telephone weirdness just occurred. A call from an unknown number from a woman asking if I had just called her. I had not. All I could say was “No.” I think she made a grunt of perturbation but I just hung up. How could anyone think I just called them when I […]
Read MoreIn which I open a random piece of music on my sheet music tablet and attempt to play it to a reasonable level of accuracy. Not perfect but nothing ever is. There is a Trio section of this piece that I did not get to. I just ran out of time. This take is the last […]
Read MoreA half hour spent thinking I was recording video and audio should not go completely to waste. It’s actually kind of strange watching hands dart across the keys absent the sound or vibrations one might naturally expect. I’ve played piano most of my life but seeing another pianist’s hands play is still a marvelous mystery to me. It just doesn’t seem […]
Read MoreI came up with this after a long afternoon spent beating my head against a wall trying to get best quality recordings from a Roland digital piano. This music could be a basis for something more substantive. But really I think I just wanted to sing. Cables from the piano go into a TASCAM mixer. The TASCAM sends […]
Read MoreI know a lot of the Johnny Carson star-maker canon, but never heard of this before. Pretty cool, though you have to ask what other talented pianists in the audience were ready to answer the call.
Read MoreAssuming it had been deleted long ago I rediscovered a bunch of videos I posted to Myspace during that social network’s brief reign of relevance. It’s a Bach Fugue in C-Sharp, from “The Great 48”.
Read MoreThe tone of the music is meant to express my feelings about the apocalyptic rise of hideous luxury high rise structures at Queens Plaza and elsewhere in Long Island City. This montage does not quite hit the mark but I don’t mind how it sounds or how it looks. This is the first time I […]
Read MoreA series of short video clips of New York City scenes accompanied by my piano music. Thanks for listening and watching. Locations include Port Authority Subway Station, Times Square, 1st Avenue, the East River, and Northern Boulevard in Queens.
Read MoreRummaging through old photos I found a set of videos I made 9 years ago using a Konaki DV6 video camera, a cheap but functional gadget that I seem to have lost. I set the short video to a simple little piano ditty. The sepia setting makes this look like it was filmed in the […]
Read MoreIt’s another try at combining my piano pieces and improvisations with photos and vdieo of my own. This 9 minute video uses sounds of subways pulling into and out of Queensboro Plaza, with accompanying noises. The sound was recorded using a payphone on the subway platform. The only modification to the sound was that it […]
Read MoreI am going to keep making these videos until I create one that I like without too much reservation. This one is raw and needs work but it is something close to what I had in mind.
Read MoreI’ve meant to do this for a long time. I combined some random photos of mine with a piano piece I wrote and performed. I think this might be a little more effective if the photos had a single theme, but I think it works well enough. Nothing fancy here, I used Microsoft Movie Maker […]
Read MoreIt’s groovy! It’s smoovy! Check out this five-minute musical slideshow of six dozen of my new fractals set to Philip Glass’ ‘Metamorphosis’ as played by Mark Thomas. This is the first time I’ve used OSX app Photos (formerly iPhoto) to make a slideshow and it was surprisingly intuitive, easy and fun.
Read MoreI took some of today’s piano improvisations and mixed them up with sounds recorded streetside in 2010. Birds chirping, cars passing by.
Read MoreI’ve never really gotten my money’s worth out of SoundCloud, where I mostly post found sounds and musical acts heard through payphones. I posted this set of improvs from earlier today. Just messing around with a few ideas and some sound gear that I’m trying to learn how to use. There is some static here […]
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For the first time in years I was interviewed about matters that had nothing to do with payphones. And it happened twice in one week! Who’d’a thunk it. I would not have objected had the subject come up but it did not. First up came Peter Mastrosimone’s welcome and nicely done appreciation of my “Where […]
Read MoreI wrote this piano piece 9 years ago. I started crafting a video around it, using photos of mine from New York City cemeteries and blighted areas. I should get back on that project. I want to write more about piano music and the continuous decision-making processes involved in reverse-engineering the works of other composers.
Read MoreJust me noodling around with a Bach F-Sharp Minor Prelude from the WTC.
Read MoreFor several days last week it seemed all I did for 5 or 6 hours each day was play the Liszt arrangement of Schubert’s “Gretchen am Spinnrade” (“Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel”). It is an addictive little piece which I find to be more theatrically dramatic in the piano arrangement than in its voice-with-piano original. […]
Read MoreA friend sent over a link to the video of Richard Nixon playing piano on the Jack Parr show. I remembered the quest I went on long ago to get copies of piano music composed by Richard Nixon. Having read that the president composed music I thought his theme song for the Orthogonians club at Whittier […]
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It’s me making some music, some of it rough some of it not, that was the spirit of things.
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