Category: Piano Music

Ponti

I only learned recently that Michael Ponti died in October, at 84. He was a high school hero of mine, raising unknown composers like Alkan, Henselt, Liaponov and countless others up from the ashes of history’s neglect,...

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Another Discarded Piano on Astoria Boulevard

I 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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Pianists and New Things

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 […]

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Piano Practice Room Radio

All 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

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Almost Nuked All My Piano Music From YT

Lately 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...

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Stream This

Got into a long-and-drawn-out exchange with someone last week. The discussion concerned webcams,...

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Found This Old Mendelssohn Recording

Cleaning 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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Antonio Soler, Keyboard Sonata #25

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...

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Siegfried Langgard: Liebeslied (Love Song)

This 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...

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Some Edvard Grieg For Your October

I 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...

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Name the Composer

It’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...

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Nuvole Bianche, by Ludovico Einaudi

Nuvole 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....

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A Waltz I Think I Wrote, But Not Sure

These 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....

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Ancora, by Ludovico Einaudi

Just 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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Found Some Old Mendelssohn Recordings

I 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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Bootstrap, and Glutterpop Scrabber Cloop

I 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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First Things First

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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Powell Again

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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TIL: John Powell Was A White Supremacist

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 […]

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Payphone Call: I Slept 14 Hours

How 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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Sundays in Atlanta

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 […]

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Paths Cross

A 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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Who Wrote This?

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 […]

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Unknown Piano Piece

This 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 Would Listen To This

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 […]

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Practice Room: Lecuona Rising

This 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

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From the Practice Room: A Bach Suite

I’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 […]

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Channeling Henselt

Another 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 […]

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Talk

If there is one thing I wish I could talk with someone about in my life it has been piano music. I don’t think I know any subject matter as exhaustively as that. It is the only thing I ever went to school for. While I consider myself a person of many interests it’s kind […]

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Mozart

Still getting the hang of making recordings. I’ll never be good at this. The unsettled feeling of recording things knowing they are imperfect. With Mozart there is no perfect.    

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Ragtime Friday

In 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 […]

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Silent Hands

A 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 […]

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Melancholy.

I 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 […]

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A Bach Fugue From the Myspace Era

Assuming 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”.

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New York City Scenes Accompanied By My Piano Music

A 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.  

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Rockefeller Center Skating Rink, 2006.

Rummaging 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 […]

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Piano Music and Photos By Me

I’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 […]

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Piano Improvisations.

I’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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Out There

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 […]

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July 15, 2006. Piano Piece.

I 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.

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Gretchen am Spinnrade

For 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. […]

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Richard Nixon’s Piano Concerto #1

A 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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Archives: 2004 – Present