The MIDI days
After my son was born and right after I got my first Mac, I had a fling with MIDI. These are original compositions done in the 1980s, before I learned you could add tonal shading to MIDI files. That means these are all sort of plunk-plunk-splat; I put the notes in and that was the end of it.
I wrote the Invention in E Major a few years before that, and played it at one of my formal concerts on a real piano. Later I transposed it to a MIDI file.
After a conversation with my long-time piano partner about how you could make anything sound like Mozart if you added a certain type of left hand arpeggio to it, I wrote the Mozart Gospel Variations as a joke. Based on “Simple Gifts”, I wrote it entirely on paper without ever hearing it, scored for two pianos, four hands. I asked said piano partner to learn the second piano part and he refused, saying it was too boring. Since I only had two hands, for years I wondered how it would actually sound. I heard it for the first time when I finally transfered the score to MIDI. When I then played it back for him, he liked it. I wasted no time in reminding him that he’d refused to learn it in the first place, forcing it to live only in my head all that time.
Once I heard it for real, it didn’t actually sound all that much like Mozart. But still.
Jazz Too was a little ditty I used to sing to my infant son. The words are "doo doo doo doo doot". The Gigue just happened one day.
| Gigue | |
| Invention in E Major | |
| Jazz Too | |
| Mozart Gospel Variations |
Copyright 1976-1986, Jacqueline Landman Gay. Please don’t swipe these. If you want to use them for something, ask.
