Also available in MP3, Ogg Vorbis and Ogg Flac.

This is an old song but not 19th century by any means. I’m posting it because (1) it’s been too long since I posted new music and this was the nearest thing at the tip of my fingers and (2) it’s a great fit for my new 2007 National Estralita, which I bought because it’s loud enough for unamplified shows and love because the sound is so thick and warm.

MP3 version: Lucas Gonze — Frog in the Well (MP3) (1:12)

FLAC version: Lucas Gonze — Frog in the Well (FLAC) (1:12)

As always, this recording is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike license, and you are welcome to ask for a version under a different license (like a fully commercial license or a CC non-commercial license.

Update: for tablature and sheet music, see the followup post to this one.

This is a recording of an 1876 tune called “Centennial Grand March”. It’s a bit tricky, and when I first tried it on stage about a year ago it scared the hell out of me. Now that I’ve got it down it’s a lot of fun to play. I love the chromatic melodies, the way the parts tell a story, and the mood.

This is my third recording of work by W. L. Hayden, the composer. I did a couple pieces from Hayden’s Star Collection of Guitar Music, from which I learned Celebrated Shoo Fly Galop and Must I, Then.

MP3: Lucas Gonze – Centennial Grand March

FLAC: Lucas Gonze – Centennial Grand March

Sheet music: at the Library of Congress web site.

Feel free to share and remix per the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 3.0 unported license.

Technical notes

I got rid of the high pitched background whine in my first video by using an external iSight video camera rather than the one built into my laptop. To use an external camera you have to use iMovie 06 rather than the more recent 08 version, so I switched to 06, and it turned to be a lot better and easier to use.

Also, I got a more full and punchy sound by switching from the built-in mic to an external one, a Sure SM81.

Lots of caveats for this song, because it’s my first try at video and I don’t have my chops together yet. There’s some high-pitched noise that I couldn’t get rid of, it’s just a short clip, I didn’t use the right mic, stuff like that. But I’m really happy about video as a content type for this site. It makes a lot of sense to do my recordings with video, since the performances are always live and edit-free. In the future I’m hoping to do both a video and a standalone MP3 of every recording.

This post is my second recording of D. E. Jannon’s 1854 piece Carrie Waltz. I previously blogged it about a year ago on blog.gonze.com.

MP3: Carrie Waltz, version 2 (2:27)

I redid it because I’ve gotten better since then. Now I know to make a song start strong in the first couple seconds, to make the lines more fluid and improvisational, and to mash the guitar right onto the mic for a hotter recording.

Sheet music here:

Versions of the recording in other file formats:

• Carrie Waltz, version 2 (FLAC)
• Carrie Waltz, version 2 (Ogg Vorbis)

You are free to share and remix this recording per the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 US license.

Dancing

Playing along

I learned this song from sheet music at the Library of Congress. It’s not a beginner piece, but it’s pretty approachable.

The embedded images here are linked to full-size PDFs, so click through if you want a printout to learn from.

Here’s the cover sheet, which was printed in cheapo black and white:

Here’s the part, which is a short one-pager:

Free culture

There is an Ogg Vorbis version of the audio file and an Ogg FLAC version.

There is code to embed a player for the song in another web page:

This page uses the hAudio microformat.

This recording is copyright 2008 by Lucas Gonze and released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States license. You are free to share or remix it as long as you give attribution and apply the same terms to works based on this one. If you need another license for some reason just contact me and we’ll arrange it.

You are welcome to link directly to any file I host, including MP3s. No need to host a copy to spare my bandwidth.

If you do a version of this and want a link here, let me know.

Lucas Gonze — Ella Waltz

This post is a recording of the composition Ella Waltz by D.E. Jannon, which was published in 1854.

It is the third of a set of three waltzes by D.E. Jannon. I have also blogged recordings of Amy Waltz and Carrie Waltz. I don’t consider the series finished because I want to redo the Amy one, but who knows whether I’ll really come up with a better version in the end. It takes a ton of practice and a lot of trial and error with the arrangement to make one of these recordings, and I have other tunes that I want to move on to.

As I was learning the 3 waltzes I made up a back story for them. In my imagination they are named after D.E. Jannon’s three daughters. They are ordered from oldest to youngest. Amy is a teenager, Ella is a little kid, Carrie is in-between. Amy is going through a phase where she is hustling all the time and in a hurry to get away from her parents. Ella has been falling down, dropping things, running into stuff, and generally being accident prone. Carrie is moderate in all things.

The original writing on this tune had dead spots, places where the writing was thin or weak and needed fixing, so I rewrote many of the parts. My version isn’t as simple as the original, which is a loss, but it sounds better.

By the way, I got the name of this tune slightly wrong while I was working, and even though I corrected it in the end some of the metadata and file names are wrong. Right: Ella. Wrong: Emma.

These recordings are released under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license per my boilerplate licensing statement.

This blog entry is a repost from my tech blog, where I was putting music before I created this blog.

Ogg Vorbis: Lucas Gonze — Ella Waltz

August 20, 1852, Wednesday Page 2 of the New York Times Mr. ORVILLE HATCH, of Franklin, Conn., has become insane, he having devoted considerable attention to the subject of Spirit Rappings. Mr. HATCH is a farmer, and has been instrumental in introducing many important improvements in agriculture into the town in which he resides.

Madame Pamita, whose performances involve both spiritualism and really old American music, sent me a pointer to sheet music for an 1854 tune called “Spirit Rappings”, presumably because it’s a great number for Halloween. This post is my version of it.

Since I did a vocal part for once, the mix has the guitar and vocal parts hard panned to left and right so you can pull out the singing and do karaoke.

This recording is under a Creative Commons ShareAlike-Attribution 2.0 license. See also my boilerplate copyright statement.

Ogg Vorbis version: Lucas Gonze – Spirit Rappings (vorbis)

This blog entry is a repost from my tech blog, where I was putting music before I created this blog.

I like the way this rocks out. It’s a fun uptempo dance tune. Also I dig the idea of the celebrated shoo fly, which reminds me of a Mark Twain story called “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County:”

In compliance with the request of a friend of mine, who wrote me from the East, I called on good-natured, garrulous old Simon Wheeler, and inquired after my friend’s friend, Leonidas W. Smiley, as requested to do, and I hereunto append the result. I have a lurking suspicion that Leonidas W. Smiley is a myth; that my friend never knew such a personage; and that he only conjectured that, if I asked old Wheeler about him, it would remind him of his infamous Jim Smiley, and he would go to work and bore me nearly to death with some infernal reminiscence of him as long and tedious as it should be useless to me. If that was the design, it certainly succeeded.

So what kind fly is a shoo fly, anyway? There is no such thing. It’s a folksy expression along the same lines as like flies to shit or keg flies. For example, the shoo flies in this 1915 recipe for shoo fly pie don’t mean the pie is made of bugs, they mean it’s sticky and sweet:

How does shoo fly pie taste? According to this person who made it, your mileage may vary:

To me this pie did not smell good or look good but Darrell’s co-workers seemed to like it.

The dance is something called a galop. I come across a lot of galop music and references to the galop, so it must have been popular. The Polka History of Dance explains it this way:

The popularity of the polka led to the introduction of several other dances from central Europe. The simplest was the galop or galoppade which was introduced into England and France in 1829. Dance position was the same as for the waltz or polka, with couples doing a series of fast chassés about the room with occasional turns. Music was in 2/4 time, often merely a fast polka. The galop was particularly popular as the final dance of the evening.

And wikipedia says:

In dance, the galop, named for the fastest running gait of a horse (see gallop), a shortened version of the original term galoppade, is a lively country dance, introduced in the late 1820s to Parisian society by the duchesse de Berry and popular in Vienna, Berlin and London. In the same closed position familiar in the waltz, the step combined a glissade with a chassé on alternate feet, ordinarily in a fast 2/4 time. The galop was a forerunner of the polka, which was introduced in Prague ballrooms in the 1830s and made fashionable in Paris when Raab, a dancing teacher of Prague, danced the polka at the Odéon Theatre, 1840.

The galop was particularly popular as the final dance of the evening. The “Post horn Galop” written by the cornet virtuoso Herman Koenig was first performed in London, 1844; it remains a signal that the dancing at a hunt ball or wedding reception is ended.

There are mistakes left in the recording. Unedited solo acoustic instrumentals on guitar are an unforgiving form, and I’m not yet good enough to get a perfect take within a reasonable amount of time and labor. The medium is like watercolor painting in the sense that no corrections are possible. The hardest part for me is the tradeoff between passion and correctness. I can do a version with no ugly mistakes pretty reliably, and I can do something which is passionate and musical any time I’m in the right mood, but I can’t consistently do both at the same time. At the same time, the sonic clarity of 1-track real-time acoustic playing means that I can’t avoid a hard phrase by mumbling it or cover it up by emphasizing whatever is on other tracks.

I learned this song from David Allen Coester‘s digitization of “Hayden’s Star Collection of Guitar Music.” There is no composer in the original publication, and Hayden is credited as the arranger rather than the composer, but I gave Hayden the composition credit by default. Here is the sheet music:

These recordings are released under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license per my boilerplate licensing statement.

The title of this song is my favorite part of it. There are about 100 silly questions you could make up for the request this person is responding to. “Ebenezer, please walk the cow to the auto show.” Etc. Fill in your own.

This song is a bit too pretty for me to be comfortable with, but then again that’s the 19th century for you. It’s just the esthetic of the time. Irony was far in the future, as relevant to them as 22nd century art is to us.

The source is an 1877 book entitled “Hayden’s Star Collection of Guitar Music.” The book was kindly digitized and hosted by a guy named David Allen Coester. Coester is an independent musician who just happens to be bringing primary historical materials on the internet.

There is no composer listed, and Hayden is credited as the arranger, not the composer. I gave him the composition credit by default.

I like the lines in this composition. The phrases aren’t broken up neatly, instead they stretch out into long run-on sentences. The result is that the song is really just two lines.

It’s surprisingly hard to play. This tiny bit of music took me a long time to master, and even now I make a lot of mistakes. There is an easy way to play it but it sounds cramped. To let the notes breathe I picked fingerings which use open strings rather than fretted ones whenever possible. This enables them to ring for longer and gives them a woody resonance. Using open strings rather than fretted ones is tricky when you’re up above the first position, because it effectively means that you’re playing in two positions at the same time. Another difficulty is that the note after an open note can’t be on an adjacent string, because then my finger on the adjacent string will accidentally lean over and stop the ringing note. The requirements aren’t hard to meet on a physical level, but there are mental gymnastics that I can only pull off when I’m in a state of deep concentration.

I have heard this style of fingering called “harp picking” because the overlap of ringing open strings gives a shimmering quality similar to a harp. I don’t really lay on the shimmering sound, though. It sounds like you’re trying too hard when you hit people over the head with it.

These recordings are released under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license per my boilerplate licensing statement.