SILKS AND RAGS

I enjoy making music videos - it's become a relaxing hobby. When I made my first one about ten years ago, I had absolutely no clue what I was doing.
I still don't exactly know what I'm doing, but that hasn't stopped me.

It's not always easy to find visuals for the videos. I have spent (wasted) countless hours scanning the Internet for suitable images and/or copyright-free movie clips.
The average length of most of my videos is around two to four minutes - which isn't bad.

My latest video, Silks and Rags, is over six minutes and making it turned into an exasperating chore.

Fred S. Stone

Silks and Rags is a rare and delightful piano composition by Canadian/American ragtime composer Frederick St. Clair Stone (1873 - 1912), who was generally known as Fred S. Stone.

I recorded this piece long ago and never thought much about it. After recently finding my long-forgotten recording, I was really impressed at what a good composer Stone was.

Silks and Rags (published in 1901) is a waltz - - or rather a compilation of waltz tunes, some of which blend a deliciously unique array of rhythms and styles.
Stone utilizes the elegant traditional waltz form and eventually combines it with  ragtime inspirations.

It was nearly impossible for me to find suitable visuals to compliment the music. There is the elegant formal waltz infiltrated with unconventional negro-inspired dances. And it has to convey the essence of the early 20th century.

I decided to incorporate visuals from around 1910 - 1915. And I decided that six minutes of photos would be too tedious, so I found a few movie clips of dances from that era.

My video effort is haphazard and possibly a bit tedious, but I admittedly like my interpretation of the music.
So far, I haven't found any other recordings of this piano piece.

Fred S. Stone is largely (and undeservedly) forgotten today - but he was once a very well-known pianist, composer, and conductor of ragtime music, mostly in the Detroit area.

Tragically, Stone was killed in a freak accident while trying to board a moving trolley car. He was thirty-eight years old.

Video is best viewed full-screen

WILDFLOWER

Well, we finally made it to May - and I think the six month Tennessee winter is over (is that a slight exaggeration?). The ice floes are melting and the penguins have apparently left to spend the summer in northern Canada.

There was a light frost a few nights ago and I still have heavy blankets on the bed. And I drank hot chocolate last night.
But today was sunny and 78 degrees (that's Fahrenheit, for those of you in outer Mongolia). I'm very cautiously optimistic.....

So, in honor of May Day - I'm offering wildflowers - - in the form of a piano rag, composed by Clarence Williams (1893-1965) and first published in 1916.

Composer Clarence Williams

I recorded this about twenty years ago, without ever hearing anyone else play it. Later, when I heard several versions by other pianists I was surprised that they all (including Clarence Williams himself) play it much faster than I do.

My initial interpretative intuition  is that this is a sweet, simple, tender piece of music - and playing it very quickly does it an injustice. In fact, if I ever decided to record it again, I'd probably play it just as slow, but with more "feeling" and tenderness.

One more thing:
As usual, I used the software Audacity to transfer my old recording to an mp3 file. For some reason the mp3 file contained a lot of VERY annoying skips and jumps that aren't in my original recording.

So, I decided to transfer the mp3 file to a WAV file (which usually improves the audio quality). Unfortunately there's only a slight improvement. My over-sensitive musical ear STILL hears some slight skips and jumps - and the final chord of the song is rudely cut short. 

This probably has no meaning to others, but when it comes to my recordings I am a perfectionist.

I was initially going to use photos of wildflowers for my video - but decided to use lovely Victorian and Edwardian ladies instead. 

As always, video is best viewed full-screen.

Chicken Chowder

 

It's not my intention to turn this into a musical blog, but lately I've been delighted to find some of my old piano recordings - - and I'm intent on inflicting them upon you, even if it's against your will.

A catalogue of my piano recordings indicates that I made nearly fifty recordings of ragtime music, including twenty pieces by Scott Joplin.
Unfortunately nearly all of these were lost.  

Last night I happened to find about half a dozen of my ragtime recordings, and I quickly slapped together a video that I could post here.

This long-forgotten piano gem is called the Chicken Chowder Rag. Amazingly, it was written by a sixteen-year-old girl named Irene M. Giblin (1888-1974) and was first published in 1905 when she was seventeen.

 Irene Mary Giblin

Giblin, who was from St. Louis, started playing the piano at an early age. By the time she was fourteen, she was hired to play the piano at the Grand Leader Department Store - where she performed all the latest hits from the Jerome H. Remick music catalogue.

Although Irene Giblin had a promising musical career and published numerous highly popular piano compositions, she abandoned her professional pursuits in 1908 when she married an accountant named Edward O'Brien. Her last published piano rag appeared in 1913. She died at the age of eighty-five in 1974.

Here's my performance of Chicken Chowder.