I would like to extend my New Year’s greetings to you all.
May this year be a calm and peaceful one.
Last year, I carried out a major redesign of my website. Until then, I had been adding articles one by one in blog format, but I have now created an entrance page and placed several index pages. I hope this has made the site a little easier to navigate.
1. Beethoven's Piano Sonatas
As I have been revisiting the pieces I have programmed so far in preparation for burning them onto CDs, I have continued refining my work. With the completion of Sonata No. 28, which I am currently working on, and the next Sonata No. 29, I will have finished the piano sonata project I originally set out to do.
After that, I have not yet decided whether to move on to the early sonatas, which I have not tackled yet, or to revisit and refine the works I have already completed. I will think about it carefully once No. 29 is finished. Each time I revisit a piece, even if it is not quite a new “interpretation,” I find myself thinking that perhaps this passage could be shaped a little differently. My teacher, too, seems to come up with new ideas each time. Music truly offers an inexhaustible source of fascination.
2. Sequencing for String Instruments
Last year, I programmed the fifth movement, “Cavatina,” from Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 13 using Sample Modeling’s “Solo, Chamber & Ensemble Strings (SCES).” The library was easy to use, with very little latency between articulations, though I sometimes wished for a bit more clarity. Perhaps this is simply a matter of learning how to use each library more effectively.
This year, I plan to work in earnest on the third movement of Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 15, a piece I have been returning to for some time. The contrapuntal development found in Beethoven’s piano sonatas is woven here in an even more intricate way through different instrumental colors, and I find myself drawn to the entirely different appeal of each individual instrument—something quite unlike the piano.
From the perspective of sound libraries, a string quartet is, above all, a dialogue among solo instruments, so extreme precision in tone quality may not always be necessary. That said, with SCES, even after adjustment, the first and second violins tend to sound too similar in character. I am considering trying a blend with SWAM to see how that might work.
At my current level, string instruments are still far more difficult than keyboard instruments, and I often find myself wishing that AI would lend a stronger helping hand. But then again, if it became too easy, it might take away some of the fun.