I have been enjoying listening to Jamie Woon. I think he is definitely in the line of Stevie Wonder and Michael McDonald, both people I like. KCRW does this in studio recordings and I tend to like them. They also keep me listening to new music.

YouTube is quite a resource for me. Yesterday I came home from rehearsing the Buxtehude Passacaglia in D minor I plan to play Sunday. I was wondering about registration (which pipes to use to play it). There is a tradition among organists of using lots of register changes in these repetitive pieces. It’s a tradition, but I’m not aware of historical evidence for this kind of performing in the writers of these pieces and their students.

Still I wanted to find out about what players were doing with the Passacaglia. I listened to three live performances. In them, each performer made different decisions about how to change stops during Buxtehude’s Passacaglia. Very helpful. I was also a bit surprised that these highly polished videos had lapses of mistakes and confusion in the players. It was reassuring. I have quite posting videos of myself because I’m unhappy with the quality of recording and my performances. Maybe I’ll get back to that at some point.

My boss told me yesterday the church will buy me this refurbished version of the computer Yale provided my son-in-law. Cool.

My new AGO mag came yesterday (featuring the above Nichols & Simpson instrument in Dallas Texas). I have been reading this magazine for about for about forty years and continue to find it informative and inspiring. There were a couple of articles in the March issue that I found interesting. The first was Timothy Tikker’s review of Pamela Ruiter-Feenstra’s Bach and Improvisation, vol I. 

At first I thought this was probably a book I wanted to read. However, Tikker made so many intelligent critiques of it that I’m reconsidering. (I am unable to link in these article or even a link to the March issue due to the stupid stupid policy of this organization to build firewalls between people and information…. )

Also Gregory Hand makes an intelligent plea for more careful preparation and organization of one’s learning process in his article, “Writing It All Down: An Old-Fashioned Way to Learn New Music.” As you can tell from the title, he advocates writing in all fingers every time.

I did that in grad school but only occasionally since then. In fact, yesterday I decided to learn Distler’s Variations on “Christ du Lamm Gottes” (“Drei Vorspiele und Satz ‘Christe, du Lamm Gottes”). At some point I fingered this work. At first I thought this was a bit annoying but I’m finding myself paying some attention to the fingers.

I’m probably just lazy and Gregory Hand makes some good points.

Weirdly I spent an hour or so, composing yesterday. I’m working on an organ piece. But it seems to be better not to talk too much about this kind of work. It tends to sabotage it for me.