Digital interpretation

About

Klassik-resampled is the result of the idea to use modern sampled instruments to produce musically reasonable digital interpretations of ambitious traditional music. It actually contains 564 articles with ca. 820 mp3-recordings of together nearly 42 hours length with a variety of classical pieces. All are played or programmed by myself with Digital Audio Workstations. 
Due to my musical studies most of the recordings are compositions for piano and historical keyboards, but there is some chambermusic, orchestral music or Jazz and Popmusic aswell.

Samples

Sampled instruments means here sample libraries with thousands of single note recordings (=sample) which allows one to emulate original instruments with nearly all sounds and sound variations they might produce. Since this technology originates from popular music, I also first tried it with popular kinds of music. It might be funny to program a metal-version of Paganinis 24. Capriccio in A, it might be likewise funny, to let traditional instruments play music we would expect to hear from synthezisers as in my stringquartett on the letters of “Steffe(n) Fahl”. Musically it seems to me more demanding to use those sample libraries to program musically reasonable digital interpretations of classical masterworks.

Interpretation

The idea is to apply the appropriate samples to each single note of the complex classical compositions. Some recordings here (Bach, Haydn, Liszt, Messiaen) are also played in realtime on a midikeyboard like you play it on a real piano and the mididata I recorded in this way was edited than later detailed and diligently to shape the sequence of samples to a telling musical speech. Other recordings like pop, ensemble- or other orchestral pieces are totally based on programmed data that is often derived from digital transcribed partitions which I edited than likewise. Editing mididata comprises all aspects of musical interpretation like dynamics, tempo, artifculation, modulation etc.
How a traditional interpretation might compare with a digital interpretation is shown in this french Blog, which confronts the YouTube video of a young belgian pianist with my digital interpretation of the same brilliant piano piece. 

Benefits

- Classical music has more to tell, than to show the physical labor and manual slickness of an instrumentalist. It is about musical ideas, which "digital interpretation" helps to shape more concentrated and prezise.

- There are  many hidden treasures in the musical archives of the last centuries, which no musician dares to rehearse. "Klassik-resampled" already provides hours of never before heard classical compositions of musical and musicological interest.

- By reducing the amount of physical practice with "digital interpretation", "Klassik-resampled" is able to provide complete recordings of important workgroups from the heart of the traditional repertoire. 

References

Since classical music established a rich musical language, some of my digital interpretations became a  proof for the capability of ambitious sample libraries like Synthogy (Massachusetts ),  EastWest Quantum Leap  (California), Fable Sounds (New York) Vienna Symphonic Library (Vienna) and realsamples (Karlsruhe). Beside traditional pianomusic there are also some recordings of historic keyboards as well as some rare pianistic pieces of the classical and romantic repertoire,  some ensemble- and orchestral pieces are also used like that. Several of my recordings were linked as examples aswell in the IMSLP as in many languageversions of Wikipedia and in the online-dictionary LexM of the Hamburg University or the MUGI-online-dictionary of the Hamburg Hochschule für Musik und Theater, the "Joseph-Haydn-Institute" (Cologne) or on pages of the University Texas/Austin.

Projects

The first projects were the complete recording of Bachs Welltempered Piano Part I & II, the complete Haydn Pianosonatas compared on sampled historical pianoforte and a sampled modern grandpiano, the 24 Concertstudies of Liszt and the Vingt regards of Olivier Messiaen. Later Projects of comparable size are the 120 canons & fugues of the Clementipupil A.A. Klengel or the early pianistic works of the Mendelssohnpupil Eduard Franck (1817-1893) compared on a modern Grandpiano and on a historic Berndtfluegel from 1848 or Liszts complete Années de Pelerinage. For my article about Robert Kahn in the online-dictionary LexM of the Hamburg University, I produced some digital interpretations right from previously unpublished manuscripts of a pianoquintett,  a movement of Suite for Orchestra and a movement of a cantata. For my own musical interest I produced some other obviously worldwide first recordings like the Pianosonata f-minor op.19 by Jean Louis Nicodé, the only published 8 Pianopieces by Elisabeth von Herzogenberg which was a giftet Pianist and one of the people around Johannes Brahms.

 

suggestions

First time recorded

Complete recordings

Johann Sebastian Bach: Welltempered Piano VOL 1, VOL. 2

Joseph Haydn: Pianosonatas Pianoforte, Grandpiano

August Alexander Klengel: 120 Canons & Fugues

Eduard Franck: 22 early Pianocompositions op.1-18 Berndtfluegel (1848), modern Concertgrandpiano

Franz Liszt: 24 Concertstudies,  Années de Pelerinage, Valses oubliées 

Olivier Messiaen: Vingt regards sur l'enfant Jesus 

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