Rewriting Mozart

Does he look shocked? Or horrified?
Should he?

Kaylie has been back home from Snow College for about a week-and-a-half. This doesn't mean she was finished with her classes...COVID-19, you know. So I got to hear her practicing her songs for her private vocal class final—which was delightful for me. Unfortunately for her, this whole COVID-19 thing has left her without an accompanist. So she asked me.

She sang The Lonely Goatherd (from The Sound of Music). That music was easy. In fact, because that music included the melody throughout the entire piece, I rewrote it to sound more like an accompaniment than like I was just trying to play the song for my own listening pleasure. So I can also say that I rewrote Rodgers and Hammerstein—or at least Rodgers. Or, really I rewrote someone else's rewriting of The Lonely Goatherd ... But it's pretty much just a boom-chuck song, and it was easy to write and easy to play. :-)

The Mozart was something else altogether. I could not learn the music Kaylie gave me in just a few days' time, so I set about rewriting it—to make it easier—too.

When the work got too tedious, I took a break to post this on
facebook. I love my friends' comments.

In all fairness (or maybe just in all rationalization), I was actually rewriting someone else's work, who took the orchestral accompaniment to Ruhe Sanft (from one of Mozart's operas) and transcribed it for piano, and who tried to leave in the voices of every instrument, and who obviously had ten fingers on each hand.

Now, my rewriting this music might not have been necessary if I ever practiced the piano...
But it might have.

So I spent all day Wednesday, and half of Thursday rewriting, playing, and rewriting again, until I finally got something I thought I could work with. The trouble is that, even though I heard it a zillion times on Wednesday, I was writing on a computer program, so I only played through it on the piano a very few times. I only had one day to learn this piece which, though simplified, was still Mozart and still tricky. And my sight-reading skills are next to none (not in a good way) these days.

Thursday, after spending three solid hours practicing Ruhe Sanft, I thought I was making some progress. Then I had to make some dinner. When I went back to the piano after dinner, it was as if I'd never played the piece before in my life. And Kaylie had to make a video of herself singing it the very next day. So I told her she'd better call Karilynne—who is the pianist for the high school choirs, and our ward choir, and is an amazing sight-reader. I knew she could do it. And, indeed, on Friday evening she came over and played it very nicely for Kaylie's video. I was kind of bummed out that I hadn't been able to accompany her, but I was glad we had a good friend who could. (I did still play the boom-chucky Lonely Goatherd for her video.)

But, there was more drama to come. When Bruce and Kaylie tried to upload the video so she could send it to her teacher, it sounded like she had gargled the songs. Uh-oh! However, recording, video, and fixing technical issues are within Bruce's realm; he was sure he could fix it.

Nope.

Turns out the camera he used was so old that it wouldn't talk to any of our computers. He was able to get it to talk to the ancient TV I've been begging him to get rid of for years...

So he played it on the old TV, and used a phone to make a video of the TV playing the original video. Which is a very cheesy, and not fabulous-looking or fabulous-sounding way to make a video. And then, it would only play Goatherd, and got stuck on the Mozart. (Kind of like me.) :-/

In the meantime, Kaylie had already submitted her gargling video with an explanation that we were having technical problems, and begging for extra time to submit a good video. At midnight Friday (her deadline) she submitted the ...better? ...version of The Lonely Goatherd, with more explanations, and a little more begging for time. It was all pretty stressful.

Kaylie heard back from her teacher Saturday morning, with the good news that she could still submit a video by the end of the day. Whew!

So Bruce spent almost the entire day trouble-shooting the video, and the camera, and the computer, and everything else he could think of. And by dinner time...still no luck. (And we had a late dinner, too!) We finally decided that our only option was to re-record the entire thing—both songs. And at 8:00 p.m. we just didn't feel like we should ask Karilynne to come over again; I was going to have to play the Mozart. So while Kaylie went away to warm up and get dressed up, I practiced Ruhe Sanft. Then she and I went over it a couple of times together while Bruce got the recording equipment set up.

And then I took a deep breath, Kaylie took a deep breath, and we started.

So here's what was going on in the great room last night: I was at the piano...obviously. (I was playing Goatherd when this photo was taken—I can tell by how many pages are on the piano.) Bruce set up the video-camera's tripod and attached two microphones to it using rubber-bands (the big ones that come on broccoli bunches). This is very high-tech stuff. Those two mics are attached to a digital multi-track recorder (he scoffs as he tells me its name...I think he's unimpressed by this machine), which is sitting on the coffee table across the room. He took a speaker from the living room to hold the laptop—which was going to be the main camera—at the right height. We also have Michael's computer microphone hooked directly to the laptop, in case the multi-track recorder doesn't do a good job. Or maybe the recorder was backup for the laptop...? To the right (Kaylie's left) we have my entire set of The  International Library of Piano Music (sixteen books) stacked up on a chest, holding the kids' Chrome-book, which is doing a backup video—just in case.

After all that, it turns out the computer microphone wasn't on when we recorded The Lonely Goatherd, so we had the video on the laptop, but no sound. Bruce was able to splice the sound from the multi-track recorder onto the video, so it was a good thing we had that set up. We did manage to turn on the mic for the Mozart, and after a really terrible and dissonant piano introduction, we started over and got through the piece just fine. (Well, Kaylie sounded fine).

It took Bruce a couple of hours to splice the sound to the Goatherd video—nearly until 1:00 a.m. (He is an awesome dad!) And at last Kaylie was able to submit a pretty decent video to her teachers. It was a heroic effort all around.

If you want to hear our lovely daughter singing Ruhe Sanft, you can click the name of the song.
If you want to hear her sing The Lonely Goatherd (in which I flub the intro...) click on the title.

Kaylie did beautifully!

But maybe I should practice the piano once in a while.