Organ Fascination

(…) once my record collection started featuring organ recordings — though organ recordings took a rather slow and non-systematic start. At least, the beginning was OK — for that time (1970), at least: a box with all of Handel’s organ concertos, played by the Collegium aureum and Rudolf Ewerhart on magnificent organs such as the famous Gabler organ in Weingarten, or the Riepp organs in Ottobeuren…

Beethoven: 12 Variations in A major, WoO 71

Beethoven, 12 Variations on “Das Waldmädchen”, WoO 71 — comparing recordings with the following artists: Emil Gilels (1968), Vladimir Ashkenazy (2006), Olli Mustonen (1993), Ronald Brautigam (2010)

From Local Music into the Cloud?

(…) Sure, the signs can be read off the wall everywhere: there is a trend towards computing and storage in the cloud — and frankly, it makes a lot of sense to me! Why should humanity store Exabytes (or have we already surpassed Zettabytes?) of information on thousands of millions of computers, including a zillion duplicates…

What Tunings Did Bach Use?

People probably regard Bach as being the baroque composer, though in aspects like his preference for traditional polyphonic forms such as fugues and canons (he was a master at writing, even improvising the most complex of fugues) he must have been regarded a rather traditional composer at his time. On the other hand, he did expand into new, previously (almost) unexplored keys on the keyboard and thus may have helped advancing music towards the pre-classical era…

Transitioning from Vinyl to CD

(…) in the mid-90’s I could not resist following a colleague’s recommendation to visit Tower Records in Mountain View (a shop that has since gone out of business) when I was on a business trip to the Silicon Valley, and so I started purchasing CDs. Of course, unlike when I started collecting LPs, I now had a better idea what to look for…