Badinerie Excerpt MIDI - Update 7

Hey there, and welcome to the penultimate post on this project!

For those yet to have seen my posts, I am working on a MIDI file of Bach’s Badinerie from his Orchestral Suite no. 2 in B Minor to then play over the flute part. Last week, I finished working on that MIDI file. If you recall, I mentioned playing at the University of Arizona’s Language Fair. Due to certain circumstances and arrangements with my group, we did not perform there. However, the German department is hosting another event in one and a half weeks, so you can expect us to be there. Now, what happened this week?

The first big thing was trying to decide what DAW to use. DAW is the kind of software I will be using to record over the flute part of my MIDI. My original plan was to use Cakewalk by Bandlabs, but no matter what I did, I could never get audio from the program. Then I remembered, my iPad has a really good piece of software on it, and it’s free! Some of you may know it, GarageBand. It’s much easier than Cakewalk to use, and GarageBand has important settings that are easy to find, like reverb.

Outside of the technological aspect of the project and into the flute part, practicing Badinerie is like practicing any piece of music. Work on it a bit every day, speeding it up over time. My goal is to be able to play it at quarter note = 120 bpm by the end, and I’m getting there. The faster I practice it, the easier it is to play slower. It requires lightness and notes that are not too long, although tenuto is okay. All that is left on playing what’s already on the page is the cleaning up of minute details.

Ornamentation is possibly the harder part to work on, definitely harder than just playing what’s written. It requires knowledge of the piece and chords beforehand, and then having an idea of Baroque ornamentation is most practical. My favorite use of ornamentation within Baroque is filling in the space between a larger interval with a scale. Here’s a short example of the first recording altered to include ornamentation.

It’s time to finish this week’s post with my concluding thoughts. Three important topics this week, all covered. DAWs are essential to this project’s goal of recording with a string ensemble without the need to hire musicians for more rehearsals. Topic two is all about ornamentation. Every time I work on a Baroque piece, it repeatedly becomes painfully clear and reinforced in my head as to the purpose of why musicians from that time always played by memory. First, it's impressive to see a virtuoso play something you think you could never play all from memory. Not only that but ornamentation is easier and much more experimental when you know what note lands exactly where. As long as the Baroque conventions are followed, there are no limits to the alterations that can be made to a piece of music.

The final topic we covered was the basic practice of Badinerie. It made me start thinking about whether I should be starting work on a piece and working on large chunks at the beginning of a cycle and progressively work on less and less the closer I get to the performance, or if I should start with smaller chunks of the piece after sight reading it, for shorter amounts of time, and focus on it more and more the closer I get. I plan on discussing that later.

But for now, see you in two weeks for the final update!