I've been told that I have "indiscriminate discriminating" taste in music. I think that's supposed to mean that I like to listen to any kind of music, as long as it's good. For example, my CD collection includes greatest hits albums by Hank Williams, John Prine, Andres Segovia, and Kitaro, in addition to:
Anyway, until recently, the only musical instrument I knew how to play was the stereo. Then I got a piece of software for my daughter and started fooling around with it myself. The result so far is a couple of compositions. (I guess that means I can now play the computer in addition to the stereo.) For your listening pleasure, here are my first works:
When I first placed Opus 2 on this page, I had to give it to you in pieces. The version of the software that I was using had some problems, and it really didn't want to save a single MIDI file that was five minutes long. So, I had to break things into pieces. You could play them one at a time; you just had to pretend that the extended silence between finishing one piece and starting the second wasn't there.
The software, in case you're interested, is called ConcertWare, and it's a product of Jump! Software. They were very nice about offering to send me a free upgrade to the program when I reported the problems I had exporting MIDI files. If the new version had fixed the problem, then I would have used it to put the entire piece on here as a single file. By the way, the score at the top of this page contains the opening bars to "Opus 2". It was constructed by cropping a screen shot of ConcertWare.
In any event, the new version of ConcertWare did not solve the problem. I managed to get around it another way. Jeff Glatt maintains a highly informative site about MIDI files. Using a MIDI disassembler that he wrote, I was able to convert the MIDI files to text. I then wrote a perl script to combine them into a single text file. Finally, I used the MIDI disassembler to convert the new text file back to MIDI. If anyone wants more details, just ask.