Amateur
Chamber Music Plaayers (
ACMP).
The ACMP is an organization of amateur
chamber musicans that provides a number of valuable services
to its members. The ACMP maintains a database consisting of
the musical profiles and contact information for members,
organized by geogrraphidc region. Members can search for other
players when forming ensembles and planning other group activities
using a number of different search filters. They also provide an
annual listing ofsummer chamber music workshops, grants providing
partial payment for chamber music coaches, and support for
local play-in activities organized by members. Members pay an
annual fee of $25.
Northampton Community
Music Center(NCMC)
A community-based nonprofit organization with a
permanent faculty of instructors and coaches that staff a variety
of musical programs. An adult chamber music program runs twice a
year in which individual players are assigned to groups, prepare a
musical selection under the direction of a chamber music coach and
perform it in a recital at the end of the term. There
is another program for 2- and 4-handed piano music.
Northampton/Amherst Chamber Music
Concertgoers
Another area Meetup group of chamber music lovers that regularly
meet for dinners at restaurants before evening concerts and
after concerts in the afternoon.
Apple Hill Chamber Music Center
A nonprofit chamber music organization
located on a campus several miles north of Keene NH
with resident string quartet that organizes five 10-day
student chamber music workshops each summer. Students are
matched with musically compatible players (regardless of age)
and prepare assigned pieces from the chamber repertory for a
recital at the eic, and of the session. Participants are placed in
two coached ensembles, one of which will probably be close to
one's technical limits. The second assignment is usually less
challenging. Students must submit an audition recording in their
application. The center will accept qualified students at all
levels, from musicians just getting started with chamber music to
conservatory students and professional musicians. The
playing-for-peace' program of the Apple Hill Quartet draws
students from all over the world, and gives the workshops a
uniquely diverse and stimulating character.
Stacey Styles Violin Restoration
This is where I go for work on my instruments, both
for routine adjustments and inspections and for larger and more
complicated restorative work. Stacey is a highly skilled restorer
and does all the work herself on the instruments that are brought
to her. Her shop is only about 20 minutes from Amherst if
you go over the notch.
The Petrucci Library-IMSLP
An online repository of pdf files consisting of scans of sheet
music in the public domain (both individual parts and scores.
) The project is similar in spirit (and was probably
inspired by) the open source code environment for the the
Linux operating system. Since anyone can legally scan and
disseminate sheet music in the public domain without violating the
rights of composers or their estates , the IMSLP repository was
developed by individuals around the world contributing
scans of out-of-copyright sheet music, usually borrowed from music
libraries to the IMSLP collection. Copyright law is very
tricky here, since the publishers and composers come from all over
the globe. Generally, this means you're only going to find music
there dating. from the very early 1900's and before. Companies
also sell CD's with scans of such music -- I think many of them
simply downloaded music from IMSLP then put their own logo and
copyright restrictions on their versions, then sell them.
For quite a while after the project
started, their collection was too incomplete to be of much use,
and the scans were frequently of poor quality or in color and
didn't print out well. In recent years, the size and scope has
increased exponentially, and it is quite likely you'll find scans
of the scores and individual parts of many compositions of
the most important pre-1900 composers, frequently with high
quality scans that print out well and can be used for playing
music. They also have a huge collection of scores by lesser
composers. Look for black-and-white scans: the files are
much smaller and print out the best.
This is a great place to scores for
string quartets etc, where there's no piano part. Its also very
useful for searching for repetoire for a particular group of
instruments where you're unfamiliar with the literature. For
example, if you want to search for music for a flute, violin and
cello, under their "browse scores" menu item, go to
"Instruments/Genre", then "trios", then "subgenres", then
either "flute, violin cello" or "flute, violin cello (arr)".
In case you were
wondering, the name "Petrucci" is in honor of
Ottaviano Petrucci, who
in 1501, created the first press-printed book of polyphonic
music.
The UMass/5 College Library
The combined sheet music collection of the 5 colleges in the area
is very good, and you'll frequently be able to find what you're
looking for. Students, faculty and staff of each school can
search the collection online. I gave the UMass link above,
and you can get to the library links to the other schools from the
UMass link.) You can also borrow (from the UMass library at least)
by going to the library and showing them a library card for a town
library. You can also probably borrow a music score
from the 5-college college libraries from your town
library through the inter-library loan system (Iliad.) Saves you a
trip to one of to one of the colleges but takes longer to
get. You can also get sometimes gets scans of music that
none of the local libraries own through Iliad, but some nonlocal
library must be willing to do the scanning, so this probably only
works for short pieces.
Midi Renderings and play-alongs:
I've been using computer-based midi renderings
of chamber music to learn the cello parts of new pieces quite a
bit, and have found it be a very valuable tool. It ain't
music, but its a great way to learn how your part fits together
with all the other parts. You can also try to play along with a CD
after you know a piece, but the correct tempo is far
too fast in most cases while you're still learning the piece, (and
sometimes, even after you've learned it!) The great thing about
midi renderings is that you can set the tempo to be as slow or
fast as you want without degrading the audio quality. Programs
exist that slow down or speed up audio files of recorded
music, but the audio quality becomes bad enough to make it
useless when you slow it down more than 5 to 10%. Also, with midi
files, you can omit any track you like, or make it softer, so you
can play along with the computer in a music-minus-one format.
Another good feature of midi is that you can change the
instruments to whatever you want. I usually switch the violin and
viola tracks to clarinet, which sounds much better to my ear than
than those dreadful hurdy-gurdy cartoons of how string instruments
sound that you get with midi. A midi bassoon doesn't sound
much better than a miti cello. Midi does the best with its
rendering of piano parts.
Here are some free resources that I've found
useful, but its just the tip of the iceberg:
Finding midi files on the internet: Suppose I'm looking for
a midi file for specific piece, e.g. a Beethoven string
quartet, I'll search on google with something like " beethoven
quartet midi", or even "beethoven midi", then go to a midi
site that focuses on classical music or on the music of
Beethoven. Most of links will be junk, but there several
repositories that give you a limited number of free midi
downloads. Chamber music is usually not a high priority item for
the larger sites, but you can find a lot this way.
Midi repositories: the list is endless, but most it
is garbage. Here are a several that several that are decent:
HarfeSoft.
A very nice selection of free midi files for chamber music
(including violin-piano, cello-piano) duos of the big names from
the classical and romantic periods. This is someone's pet project,
not a commercial one. The number of selections is very limited,
but whoever did it had good taste.
Kunst der Fuge A
commercial midi file repositoary, but if you register (no
big deal) they give you 5 free downloads per day. The have a
pretty good choice of chamber music midis for the most important
composers.
midi software: players,
editors, and services PC"s and macs will both play midi
files if you click on them, but with very little editing
ability. The freeware version of Quicktime (on both macs and PC's)
has a slider that lets how change the tempo arbirarily, but it is
not calibrated to metronome settings. You can't delete
or alter individual tracks as far as know, or change the
instruments.
Aria Maestosa: a
free, open source midi player. It was developed as a Linux program
but has free downloads for Windows and and Mac versions. The
editor let you delete tracks and change the instrument, but the
tempo editor seems to have a bug and doesn't work (for me, at
least.)You have to import midi files. You can then export the
modified midi and play it with Quicktime, where you can change the
tempo.
Rosegarden An open
source (Linux) midi and audio sequencer that provides an
enviorment for generating and editing (printable) musical scores
from midi files and for editing midi files. You can use
Rosegarden for simple changes in tempo, for changing the key
and transpositions by intervals, and many other sophisticated
things. The music score editor lets you write your own
notations into the music. You can then print out the midi file as
a pdf file for a musical score. The score editor is
based on
LilyPond which is an
open source music engraving program based on the Tex and LaTex
programs for typesetting mathematical text. If you're
familiar with Tex or LaTex, its easy to learn to write
LilyPond code. This allows you to write your own music using only
the commands typed at the keyboard. Rosegarden is only available
in Linux. Is best to install it through an installation program
provided by your distribution rather than getting it directly from
the Rosegarden, since the program has to fit in correctly
into your system to find the libraries and devices it needs to run
properly. I'm not sure its available with all distros; Ubuntu is
one that supports it and makes it available.
Naxos
sheet music service: a propriatary service which has a
large number of digital chamber music (and other) scores that you
can play as midi files and print out as sheet music, with midi
editing capabilities similar to those of Rosegarden. Faculty,
staff and students can get access to the Naxos sheet music library
(and also, to the Naxos library of recorded music) through
the UMass library's
database
page for music , but you need a a valid UMass library
user account . Both services can obtained by the public by
purchasing subscriptions from Naxos. Their recordings library is
huge. There's never be a piece I couldn't find there. Their
sheet music library is large, but finding particular pieces there
can still be hit-or-miss.
Another resource:
piano-accompaniments.com
A website where a professional accompanist, Paul Gardner (no
relation) sells recordings of piano-only recordings of his
accompaniments to a large number of pieces from the string,
woodwind, and birass solo repertory. Gardner has a Masters in
Music Performance, and his accompaniment files are about the
best of this sort of music-minus-one format that I've come across.
He uses a high quality digital piano to make the recordings
They can be fun as well as instructive to play along with. You
can't change the tempo without sacrificing audio quality, but he
does provide practice versions of faster movements. Both the
Schumann and Beethoven sonata recordings in the recordings link in
my profile were made with his accompaniment files playing through
speakers while I was playing the cello. Not bad, but still no
substitute for a live pianist playing a real piano.