I've published over two thousand animated graphical score videos (currently 1578 on the
smalin channel,
605 on the musanim channel),
and 52 on the musanim 3D channel), and I
know that if I can't keep track of them, it's unreasonable to expect that of anybody else.
So, to make this easier all around, I've made this list of those that are notable for one reason or another.
Some of these are big projects (many movements, many months of work), some are unusual,
some turned out especially well, and some were just very popular with viewers.
The only thing they all have in common is that I've found occasion to mention them to people from time to time,
and want to keep track of them so that it's easier to remember to recommend them in the future.
In 2021, Matthew Sheeran helped in (and underwrote) the production of animated graphical scores for
Easley Blackwood's Twelve Microtonal Etudes (see this page for background on that project).
He was also working on his own project: to make a recording of these pieces on acoustic instruments.
His album was released in 2024, and I made new versions of the videos
(which are in this playlist).
The recording of Giovanni Gabrieli's canzonas performed by the combined brass of three major orchestras
thrilled me when it first came out (1969, I think), and it still does.
The Canzona per Sonare No. 2 is my favorite,
and the Canzon a 12 in Echo is also pretty nice.
Speaking of contemporary composers working in a neo-Baroque idiom, Aaron Andrew Hunt published
The Apprentice of Fugue, his irregular-meter take on the material and techniques of J. S. Bach's Art of Fugue.
I made videos for his
Contrapunctus 3 and
Contrapunctus 11.
One of my wife Christine's earliest exposures to music was George Kleinsinger's Tubby the Tuba;
this year I made a video of it for her (based on Danny Kaye's recording).
A project I worked on for more than a year was based on my collaborator Augustine Esterhammer-Fic's
transcription of the gamelan piece Teruna Jaya.
I made two versions of the video, a pristine version with
just the notes, and a study version that includes measure numbers, section numbers, and pitch lines.
In the 1970s when I was a poor student I splurged on a study score of
BartókString Quartet No. 4 and
wrote "SOLID GOLD" on the cover. For years, I was too intimidated by the piece to work on it, but in 2022
I decided that the pizzicato movement was simple enough for me, and in 2023 I completed all five movements.
When I finished making the video for
Bach's Réjouissance (from the 4th orchestral suite),
I found that my
eyes were only barely smart enough to follow it, and when a viewer commented that they were having the
same problems, I put together some training wheel videos for it.
Daniil Trifonov's performance of
Franz Liszt'sFeux Follets is incredible,
enough that I feel a little bad
making a video, since you ought to watch him playing it.
Oh, and speaking of wonderful performances,
Arcadi Volodos' version of Mozart's Ronda Alla Turca is also incredible.
Ligeti's Lux Aeterna
rocketed into public view when Kubrik used it in 2001, A Space Odyssey.
After completing the video, I watched Mattia Aisemberg's analysis video of it,
and realized
I could do a better job showing the piece's structure, which I did in
this video.
Can't have too much Mozart; here's his Piano Concerto No. 13: 1, 2, 3
(with Daniel Barenboim).
Esa-Pekka Salonen's piece
Dichotomie 2. Organisme was very interesting to work on;
I wrote him this letter describing my approach to the animation.
In 2021, Remy Le Boeuf released his first volume of Vignettes for solo saxophone, and I did videos for
two of them. In 2023, he released volume two, and I did videos for Vignettes 17, 20 and 22.
I'd been intending to work on Claude Debussy's
String Quartet in G minor for many years, and in 2023
I finally bit the bullet. It's a wonderful piece.
Everyone knows Ludwig van Beethoven's first version of Für Elise, but his second version (which, like
the first, he never published), is almost unknown. Beethoven called Für Elise a Bagatelle, and in 2023
I also did his Bagatelle in B minor (opus 126 no. 4).
During Brahms' life, horn players were switching from the valveless (natural) French horn to the valved horn,
but he was a fan of the natural horn, and specified it for his
horn trio.
It is widely considered one of the greatest
pieces of chamber music, and the recording I'm using (with Teunis van der Zwaart on natural horn) is exceptional.
Five of Bach's pieces for unaccompanied violoncello are written for a standard 4-string instrument, but the sixth
(BWV 1012, in D major) is scored for an instrument with five strings. One possibility is that he intended it to be
played on a violoncello da spalla, which is what
Sergey Malov uses
in this performance. I also did Bach's first
unaccompanied violin sonata (G minor, BWV 1001),
using a recording by Lara St. John (1,
2,
3,
4).
While we're on the subject of Bach: his sonatas for viola da gamba and harpsichord are perhaps somewhat less
well-known than his other chamber music, because of the gamba being an "historical" instrument (that not so many
people play these days), and the fact that lines played by the harpsichord are not so easy to hear. But the music is
really good! Vito Paternoster addressed this by
making a version for three (or more) cellos and harpsichord, and
made a recording with all the parts played by himself. I've made videos for five of the eleven movements, and
added them to this playlist.
When I started using Harmonic Coloring to show changes in harmony and tonality,
one of the first pieces I did was
Jupiter from Holst's The Planets, because its quick switches in tonality were very striking, visually.
It turns out that
this was true for the rest of the movements, which I completed 2023.
Two Mozart symphonies this year: the Prague (No. 38) (1,
2,
3),
and No. 39
(1,
2 ,
3 ,
4).
Christine and I have always loved the Crosby/Stills/Nash song Helplessly Hoping,
so when I found an accurate
transcription of it, I made her a video for it.
I'd wanted to do George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue for many, many years, but didn't
feel I could do it justice. This year, I thought "life is short" and made my first attempt.
Here's a page with some background on the project.
When I worked on Danny Clay's Broken Birds V
in 2020, I thought "I'll never do another like that,"
but then I came across David Bruce's oboe decet, To the power of 10, which I had fun exploring,
including with some 3D versions (requiring special glasses/goggles/viewers of one sort or another).
Bartok's 4th string quartet is a masterpiece, and its all-pizzicato movement is remarkable.
The fugue from Ravel's Le tombeau de Couperin wasn't included in Ravel's orchestration of the piece,
so it's not as well known as other movements, but it is beautiful, subtle, and sensitive.
I was pleased to find that the Musopen String Quartet had recorded Haydn's "The Lark" string quartet,
but dismayed to discover that their recording of the fourth/final movement was incomplete
(and therefore unusable); here are the first three:
1,
2,
3.
I've always been a fan of Copland's Fanfare for the Common Man; it's simple, but I enjoyed working with it.
The last video for 2021 was my first of the music of Dieterich Buxtehude,
who was perhaps J. S. Bach's greatest influence.
The first seeds of my graphical score project were planted in the 1970s in response to my
experience of J. S. Bach's music for unaccompanied violin and the
Brandenburg Concertos.
I've been working on these pieces ever since, and in 2021 I completed videos for all the
concertos.
Speaking of Bach: I also completed the Musical Offering set.
This Estampie
is notable because it's the earliest known example of music composed specifically for keyboard.
My collaboration with Remy Le Boeuf
(Vignettes 8 and 1 for solo saxophone) was very satisfying, as was my
collaboration with Anthony Joseph Lanman
(Hammer and Nail for electric guitar and piano).
I also collaborated with two new pianists, Benedetto Boccuzzi (with his luminous performance of
Debussy's Poissons d'or 'Goldfish'),
and Minsoo Hong's flat-out dash through the 18-year-old
Prokofiev's Etude in C minor.
Easley Blackwood's Twelve Microtonal Etudes
(opus 28) were groundbreaking at the time they were composed
(in the early 1980s). It took me forty years before I felt I had any idea of what to do with them.
Early this year, Colin Booth released his recording of the
second book of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier,
and gave me permission to base animated graphical scores on it;
I worked on this steadily through 2020 and completed it early in 2021;
here's the playlist,
and here are some other harpsichord pieces I worked on in 2020:
I first heard recordings by pianist Boris Giltburg in April,
and immediately wrote him to asked whether he'd like to collaborate.
He had a big project planned for 2020: all 32 Beethoven piano sonatas;
so far, I've used his recordings for
No. 1 in F minor (opus 2 no. 1) and
No. 7 in D major (opus 10 no. 3); I hope to do more.
As a break from Beethoven this year, Giltburg recorded Bach's 15 three-part inventions (aka sinfonias);
his performances can currently be viewed on the Gramophone website;
I will be adding my animated graphical scores to this playlist as I complete them.
As good as Giltburg is at playing Bach and Beethoven, his specialty is Rachmaninov;
so far, I've done one video based on that: Etudes-tableaux (opus 39) 4. Allegro assai
The ORA Singers
commissioned me to make an animated graphical score for Thomas Tallis'
monumental 40-voice motet Spem in alium as part of their
TALLIS 2020 project.
I made about twenty experimental versions,
from which they selected two to publish.
I'd been doing videos of Bach's organ sonatas for several years;
in 2020 I completed the set
(playlist) with recordings by
Willem Tanke (previous performers were Anthony Newman, David Yearsley, and myself).
Other Bach organ music (by BWV):
538,
572,
582,
605,
666,
657.
Most of that Bach organ music came from the Netherlands Bach Society's
All of Bach project.
I've been using their recordings a lot; in 2020 I did these movements from cantatas (and motet):
18,
44,
63,
100,
102,
102,
104,
150,
206,
230.
This video based on the
first movement of Bach's 3rd Brandenburg Concerto turned out well;
I also did ones for the
2nd and
3rd movements of his 6th Brandenburg Concerto.
Viola da gamba player
Alberto Rasi
gave me permission to use recordings by him and
his ensemble.
I'd previously worked with keyboard recordings of Bach's Art of Fugue,
but they're wonderful on
string instruments,
so I eagerly started adding to my collection.
I also made videos based on his recordings from gamba sonatas by
J. S. Bach and his son
C. P. E. Bach.
I've been a fan of Brahms' F minor piano quintet for decades,
and therefore jumped at the chance to use the recording by
Joyce Yang and
the Alexander String Quartet in my videos (here's the playlist).
Another 2020 Alexander collaboration was this Mozart clarinet quintet movement.
One of my earliest inspirations was Oskar Fischinger's Study Nr. 7 on Brahms' Hungarian Dance No. 5 (it's inspired a lot of people),
and for many years afterwards, a sense of respect and reverence kept me
from even considering working on it myself, but this year I gave it a go.
(Another orchestral piece I animated this year—for Halloween—was Saint-Saëns'
Danse macabre).
These pieces from Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite are in a similar vein:
March,
Russian Dance
2020 was a big year for collaborations and commissions;
in addition to the ORA Singers' Spem in alium (above) project, I worked on these:
Michael Barry, Exercise in Delirium,
Boomba
(and I describe how I made this video here)
Danny Clay
I have a special affection for the rackett,
an instrument most people haven't heard of (let alone heard),
so when I came across this performance of Giorgio Mainerio's
Caro Ortolano,
I knew I had to do my part to spread the word.
Christine (we later married) suggested I do this wonderful piece: Grainger, Children's March (In 2016, this video was included in the Tough Art exhibit at the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh.)
I did several videos of Sousa marches this year (playlist);
in this one, I tried a technique of compressing octave doublings to reduce clutter: Sousa, Semper Fidelis
, to celebrate the 100th anniversary of its 1913 premiere.
J. S. Bach's Brandenburg Concerto 4 in G major was what originally motivated me to make animated graphical scores,
so I paid a hefty license fee to use a good recording for this video.
This was a turning point year for me in several ways.
The key was that I retired from my "day job" so that I could work on this project full-time.
This gave me time to take stock and start exploring the ideas that inspired me in the first place:
having the score "come alive" by moving in ways that reflected what the music was doing.
This led to the "balls" animation I used in Debussy, Arabesque #1, Piano Solo I also used this for a Chopin nocturne: Chopin, Nocturne in E-flat Major, opus 9 no. 2 Both of these were very popular with viewers.
Before the internet, I shared my work by showing it to people in person (on my computer),
making VHS videotapes (and, later, DVDs), and through Classic Arts Showcase.
When YouTube first appeared in 2005, I didn't know whether it would be an effective way to distribute my videos,
and decided to give it a try with some videos I'd made in the past, including:
Debussy, Clair de lune (which I'd made at a friend's request a few years earlier), and
Bach, Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV 565
(which I'd made in 1996 for a commission).
These ended up being my two most-viewed videos of all time (though it took a few years before YouTube really caught on).