Author: PamelaM

Stockhausen’s Kontakte at SICPP in Boston

This week is SICPP at New England Conservatory (Summer Institute in Contemporary Performance Practice, also known as Sick Puppy, I didn’t make that up. They call it that!). Along with the seminar activities during the day (I participated in 2007), there is a fabulous week of free evening concerts — the big, hard-to-program, fascinating works   Read More...

Storing Old Vellum – Why?

Why do I still have a pile of vellum for music copying? I’ve got sheets with layouts for quintets, quartets, parts, chorus. It’s such old technology. I never want to go back to copying music by hand with pens on transparent vellum, which are then copied using a diazo machine. For those of you who   Read More...

New Year’s Resolutions

A New Years Resolutions thread at Sequenza 21 reminded me about making New Year’s resolutions. There’s so many needs tugging at me, but all I want to do is make musical plans. I want to remedy my lack of momentum of the past few months. Everyone knows – economic times are tough. They’re tough here   Read More...

Keyswitches in a Kontakt 3 Virtual Instrument

If you have a multi-timbre or multi-articulation instrument, but no documentation, how do you figure out how to switch between different sounds? What is a keyswitch?One common technique is a “keyswitch”. Playing a MIDI note of a specific pitch turns on a particular timbre. The MIDI note is out of range for that instrument so   Read More...