James Tauber

journeyman of some

blog > 2005 > 09 > 10 >

Old Classical Piece of Mine

I've never made any of my classical music available on the web and I thought now is as good a time as any. Here's an MP3:

Divertimento for Three Clarinets — First Movement

I wrote this piece in 1988-1989 at the height of my study of and love for the music of Mozart. I was fifteen at the time and this is probably the best piece I wrote while at high school (which isn't saying much—there is a reason most composers retract their juvenilia.

The MP3 above is a realisation in Logic Pro using the Garritan Personal Orchestra samples. The piece has never actually been performed with three clarinets. It had one public performance—in Canberra at the National Science Summer School that I attended in early 1990. The performance there was with a flute, violin and another violin restrung as a viola.

Categories:
music_composition » next

Comments (9)

Allan on Sept. 10, 2005:

Cool! I like it. Reminds me of Carl Maria von Weber.

James Tauber on Sept. 11, 2005:

Thanks Allan. I'm not sure if I was listening to Weber at that stage but I certainly got into his stuff (including the Clarinet concerto, of course) a couple of years later.

Tim on Sept. 13, 2005:

I don't suppose you could put it up in Ogg format?

James Tauber on Sept. 13, 2005:

Tim, I should investigate how to do this as it will be a must for Nelson James releases but given that it's less than 24 hours until I get on a plane to the US for three weeks, it could take me a while to get to it.

Allan on Sept. 15, 2005:

Tim: "I don't suppose you could put it up in Ogg format?"

I doubt there are many who can play Ogg Vorbis files and not MP3, but in case there are some, I have converted James' file. You can grab it here:

http://www.cybaea.net/files/divertimento.ogg

Obviously it will be much better to create it from the original MIDI (?) files: hopefully JT can do that when he gets back and then delete this comment.

(James: If you want me to take down the file just say so.)

Tim on Sept. 17, 2005:

Allan, if you care about being legit it is pretty hard to play MP3s in a Linux (or BSD for that matter environment). Players abound, but are illegal to use in Australia/US/etc. unless you pay the MP3 patent holder royalties. They don't seem to seem to offer licenses on an end-user basis.
Also, I've read that ogg gives better quality/file size ratio than MP3.
I'm a Linux user who cares about being legit, so that's why I asked.
Many thanks for putting up the ogg. I'll give it a try now.

Tim on Sept. 17, 2005:

Very impressive James. It appears you have plenty of feathers in that cap of yours!

Thanks again for the conversion, Allan, the quality is fine!

Allan on Sept. 21, 2005:

You are welcome Tim. Glad it was useful, and I uderstand the situation.

The file is tagged, which means that Last.fm now knows about JT. We just need to get nine more people to vote yes to the image. Vote here:

http://www.last.fm/music/James+Tauber/+images

:-)

James Tauber on Sept. 22, 2005:

:-)

He looked familiar so I voted yes.
Created: Sept. 10, 2005
Last Modified: Sept. 10, 2005
Author: jtauber