Elite Syncopations Part A
Lucas Werkmeister, .Between last and this week, two WMDE colleagues and I created a short film about the new Musical Notation data type on Wikidata. For some of the scenes, we needed recordings of Scott Joplin’s Elite Syncopations, so I sat down and played the A part on repeat until I thought there was enough usable snippets, and we were able to cut together something we could put in the video.
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Garbage
Another scene also called for a kind of distressed jangling,
which would be played by the musician unable to read the LilyPond notation;
I just improvised that for a while,
first at random and then trying to guess what a musician might actually try to read from the text
(most of the pitch names should be understandable if you’re familiar with Dutch/German note names,
except for the q, which means “repeat chord”,
but the notation to group several notes into a chord would not be easy to guess
and might instead be played sequentially, etc.).
And then I did that again because during the first improvisation
I forgot to switch the piano to the same voice as for the proper recording.