Wednesday, July 30, 2014

The Peter Schmid Quartet Plays Swing Left

Today's post is from the Things Which Get Lost In The Shuffle Department

Two years ago I composed a piece called Swing Left.  It was recorded by the Peter Schmid Quartet at the criminally out-moded Aphrodita Japonica Recording Studio.  AJRS is a crowded little room with inadequate sound isolation.  If you take your headphones off you can hear the Metro Gold Line trains whizz by every few minutes.  But hey, when you're a failed composer you take what you can get.

Back then, on August 16, 2012 to be exact, I uploaded Swing Left.  I even created a link to it on the Peter Schmid page.  For reasons lost in the mists of time, I never posted an announcement of Swing Left here on Mixed Meters.


Fast forward to today.  It's almost the end of the month and Mixed Meters is still two posts short of our very modest Three Posts Per Month goal.  So . . .

Click here to hear The Peter Schmid Quartet Plays Swing Left - © 2012 & 2014 by David Ocker - 253 Seconds

There's also a piece called Swing Right.  I might post that someday.  It was never finished to my satisfaction.  Once a long period time passes I forget why I was dissatisfied and the piece becomes completed by default.  Maybe I was waiting to share Swing Left with Swing Right at the same time.

The phrases "Swing Left" and "Swing Right" were intended as political references.  All the Peter Schmid pieces have more or less political titles.  Our country does a good job of swinging to the right.  It's been an awful long time since we've swung back the other direction.

The Ocker Scale, which features the voice of Leslie Harris, is another piece I never finished to my satisfaction.   I posted it online after waiting about two years.  By then I had pretty much forgotten why I was dissatisfied.

There's a moral to this story somewhere.  On second thought ... no there's not.

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