Organ solo CD "A Joy Forever"
released January 4th 2006
Harpsichord solo CD "Playing from Bach's fancy"
released January 4th 2006
Trumpet/organ
CD "In Thee is Gladness"
released January 2005
My discovery of
Johann Sebastian Bach's tuning
...the article is published in
Early Music
(Oxford University Press).
See also
other articles about this.
This temperament is used in almost all of Peter Watchorn's
recorded series of Bach's harpsichord music.
See also this
roster of usage 2004-9.
I've composed many Hymns, and
compiled a
Hymnal Concordance which is currently in print
from Mennonite Publishing House. The concordance is available in two formats: either as
a software package, or as a regular book.
I'm half of the
Hodel/Lehman Duo (trumpet/organ). Our CD "In Thee is Gladness",
released 2005, is
here.
Schubert's
works for piano trio and piano quartet played by the
Atlantis Ensemble (Jaap Schröder, Enid Sutherland, Penelope Crawford) on
original instruments,
Wildboar 9703/9704.
Available in reissues from Musica Omnia.
I was the session producer: managing the takes, listening critically, offering performance
suggestions, .... I think these two discs are the best available recordings of
these pieces, and I would say that even if I hadn't been involved with them.
A reviewer for Continuo magazine
expressed a similar
opinion, October 1998....
I was a production assistant on this
live CD
of music by Hildegard von Bingen: performed
by Norma Gentile, published by Schoolkids Records and Ave Maria Press.
I also sang in the "drone chorus" in some of the pieces.
Similarly, I was a production assistant on its sequel, this
studio recording
published by Lyrichord. I was most involved during the editing phase (as a critical
listener for detail), but was also present at the sessions.
CD recording of music from Thomas Jefferson's collection released 2008: songs, violin sonatas, and a harpsichord solo
I conduct six of my own hymns in
Hymnal Selections, a set of three cassettes.
This set was published with the release of the hymnal to help people learn
music that is new to this book.
One of my hymns is performed as a two-piano arrangement on
Hymnal Masterworks: Solo Piano by Marilyn Houser Hamm.
Several other hymns are recorded by the Eastern Mennonite University
Chamber Singers directed by Kenneth Nafziger. This recording is
Praying with the Anabaptists: The Secret of Bearing Fruit
by Marlene Kropf and Eddy Hall...it is a book-and-cassette set.
My hymn "By Peter's House"
has been published in a
choral arrangement by Philip Orr of
Orrganized Sound.
This arrangement has also been recorded for publication by the Presbyterian Church USA.
Another of my hymns is performed as the title track of a private CD
by
a parish choir in Cleveland.
I continue to write musical compositions and arrangements. Most of these are
for my own use in concerts and church, but I have also done some commissioned
pieces for the professional theater company
Ted & Lee Comedy.
All the above items are physical objects.
Something should also be said about my live performances
(on harpsichord, organ, clavichord, piano, ...). It is difficult to
describe this on a web page, as every performance is different. But here
at least is an
essay about my performance goals and
preparation methods. And I have tried to capture the feeling of "live"
performance in my clavichord
recordings.
As one of my musical heroes, Alfred Cortot, put it: "Music must cause fire to
flare up from the spirit - and not only sparks from the clavier...."
As a computer programmer (my regular "day job") I design and
develop self-service business applications.
Several years ago I designed the engine (database and functions) of this
web-based
calendar of events for Eastern Mennonite University.
Most recently I've been working on much larger projects for
corporations and government agencies: we develop interactive telephony (touch-tone and speech) applications.
This work is analogous to musical composition and performance...one has to interpret the
client's specifications, understand the intended audience,
anticipate any difficulties from a user's perspective,
and then use symbolic code (a language) to build
and test a package that does the job. I enjoy building dynamic systems...it's like
creating living things, helping them take shape and become robust.
The logical structure is just another language to me.
One of my doctoral research projects became this
free spreadsheet to analyze
the various temperaments (tuning systems) possible on keyboard instruments.
It measures the characters and usability of different keys, and gives practical
reference material for the tuning process. I have always had some interest in
the interactions among music, mathematics, and perception.
As a programmer and bridge player (ACBL Bronze Life Master),
I'm somewhat well-known as the developer
of the "Lehman
rating system" (1993) for
OKBridge.
I proposed and tested the
mathematical
model...this
was several years before internet game servers became widely popular, and
OKBridge itself was still non-graphical (UNIX only).
[Briefly, this is a system
that attempts to measure a player's individual performance in the game, and to encourage
fair competition among players of different skill levels. It essentially
"factors out" the expected values due to opponents and partner, so a player can
track his or her own improvement (or slumps). Personal rating systems have been devised
subsequently for Yahoo! Games and
other online game services...I do not know the extent to which those are based on my work,
but the principles and algorithms are obviously similar.]
Many self-published essays on my
web site:
about musical performance, voting methods, bridge, and creativity.
A common thread...these various topics are all dynamic systems with multiple
players influencing them, and exhibiting mathematical structures (like
languages)....