Idea is a suite of pipe organ "duets" I composed, performed, and recorded in the spring of 2011. While at college, I played a variety of instruments, some for just a couple months and some for the whole four years. This piece pulls them all together in a final hurrah. Included are: carillon, guzheng, drum set, steelpans, and pipe organ. A lot of people wrote theses or had senior recitals. I did neither.

Instead, I made this.

One request: please use decent speakers or headphones if you can. Idea is not performed live, so at least aspire to good sound fidelity (i.e., not laptop speakers).

Hopefully the various instrument combinations also suggest new musical character possibilities for the organ. I will probably continue to experiment with the pipe organ in this way, but I hope that other people latch onto the concept as well.

I did not necessarily do the best job recording these instruments or always use industry standard methods. And even if I had, all of the instruments sound better in person. But recording is a type of performance in itself - it makes it possible to hear the combination of a drum set in a dead room alongside a pipe organ in an echoey church. The drums or the bells are not just the instruments, the rooms and halls and churches combined with the recording technologies and playback engines and headphones or speakers together shape the sound.

Each instrument within each movement was recorded as a continuous performance - I did not splice measures all over the place, save for a couple in the last movement.

The organs featured in the piece live in Stanford University's Memorial Church. The Murray-Harris instrument is played in each movement, while the Fisk-Nanney shows up at the end. The church's wikipedia page has more details.

The Hoover Tower carillon is a four-octave instrument (read: 48 bells) made in Belgium and later restored by a Dutch bellfounder, Royal Eijsbouts. Epically and ironically, the largest and loudest bell (the low C) bears the inscription, "uno pro pace sono" which means "I ring only for peace."

The guzheng is a gorgeous and ancient chinese instrument that nowadays comes with 21 strings and is tuned to a pentatonic scale. Stanford has a few of them in Kimball dorm, where this one was recorded.

The drum set used for this performance belongs to the Stanford Music Department. It was recorded in the studio at Stanford's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA).

The steelpans used in this recording belong to Cardinal Calypso, Stanford's premier student steelpan band, for whom I played drum set for three years. The specific pans used were a set of triples and a set of double seconds. These were also recorded at CCRMA.