Skip to main content

George Frideric Handel on drums

It was nice with this page to be able to present examples of Handel's work from the wide range of musical forms in which he engaged so prolifically, including concerto, oratorio in the form of the Hallelujah Chorus from the Messiah, opera and of course the water music.

For these pieces the steel drums have been combined in different ways with Marimba, growling Moog synthesizer and for Sheba's Arrival Pan flutes and Ocarinas. This gives a crisp feel to the music, minimising the trailing edges of the baroque flourishes and helping to expose the underlying counterpoint and harmony.

The Concerti Grosso are emphasized by reviewers as some of the most sophisticated expression of his genius and it was satisfying to find that our approach worked well here as well.

Popular posts from this blog

Worldwide audience

In the last month Download2MP3 was reached from 169 countries with the remaining gaps being a few countries in North Africa. These days most visits are going direct to one of the big name composer pages although the ragtime category is holding it's own. The last twelve months or so have been a dry patch interms of producing more recordings but I'm pleased to report that the technical issues which been related to various software upgrades. I have been using Cubase for at least 25 years not on an Atari but an Acorn with an external roaland Sound Canvas synthesiser which was purchased in London's Tin Pan Alley. Some of the steps that have got us to 10.5 have been very disconcerting but the truth is that there is nothing to campare with it for the work that I do. I have also acquired some exciting new instruments in the last few months to augment the stalwarts which saw this site get underway. So the Covid19 Lockdown is giving me the time to produce more recordings wh...
Persistance does it It is now 15 years since this website was launched. In that time we have had ups and downs - some associated with Google algorithm changes but this year we seem to have seen steady growth in visits and some dramatic download volumes. It looks as if we might reach 1000 giga bytes of download this month for the first time ever.  Our global reach is wider - although Indonesia and India still account for over 25% of visits we had visits from 126 countries in the last week exceptions include Uragauy and some sub sahara countries. The bulk come through organic Google searches with the next largest share coming from our daily tweets. 

Downloads a plenty

Hadn't really looked at the download stats in the new suite except to see what was managing to get into the top ten alongside Beethoven. So far this May we have had nearly 41000 complete downloads and 55000 incomplete downloads. As you'd expect the incompletes are concentrated in the popular long pieces like Beethoven symphony movements. For some reason (probably alphabetic do you think) Scott joplin's Weeping Willow was the least popular along with 50 others on just one complete download out of the 800different MP3 files downloaded. Perhaps more analysis later.