Housekeeping and "new" recordings

When I first started recording myself on the piano, I wasn't thinking about organization. I wasn't even thinking I'd want to listen to the recordings again, or share them with anyone -- they were just a learning tool for me. I am now paying the price for that in many gigabytes of poorly labeled audio files scattered about the hard drive. A few years into it, I did start saving them in one folder, with subfolders labeled with the date, but unless I felt a recording was a wrap, I didn't give it a name. Some of the recordings are just mistake-filled blunders -- valuable from the educational perspective, but not so much from the artistic one. But others are actually pretty good. I am now faced with the task of wading through everything and deciding what I can delete and what I should archive on a storage disk, which needs to be done before this poor computer cries uncle. Given that I have a full-time job plus I'm trying to actually practice the piano (and the cello) plus I have a life = Agghhh!!!

Anyway, I was looking at my list of Bach preludes and fugues from the Well-Tempered Clavier that I placed on the blog and thinking that surely I learned, and recorded, more.

And sure enough, I came up with a few.

When one of my sisters got married in 1971, when I was 13, she asked me to play piano at the wedding. It was a sort of hip wedding at the Ethical Culture Society, with self-written vows and so on, so the music was simply to add a little atmosphere. My sister had been taking piano lessons at college as an elective, so she asked her teacher for some suggestions for music, and they came up with two of the easier Bach preludes. Prelude No. 23 was one of them. Of course I did not memorize it at the time, but over the years since then, I looked at it and wondered how it might be done, and especially how one might learn the fugue.


In 2008, I decided to wonder no more, and learned the set. This recording is the result.

WTC I, No. 23 in B Major

The next one is from November 2006. No story attached, I just love it. I learned all of it, but I can find a recording only of the prelude:

WTC II, No. 12, Prelude, in F minor

Who knows what else I'll find in my rambles through the hard drive?

And if anyone out there has a suggestion for a good way to organize this stuff, please chime in!