Something New -- Singing Music on my Blog -- "An die musick" by Schubert

Many of you Avocational Singer blog readers have gone for visits to Frescamari's Practice Room to sit and listen in on all my experimentations and voice discovery missions.  I first invited everyone to come over to that virtual practice room in this post, where I compared visiting my practice room to visiting a painter's studio.

I chose the Posterous site for my virtual practice room because it was a convenient way to store mp3 files for free and it was simple to get the files posted, by merely e-mailing the files.  Posterous would automatically embed the files in a player, so the work was done for me.  I will continue to devote time and attention to the ramblings and scribblings and trial and error of that Internet practice room.  It serves as a kind of online practice journal for me and I have benefited greatly from posting my practice mp3 files there and commenting on them.  From the looks of the numbers (thousands) of visits, it seems that people enjoy browsing through some of the stuff I've got up there.

However, I have wanted to be able to post a file once in a while on this blog.  I just needed some time to do some research and tinker around and figure out how to embed a player.  I have created a little test blog to play around with this technical stuff and have been busy experimenting over there.

I think I have figured out how to neatly and easily embed a little player so that I can, once in a while, put up an mp3 file right on the blog, so you will not have to take the little cyber-journey over to the practice studio.  This would have been great to do when I was pursuing the 24 Arias in 24 Weeks project (which I have not abandoned entirely yet -- I'm just splitting the sessions up -- having completed 10 of them in 10 weeks last winter.  I think I may start another 10-week session this Fall.  If you are a new reader and don't know what I'm talking about, 10 of 24 Italian Arias I learned in 10 weeks are posted in Frescamari's Performance Space, another posterous blog.)

So, to test out my new mp3-player-embedding abilities, below I have embedded this morning's rendition of "An die musick," by Franz Schubert.  To help me learn this song, I purchased a book Music Minus One High Voice Soprano, Vol. 1 Schubert German Lieder (Book & CD), and have used the CD that came with it for accompaniment.  I have done most of the work on this song by myself, since I am between teachers right now.

Some other work I did on this song leading up to what I've got today can be found in Frescamari's Practice Room.

So, here it is, my progress thus far on "An die musick" in an embedded player right on the blog: