Friday, June 20, 2014

Dinner reception at University of Gothenburg


The staff of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Gothenburg held a dinner reception last Thursday to end the study year, and Dolce Trio was invited to play. It's the end of term here in Sweden and students are rarely seen in the school corridors this time of year. The university officially closes for summer holidays around mid June but most courses ended way earlier. 

It's always nice to play in an academic environment. The building "Humanisten" (named after the field of subjects, the humanities) share the same campus area as Dolce Trio's old music college - the Academy of Music and Drama. 

We had a great night and the professors seemed to enjoy our music. It's safe to say Dolce Trio haven't performed as frequently (6 nights a week) since being on the NCL Epic in the Mediterranean a few years ago, and I've missed playing our repertoire. Every time u turn the page it's like meeting and "old friend". Some more dear than others of course haha. 

Dolce Trio at 'Humanisten'

Dolce Trio wishes every one of you a great start of the summer holidays!

Tuesday, June 10, 2014

Wedding gig at Käringön

Last saturday Dolce had the summer's first wedding gig.
Therese and Lars got married at Käringön, a small but beautiful island on the west coast (the best coast as we call it) 1,5h drive north of Göteborg.
This time we were reinforced with the double bass player Mikael Klaening, resulting in Dolce Quartet. A lower register instrument was actually very good for our sound, adding much more depth and orchestral quality.

 
 
Also, Mikael got the gig and needed more musicians with ready-made arranged pop/light-mingle-music in a classical setting. Voilà, Dolce per definition.




The day started very early, we had to do the complex logistics of getting cars to pick up the musicians, the electric piano and double bass in different parts of the city, and then drive up to the ferry that goes to Käringön. We had good margins so the stress and panic was at minimum. A lot of gear:


 
 
We arrived in time and could rehearse our two songs in the Church with two singers that we should perform together with. "Miracle" and "I'm yours now," two very Lovely Swedish songs we had arranged for this occation. It went very well, it felt really great and quite powerful - one singer played guitar as well so we were a total of five instruments and two voices! We also played Peterson-Berger's "Entrance in the summer meadow," a Swedish summer-classical classic, which suits us very well to play actually.
 
 
After the wedding we set up the electric piano at the porch and played one set of light background music for the toast before the dinner. The weather was beautiful and it felt really good!
Also, the runner-up in last year's Swedish TV chef competition Sveriges Mästerkock, "Carl" did the catering at this place. We were starstruck.
 


After the music, we packed up just in time to catch the 6 pm ferry from the island, and drive back to Göteborg. A full day's work but a great experience!

Monday, November 26, 2012

Göteborgs Remfabrik

Last Sunday Dolce trio had the honor to play at an award ceremony at Göteborgs Remfabrik, an old textile factory that was in use during the first half of the 20th century and is now a museum and a memory from that past age. The society in charge of preserving the building and present it to the public got a very prestigious national award: "Årets industriminne" (the industrial heritage of the year) and we where there with our portable piano and played background music which was much appreciated by the invited members of the society who attended. You can read more about Göteborgs Remfabrik here.


But there is more to the story than that. When Henrik was still in high school, about six years ago, he was involved in film production together with a bunch of friends, and the biggest project they ever did, a two-hour-long Gangsters drama-thriller which took place in early 20th century Chicago and shows a desperate police-man dealing with the Italian gangsters of the city, used Remfabriken as a primary location for scenes in the police headquarters and gangsters hide-outs. The movie was a great success at the time for Henrik and his friend Ted Jönsson (script-director-editor-lead star), and besides being producer and holding the camera, Henrik also wrote music for the score to the picture. He recorded it with an orchestra put together of other friends playing musical instruments, and there was a big gala premiere in of the movie in 2007 with around 100 guests.
Anyway, since Henrik had a connection to Remfabriken the board thought it a good idea to have the trio play some of the music as an entertainment number at the award ceremony, so Dolce presented a specially arranged "Gangsters medley" of some of the melodies from the movie!


We really enjoyed playing there and it was a special feeling for Henrik, returning, quite literally speaking, to the scene of the crime some five years later!




Friday, November 9, 2012

Gig at Royal Bachelor's Club

Tonight we had a gig back home in Göteborg. It felt a bit like we had a couple of days off and then met up for work just as any other night on the ship for the last two months. Although on a different location and with different settings it felt even more fun and exciting! The event was a dinner with a society from Göteborg and their friend society from Norway (so Dolce trio was really the ideal choice).
We played first at the reception after a meeting in a room without a piano, so we had to bring our electric one. A snowboard soft case works really well for easy handling and transportation:
Then we played again to the coffee after dinner. This was in a room with a piano, and we enjoyed playing some of our best hits, like some Strauss waltzes and the Can-can!
Here we are having our own coffee before playing. And tuning:
We've now played at the Royal Bachelor's Club twice, and we would be happy if we were to return anytime again in the future!

Sunday, November 4, 2012

End of contract

We have now lived and worked on the Epic on our second contract for 10 weeks. It's funny when you are on a ship how time goes by both really fast and sometimes quite slow. Anyway, we have had a great time; we have met so many interesting, fun and lovely people, we have seen some new places and we have played our repertoire so many times we've lost count of it. To everyone on the Epic, thank you so much for making our stay there so good!
This blog post is basically just a big thank you and goodbye to the Epic. It's just one more thing we want to share with you all, and that is the last two weeks when the ship crossed the Atlantic sea to do the winter season in the Caribbean.


First we headed through the strait of Gibraltar - pretty amazing to see one continent on each side of the ship! This one is Africa.
And then after 9 days with one stop (the Azores) we finally got the Caribbean and the island of St Thomas. It was really hot there, especially when we thought about all our friends in Sweden stuck with snow!
For the flight back home we went via Houston, Texas, and spent some six hours at the airport. We found free wi-fi though so we managed, and it doesn't matter if it's a long travel as long as you know you're going home.
So once again, thank you Epic and all your people for this time! We've enjoyed playing for you and spending time with you.
Yours
Dolce trio


Wednesday, October 10, 2012

Signs of the Epic

 This is just a tiny glimpse of the life on board - let's have a look at some of the signs that's literary everywhere you look. A lot of them is concerned with safety and security, some with general information and some are actually pretty funny.
First off: this is the name plate to my cabin. Cabin number, number of crew living there (1) and title of the crew member.



In the entertainment office they have all kinds of papers and posters, detailing for the musicians and entertainers which hours to work on which days, and some announcements of access hours to guest dining places, dress codes etc. Here are the chart for all musicians on board, updated with our photos just last week :)



Since last year they've updated the drink menus, describing quite accurately what it's all about:



After having a drink and you go to a (crew) toilet, there are very clear instructions on how to keep a perfect hygiene. Second to fire and sinking, GI is the greatest fear on board.. But really? A bit overkill for my taste.



Now, after the toilet you're heading for Crew bar. That's where everybody hangs out between 12-3am, and you can buy a beer for $1 (oh yes it's true and it's good for the wallet but bad for the liver). It is universally known as crew bar, but on the front door it says something different. I've never heard anybody say this name, it's probably a left-over form the 80's...



So, after some time in the crew bar, if you're a smoker you need to go to the smoke room (most disgusting room, you smell like an ashtrey when you come out again). Anyway, on the way out there are some clear instructions. Hehehe.



Now for a completely different picture, me if I were a DJ (Thank you DJ Robert Michael for this pic!!!)



It's really no sign, or is it........ 


Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Henrik’s Awesome Playlist Generator

I'm afraid this is going to be a very long and technical text about one of my greatest passion in the Dolce Trio daily work (besides the playing of course) – generating a good playlist for our gigs. The task at hand is quite substantial, and it is only through trying and thinking about it many times that I've finally arrived at a satisfactory result. We have around 150 pieces, 110 being “classical” and 40 belonging to the “pop/other”-stack, incorporating such musical highlights of the last century as Disney hits, evergreens, Abba's, tangos, musicals, Swedish waltzes, Celine Dion and Andrea Bocelli duets etc. etc., that we get good response for playing and that we also feel nice to spice up the classical repertoire with (see excerpt)


So the challenge is this, expressed through the following objectives:
  •      Make a playlist that incorporates all of our pieces, so that we play through everything before starting over in order to get as less tired of the pieces as possible. 150 pieces = around 9h music, 3h playing/day => 3 days before starting over.
  •      Make a new playlist every week in order to not get tired of the pieces by playing them in the same order every time.
On our last contract we made the playlist by hand once a week, and being three persons in the trio it was a workload of about one hour every third week. As you will see I have put a lot of more work into this than I would have with the old system, but the principle is that of instead of inventing the wheel every time, I'm building a wheel factory. Moreover, putting 150 pieces in order by hand may result in a good order from the start, but it is inevitable that you forget one or two, or ten, and to check for leftovers would take nearly as much time as making it in the first place.

Anyway, I had an idea that I would be able to do this with a little help from my computer. And in order for you to understand how that is done, dear reader, I need to explain how our repertoire works in the first place.

Every piece has a number. The original numbering, when we first got on the ship last year, was from 1 – 75 (classical) and 1 – 52 (pop/other). Of these 127 we were able to play about half because we hadn't have time to rehearse or practice all of them. But throughout the contract we did just that, and in the end we managed to play around 100 of them I think. Whenever any of us arranged a new piece for the trio we just squeezed it in as for example 52b, between 52 and 53. The classical stack is ordered by composer and title and the pop stack only by title. Thus, 1 (classical) is Albinoni's Adagio and 75c is Verdi's “Slave choir”. Anyway, the fundamental idea with the playlist is that we have all these numbers in a row on a piece of paper next to our music when we're playing, and we never need to decide in the moment what the next piece is going to be (trust me, it isn't easy with three stubborn musicians). But of course we allow ourselves to deviate from the playlist whenever we feel like it.

Now, there are two more criteria for the perfect playlist. First, regarding the numbering and practicality of the gig:
  •      There shouldn't be less than three pieces from any binder.
With our increased repertoire this is a new problem since there's no room for all music in one binder. We have three binders of music each (the piano binders are fuller but still amount to the same number) – pop/other obviously, and two for the classical: composers A-L and M-V. When we have one binder on the music stand the other two are on the floor, and switching the binders back and forth all the time is not only a wearisome task but also a greater risk for the wellbeing of the instruments, should they fall over and break in the process.

So, when all this is clear to you, dear reader that is still with me, you probably think that it wouldn't be hard at all just to randomize the order with an algorithm of three pieces from binder 1, three pieces from binder 2 and three pieces from binder 3. But here is where the real challenge begins, to be in compliance with the last criterion.
  •      The order of pieces should have an inner coherence of succession, variation and dramaturgy, and should reflect the exterior atmosphere of the performance situation in its mood.
Now we have to do some real thinking. Well, you don't have to because I have and I'm sharing with you. This isn't really any different from the fact that all major classical works with several movements have a succession of characters for the movements that passes from fast to slow and from slow to fast. So what we have done is putting a number to every piece corresponding to its mood/tempo, from 1 to 4 like the following:

1 being really slow, like “Air on a G” string by Bach;
2 being a bit more moving, like “Salut d’Amour” by Elgar;
3 being quite active but not too much, like Schubert's “Moment musiceaux”;
4 being a real show-off piece like Brahms' Hungarian dance no. 5.

The same goes for the pop songs except there are no songs as slow as 1. Now, after sorting the repertoire like this in Excel, there are only two tools that you need: sorting on several levels and the randomize function. A big thanks to my friend Attila who helped my on the right track here. Starting with the randomize function, if you type in =SLUMP() in Excel (Swedish) it generates a figure between 0 and 1. If you do that to every row entry and then sort the data according to those figures you get a totally randomized order. But we don't want that, no, we want a randomized order with some rules applied. Here is where the sorting on different levels comes in. We need to sort first on the 1-4 character number, and then on the randomized numbers. So now we have a list of all 1’s, all 2’s, all 3’s and all 4’s, and also sorted by binder 1, 2 and 3 of course, in a random order. Now this is the fun part: coming up with the algorithm for the perfect order. I've tried a few and I'm not sure I'm there yet but it gets better and better. Just to explain: the algorithm for a three-movement typical classical sonata would be (4-1-4) or (4-2-4), following the fast-slow-fast model. And for the trio to indicate which binder I'm writing 1(X-X-X) for classical binder 1, 2(X-X-X) for binder 2 and P(X-X-X) for the pop/other binder.

But before we can come up with an order algorithm we need to look closely at the last part of the criterion above: “The order of the pieces … should reflect the exterior atmosphere of the performance situation in its mood”. The exterior atmosphere of the performance situation for us is this: people eating and enjoying their dinner, talking to each other and occasionally listening, and the later the evening goes the louder they become and the less they listen. So the algorithm needs to be in two parts: one for the first sets when it's quiet enough to play slow pieces, and on for the later sets when it's too noisy to play quiet pieces but feels right to play active ones. In Dolce terms they are known as “Hour of death” and “Party”.

I'm now going to reveal our current algorithm, even though it might be regarded as a corporate secret, but I doubt there's any rival out there that's going to profit on this on our behalf, so here it goes.

Calm: 1(2-3-1) 2(2-3-1) P(2-3-2)
Party: 1(3-4-2) 2(3-4-2) P(3-4-2/3)

Oh, isn't that beautiful.

The only thing left to do now is to sort the pieces data as described above, fill in X.Y in another column for every piece, Y being the place of the group in the algorithm and X being 1 through 7 for the calm part and 11 through 17 for the party part (which is easy to do in excel, you just type the first two for each group and then pull down to get the rest automatically), save that column for later generation (“the wheel”), sort the data according to the new column, copy the column of the numbers of the pieces, now in right order, to Word as text only, replace all enters with dashes, and after a final touch it looks something like this:





Coincidently (you would think) almost all pieces in our repertoire made it to the list, fulfilling the first requirement, because we happen to have proportionally twice as many 2’s and 3’s as 1’s and 4’s. Only a few pop songs didn't come out even but they can be thrown in “manually” at the gig. And whenever we feel the noise is too loud for the Calm part of the list we just switch to Party mode and the next day we continue where we left, thus letting us play our entire repertoire in a perfect order of succession and variation and with not too many binder changes.

If you are still with me dear reader, well done, you made it through. Now you can enjoy our playing in a dimension you didn't know before. Not a musical or artistic one, but the mathematical-programming-theoretical-playlist-generation dimension!
Congratulations.

/Henrik