Ancient Web: James Signorile Shared a Symphony in MP3 Links

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

The Internet made an unusual promise to a composer in the early 2000s: you could put your own music online and let someone hear it without persuading a record label first.

Visit James V. Signorile's Twilight Dreams Music

James V. Signorile filled his website with compositions, arrangements, performance notes, and MP3 links. It reads like a concert program expanded into a home recording studio. There are options to stream an audio file at a specified bitrate or download it directly, reminders about how Windows users can use Save Target As, and links to alternate MIDI and RealAudio versions.

The large recordings catalogue includes a flute quartet, organ symphony, piano concerto, string quartet variations, choral pieces, and works for orchestra and brass. Some of the music was originally composed decades before the site itself existed; Signorile preserves dates of composition and performance separately from the technology used to share them.

The program notes are part of the archive

A piece called Essay for Trombone and Orchestra includes a personal account of its March 24, 1974 performance at Colby College. Signorile recalls conducting the student orchestra while the trombonist, his friend Don Appert, performed the solo. A work first written in 1969 and performed in 1974 acquired a new life through a downloadable recording many years later.

The catalogue also describes a 1999 piano concerto commissioned by composer Carson Cooman, with movements offered as MIDI realizations. A four-movement Symphony No. 1 for Organ appears in multiple renderings, including one described as being performed through a MIDI-enabled pipe organ.

For Et in Terra Pax, Signorile explains how a tribute to fellow composer Alan Hovhaness came to be. For Corona Suite, he discusses using Baroque dance forms for a piano work commissioned in 1998. These notes preserve decisions and personal histories that might otherwise have disappeared behind a bare list of track titles.

The website still points to Yahoo Groups, MySpace, SoundClick, ACIDplanet, and other services associated with earlier music-sharing culture. Some links may be obsolete; the site documents their existence rather than guaranteeing that the old hosts remain alive.

The most valuable feature here is the artist's willingness to describe what each recording means and how it was made. The page is an archive of the process as well as the results.

Browse the original recordings and program notes.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.