Category Archives: Website updates

Two new songs

Thursday, October 22, 2009

I’ve spent some time over the past few days writing two new songs – part of a group of birthday songs for friends. The 8 planned super-short songs are, of course, a part of the Song Album Project (I haven’t forgotten about it!), but will be available in the Tobenski Music Press store as soon as they’re written.

So far, I’ve written songs for my friends Danny Stone and Joel Conarroe (the latter of whom is having a big birthday bash tonight on the East Side), who turned, respectively, 30 and 75. For Danny, I wrote the 1&12frac; minute “Twilight”, on the short poem of the same name by Walt Whitman. And for Joel’s one-minute song, I used another short Whitman poem, “To a Western Boy”.

Six more to go!

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Tobenski Music Press store fixed

Friday, August 21, 2009

I discovered this afternoon, much to my chagrin, that the Tobenski Music Press PDF storefront hasn’t been working properly since April. So, I just spent the past hour and a half updating my PayPal settings and upgrading my LinkLok files (I sure would have appreciated an email from the LL folks when the updated version rolled out in April…). After a sizable number of test transactions and their corresponding refunds to myself, I have the storefront up and working again!

On the one hand, at least no one tried to purchase anything in that time, so no one was inconvenienced (I receive emails of all purchases, and would have been able to have fixed it immediately, so it would only have been a minor inconvenience). On the other hand, nobody even tried to purchase anything during that time! Which left me a) without any idea that there even was a problem, and b) having managed not to have sold a single score in five months!

So now that everything’s working again, buy! buy! buy! Or just donate on the Links page because you love me so much.

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It’s all I have to bring to-day

Tuesday, July 7, 2009

This afternoon I added a new song to the Tobenski Press store: “It’s all I have to bring” for voice and piano, composed for Neri Shulman’s 60th birthday in 2007. The song, on the Emily Dickinson poem, clocks in at just under a minute – a cute little gem.

The engraved Sibelius file has been sitting on my hard drive for some time, now (over two years!), and sitting with my laptop on a rainy day in Montauk seemed to be the perfect time to post this little musical offering. I made a cover page and a very few minor revisions to the score, and here it is!

Here’s what my diary has to say about the writing of the song: “Ran back to Astoria in the morning and wrote Neri’s song. Decided on an Emily Dickinson poem – ‘It’s all I have to bring to-day’ – and wrote the song in around a half hour. Seventeen bars. It’s catchy and pretty!” There’s something about the pieces that you shake out of your sleeve – they have the real spark of life, and an easy grace that can’t be faked.

Enjoy!

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DT.com’s 3rd birthday PDF sale!

Friday, February 20, 2009

Next Saturday (Feb 28th) marks the 3-year anniversary of the launch of dennistobenski.com! The site’s gone through a ton of changes since then, most notably has been the recent addition of the Tobenski Music Press storefront. So, in celebration of dennistobenski.com’s third birthday, all PDF scores are half off!

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Twitter experiment and site updates

Thursday, February 12, 2009

I finally joined the ranks of Twitter users today, and added Twitter widgets to both the blog sidebar and the site’s front page. This will make announcing smaller site updates (a number of which are in the works) much easier.

Another addition to the site is the Current Projects page. This way, the world can see what I’ve got on my plate at the moment, and what’s in the pipeline. As the projects there are completed, I’ll shift them into a separate list (on the same page) of Recent Projects.

With the addition of Current Projects came two more changes: “Articles” was removed, and the nav bar was reorganized a little. “Articles” got to be a little pointless next to the blog, where I’ve got a few “blessays” as Stephen Fry calls them. The nav bar’s organization was repriotized: the forum, which I intend to keep, doesn’t get much (ok, any!) action, so it got bumped to the “Extras” menu. The blog gets a brisk readership, so I moved that to the main nav bar, instead. I also never really liked the word “Features”, and realized that “Extras” made a little more sense.

I mentioned some minor updates at the top of the post. These will mostly be fleshings-out of the Current Projects, and a few more program notes in Works.

And just because I haven’t forgotten about them: vodcasts are still on the table, but are being pushed back until mid-Spring.

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Audio: My True Love Hath My Heart

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

I’ve added another MP3 to the Audio page – the Illinois State University Madrigal Singers’ recording of My True Love Hath My Heart.

I composed the piece in 2003 specifically for the Madrigal Singers, a group that I was a member of for all four years of my undergraduate career at ISU. The group’s director, Dr. James Major – also the Director of the School of Music at the time (now the Dean of the College of Fine Arts) – commissioned the work. In fact, he commissioned me every year I was in the group for a new work for the annual Madrigal Dinners.

This is, I think, the best of my choral works, and is the most demonstrative of them of the push-and-pull / constant metric shifts I wrote about recently.

This particular recording was released on a CD put out by ISU titled “Sing On! Celebrating Fifty Years of Madrigal Dinners at Illinois State University”. A mouthful, that! I’m both conductor and part of the choir here.


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Tobenski Music Press: PDF Downloads

Tuesday, January 13, 2009

As of Monday afternoon, the Tobenski Music Press now sells PDF downloads of select scores: And He’ll Be Mine, till night is overgone, Sweet Briar Songs, echoes, Starfish at Pescadero (score only), Letter from a Young Poet (score only), and String Quartet No. 1 (score only). I’ll be adding more scores and their accompanying parts in the coming days and weeks.

If anyone encounters any difficulties, please let me know ASAP at tobenskipress@dennistobenski.com. My live tests with the new scripts have gone well. I should emphasize that the process is completely secure – everything is handled by Paypal and the Linklok Paypal IPN system. All credit card information is handled entirely by Paypal, and the file downloads are dealt with through the secure Linklok scripts. I’d love to be able to write all of my own scripts to handle everything on-site, but security’s far too important an issue to entrust to little old me.

Bound scores will be handled the same as before: place your order through Paypal, and I’ll mail you a pretty, bound copy of the score(s) or parts.

PDF downloads (and, in the future, MP3 downloads) are even simpler! Place your order through Paypal (Shameless Plug: note the lower prices because of the lack of printing/binding fees!), and Linklok will provide you with links to download the appropriate files. The links will be provided in two forms: a page loaded immediately after completion of your order with secure links to the file you purchased; and a confirmation email sent to you immediately. This email is distinct from the receipt you will receive from Paypal with your complete purchase details.

I ran several test transactions Sunday afternoon, and everything ran smoothly. Paypal even made a point of calling me to make sure that all of the sudden transactions-plus-refunds-of-my-own-money were “authorized activity”. As if I didn’t trust Paypal enough, that made me a believer – a phone call on a Sunday afternoon just to “make sure”. Good people! (Thanks, Karen! That kinda made my day!)

I’ll be adding a few more things to the Tobenski Music Press pages very, very soon (Shipping/Return policies, etc.) to flesh out the storefront and make the processes super-clear.

The process of making this happen has been really exciting for me. I’ve been eyeing Linklok for months, now – going over their materials, reading reactions to it all over the NetarWebs. I think I read their manual a half dozen times before I even bought the scripts! Just the initial Paypal integration for the bound scores storefront had me ten kinds of excited, so to finally get this up and running has me over the moon!

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Family videos

Sunday, December 21, 2008

This week’s video uploads are inspired by the holiday season. The holidays are about family, so these videos feature family – my younger brother, to be precise. My brother Denton gave his senior voice recital at Illinois State University (my alma mater) on 3 November 2007. Denton co-commissioned till night is overgone, and this recital was the official world premiere. The recital consisted of all works written in the 21st Century (save for one song by Chet Biscardi written in the 1990s), and also featured my Sweet Briar Songs.

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“Acrostic Song” video

Saturday, December 20, 2008

As promised, here is the video of Rob Frankenberry and I performing “Acrostic Song” from David Del Tredici’s Final Alice on the Tobenski-Algera Concert Series’ program “Songs by Gay American Composers”, 19 June 2007.

(http://www.dennistobenski.com/video.php?cat=2&video=121)

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More “Songs by Gay American Composers” video

Thursday, December 11, 2008

More presents for you, my lovely site visitors! The holidays must be fast approaching (Too fast, in my opinion! Where does the time go?), because I’ve got a whopping 16 more videos for you all! This batch almost completely rounds out the “Songs by Gay American Composers” concert from June 2007. Available now are Darien Shulman’s Three Poems of Thomas Moore and Roger Zahab’s Autumn Songs, performed by yours truly and Marc Peloquin, and my cycle And He’ll Be Mine, performed beautifully by Marc and Rob Frankenberry.

Also available is the first of the night’s two encores, a “preview” of “In the dark pine-wood” from till night is overgone. I had just finished the cycle a few months prior to this performance while I was at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and was eager to show it off before it would be premiered later that Fall by my younger brother at Illinois State University. Because I wasn’t content merely to have organized the entire event and sung nearly an hour’s worth of the program, I decided to show off my mediocre-at-best piano skills by accompanying Rob on the song. An admirable effort, I think.

All that remains to be uploaded (thanks to the limited size of my hard drive) is David Del Tredici’s “Acrostic Song” from Final Alice – a little birthday treat for David’s 70th birthday, which had been in March, and the party for which I painedly missed because I was several states away so selfishly writing the Joyce cycle. Here, it’s Rob’s turn to flex his pianist muscles. And what muscles they are – Rob’s a first-class musician!

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