Twenty-one young and talented musicians performed on May 30, 2006 for family members and friends at the annual Spring Piano Recital at the Cashman Center of WITC in New Richmond. In addition to a jazz improvisation by Alex Chilsen, composers represented included Bach, Beethoven, Debussy, Kuhlau and Copland. Jerri then presented awards, and we then had an opportunity to visit and enjoy refreshments with parents, grandparents, friends and happy students.

The background music is Intermezzo from the Petite Suite by Alexander Borodin (1833 - 1887) which I downloaded from the Classical Piano Midi Page.

Each year there is more and more music on the Web. National Public Radio and BBC Radio are just two good sites that let you listen to music programming on your computer free of charge. Another fast growing online service is sheet music. There are some sites that offer free downloads of sheet music, but the selection tends to be quite limited. Music Scores offers a 12 month membership for $27.50 that lets you download any or all of the midi files and scores in their large library.

The Classical Music Archives still lets you download up to 5 files per day with a free registration; register as a subscriber for $25 per year and you can download up to 1,000 files per month, including high fidelity MP3 files that you can play on your iPod. The iTunes Music Store is developing a larger library of classical music. When I searched the site today I found 483 albums of music by Beethoven. Ginastera, a less well known composer, was represented by 121 titles.