"The Music of the Spheres" is a solo for the beginning pianist. It is designed to sound difficult and impressive, while actually being quite easy to play.
"The Music of the Spheres" can easily be taught as a rote piece to a pianist who has only had a few months of lessons (Primer Level), or it can be assigned as a regular piece to a more advanced student (Level 2). Students are ready to learn "The Music of the Spheres" when they can play the C, F, Db, and Ab five finger patterns, hands together, at a moderately fast speed.
"Music of the Spheres" is from a series of pieces I have written for the beginning pianist.
The postscript file contains three pages of music, plus a title page, composer's notes, and an information page.
Click here to download the postscript file.
To download the postscript file, you will need about 350K of disk space; to print it you will need a postscript printer or a postcript emulator.
A free postscript emulator called "Ghostscript" is available on the net. Versions are available for many common platforms (MSDOS, Windows 3.1, Windows NT, OS/2, Unix, VMS, Macintosh, Amiga, etc.). There is a very nice web page about Ghostscript that tells you all about it and has links to the latest versions of all necessary files. Be sure to get the previewer program, too (for Windows and OS/2 this is called "GSView").
I have just installed the latest version of Ghostcript on my PC, and I am very pleased with it. The installation will take about 4-5 Meg of disk space (more if you grab a lot of fonts) and may take some tweaking to get working right. But when you get done, your non-Postscript printer will have all the capabilities of a postscript printer at a savings of several hundred dollars. The latest version of GSView even includes a handy utility that allows you to set up Ghostscript as a regular Windows printer. You can then simply print to the Ghostscript printer, and GSView takes care of all the dirty little details--all you have to worry about is pulling the beautiful postscript output from the back end of your printer.
The only complaints I have about Ghostscript are (1) it is a bit slow and (2) some of the public domain fonts that come with it are pretty low quality. The first problem can be remedied by buying a faster CPU (you wanted to anyway, didn't you?), and the second, by spending $15 on a disk full of high quality Postscript fonts.
If you have a real Postscript printer, you'll need to run a special program to send the downloaded Postscript file to the printer. Such a program should have come with your printer; it's probably somewhere in that dusty pile of disks you chucked into the back corner of the closet when you finally got your printer to print something legible.
I have had several people report success in downloading and printing these postscript files. If you have any problems, I would appreciate hearing about them. If the problem is on my end, I will do my best to fix it.
The only bug I know about concerns users of GSView. It may also affect other postscript previewers. Under GSView, it appears that the postscript file only consists of one or two pages, even though the file actually consists of four or five pages. If you print the file, all pages will print. The discrepancy is because GSView depends on some advanced postscript code that Finale--which I used to create the postscript files--does not yet use. Ghostscript itself works fine with either the old or the newer Postscript code.
Brent Hugh
BHugh@CSTP.UMKC.EDU