Death Waltz
 

I came across this today on the Youtube. Apparently John Stump is the Rube Goldberg of classical music. Just writing insane music that he never expected to be played, just because he could. Think of him as classical music's mid 1960's troll. Thanks to midi technology, we can hear what his pieces would actually sound like. This is his Faerie's Aire and Death Waltz Other people have played versions of this, but not the original version.

With the actual sheet music



A better view of the midi, just so you can practice.


Have fun :tramp:

That was absolutely fucking amazing. I think I need to change my pants.

Someone needs to line up a bunch of pianos and have a bunch of pianists play this live. I'd pay top dollar.

One of the comments on the second video:

"Asian dad: Good son! Now, play it backwards!"

:laughing:

Holy crap.

I found another composition of John Stump. This one is called The Last Hope. Personally I prefer Death Waltz more, but this one is still pretty damn amazing.

What I still can't get over is he had no way of actually playing these, so he had to compose these entirely in his head and make sure they still sounded good. The fact that while it is still incredibly complicated and hard to play; these songs are actually are good, well written songs. That takes talent in my book.

That is so goddamned pretty.

Has he written other stuff? I can't seem to fin to much about him.

I've been looking all over the internet too. I haven't found much.

But I found this blog post by his nephew. It has some general background on his life and a few more pieces of sheet music, including some stuff for strings.

Sorry to be a party killer but I've discovered that the song in the OP isn't by John Stump and isn't "Faerie's Aire and Death Waltz". This is what the real sheet music looks like:



It's clearly not the same thing, and if you look at some of the details you can see it's literally just a joke, never intended to actually be played.

The song is really called "U.N. Owen Was Her?" and is the music from some Japanese video game called the Touhou Project. Still a cool piece of music though.

it starts at around 3:50


What I can't get over is why he didn't just write it for orchestra like everyone else rather than write it as a solo piece for someone with 5 arms, it seems overly gimmicky.