Arlan
Wareham
Welcome to my web page! My name is Arlan Wareham, and this page is
designed to give you a little glimpse into my life and my interests. Mostly,
it's for fun. So, enjoy! If you want, you can email me at Arlan.Wareham@gmail.com.
I now have 2 blogs about my life here in Israel. Click here for the first, which
is in English, or here for the
second, which is in Hebrew.
You may also notice that I now have Google AdSense ads on my site.
These are selected by Google to be relevant to the things I write here,
and I would particularly encourage you to check out ones that interest you.
In 2007, I found out about CD Baby and began selling albums of my sequenced organ music there (and at several other sites, as well). I currently have 7 albums for sale. Here's a list of the albums, with links to find out more about them at CD Baby. In addition, I have also included direct links to some of these albums on iTunes, where you can buy them (all of them) and download them or even get just the tracks you want. Now you can also buy and download the entire album on CD Baby and also individual tracks. For a single page with information about all my albums, including links to purchase them at CD Baby or at iTunes, click here.
The first album is called "Aliyah". It consists almost entirely of my arrangements of traditional Jewish melodies for pipe organ. For MANY more details, check out CD Baby. If you prefer to download the tracks you like rather than buying CDs, you can do that at iTunes.
The second album is called "Wonderful Peace". It is mostly my arrangements of favorite Christian melodies, but it also includes a few organ classics, including the well-known Widor Toccata. Again, for more details, go to CD Baby, and you can also buy it at iTunes.
The third album is called "Five Centuries". It contains favorites from organ music written in five different centuries. Well, for the 21st century, I included the world premier performance and recording of my own organ symphony, which I composed in 2007 based on melodies for the Torah service. Here's the CD Baby link, and here's the iTunes link for this album.
My fourth album is called "Herald Angels from Glory", and it's a Christmas album. Here's the CD Baby link for this one, and here's the iTunes link.
The fifth album is called "Big Bach Bash", and it consists entirely of large Bach organ works: toccatas, preludes, and fugues. If you love Bach organ music, this is the one for you! Here's the CD Baby link.
Recently, my 6th album, called "Emet V'Shalom" (which means "truth and peace") started selling on CD Baby. This is another album of my arrangements of Jewish melodies. Several of the tracks on this album are based on tunes that I learned at Congregation Emet V'Shalom (hence the album title), the Reform congregation in Nahariya, which we attend nearly every Friday night. Here's the CD Baby link.
My 7th album is quite different from the others. It consists entirely of old English organ music. For more info, check it out on CD Baby by clicking here.
My 8th album will soon be available on CD Baby, as well. It's a collection of traditional American tunes arranged for organ and is entitled "Stars and Stripes and Pipes".
CD Baby is currently in the process of arranging to sell all of this music digitally through Amazon (as MP3 downloads), but so far only "Wonderful Peace" seems to be available there. You can click here to see for yourself.
I am currently working on an album of old favorite American tunes, including "The Star-Spangled Banner", "Home on the Range", "Yankee Doodle", and many others.
If any of you have suggestions for future albums, please write to me and let me know what they are. There are quite a few more Jewish melodies that I know which I could arrange for organ. And, of course there are plenty more Christian hymns and favorite melodies that I could arrange, also.
I was born in Loma Linda, CA , in 1952, and lived in that area (known to Southern Californians as "The Inland Empire") most of my life. I graduated from high school (Loma Linda Academy ) in 1971. I got my B.A. (in math and music) from La Sierra University (it was then Loma Linda University, La Sierra Campus) in 1975, my M.S. in math from the University of Arkansas (Fayetteville) in 1977, and my Ph.D. in math from the University of California, Riverside , in 1980.
After finishing school, I worked for TRW Ballistic Missiles Division until I was laid off in 1991. From 1989 to 2005, I taught math at California State University, San Bernardino , and at various local community colleges (most recently only at Chaffey College ). So, I was a "freeway flyer ". I'm currently working as an English teacher over the internet. In August of 2007, I started teaching for Berlitz, a company that has been in the language learning business for more that 120 years! They are fairly new to the on-line business, of course, but they have translated their very well-developed and standardized material quite well to the new medium. Most of my Berlitz students are in Europe: Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Germany, France, The Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Italy, the Czech Republic, Serbia, Slovenia, Hungary, and quite a few other countries. We use VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) to communicate. We can also write on a virtual white board, and I can display the Berlitz materials there, also. We can NOT see each other, though!
I have two children: Amy, who was born in 1979, and Adrian, who was born in 1984. Although they don't live with me (they live with their mother), I am proud of them and love them very much.
From 1995 to 2005, I attended Beth Chayim Chadashim (BCC), in Los Angeles, and was a regular member there, attending almost every week until I moved to Israel. On my 44th birthday, in 1996, I finished my process of embracing the Jewish covenant and formally became a Jew. My Judaism has become an increasingly important part of who I am.
On June 1, 1996, David Fyffe and I were united in love in a beautiful
ceremony at BCC . Since
we are both men, legal marriage was not yet even a possibility for
us in California, but our wedding, in the presence of our community of
friends and family, is really much more meaningful and significant to
us. Nevertheless, we are frustrated that we cannot have the option of
availing ourselves of the many rights that legally married people
take for granted.
On December 27, 2005, we both left the United States for good
and moved to Israel (i.e., we made aliyah). We now are happily settled
into our new home in the beautiful
holy city of Tsfat, in the Galil (northern Israel). From the time we left
the U.S. until May of 2007, I kept an online diary of our adventures. Here's
the link to the beginning of it, and from
there you can continue through a couple of other files to read all of it.
I must warn you, though, that it's rather long! It's also possible that
some of the links within the postings will no longer work. The text itself,
though, should be okay. Recently, I started 2 new blogs on blogspot.com.
Here's a link to the
first, which is in English, and here's a link to the second,
which is in Hebrew.
Ever since I was a child, I have been interested in languages and linguistics. I studied Esperanto , the international language, on my own and became quite proficient in it. In high school, I studied French for two years, and I continued studying French in college. But I really never became sufficiently good at it to say that I speak it. In graduate school, I needed to pass reading knowledge tests of French and German, so I studied some of that, too, from my brother's textbook. My latest obsession has been learning Hebrew, both in its classical, biblical form and in its modern, Israeli form. I've gained a fair ability to read it, but I'm still struggling some with hearing and understanding it and with actually speaking it. My ability, and importantly my confidence, are improving daily as I actually use it to communicate with Israelis. Recently, I bought several books in Hebrew, mostly translations of English books actually, and have begun reading them, looking up words that I don't know. This is also helping me to build my Hebrew vocabulary.
I started piano lessons about a year before I started school, so I literally learned to read music before I learned to read English! I continued with either piano or organ lessons all the way through college. In college, I majored in music (as well as math), with organ as my major instrument. I was also interested in musical composition, and that interest has been blossoming more recently. Of course, you can check out my recent albums, mentioned above, and judge for yourself about this.
In recent years, my tastes in music have broadened. When I was young, I was a total classical music snob! Although I still love much classical music, I have also developed some taste for jazz and some other music.
Finally, in addition to the links embedded in the text, here are some more links to some of my favorite web sites. Some of these are mostly useful only in the States. Also, since the internet, of course, is so dynamic, some of these sites may already be gone by the time you try them. Oh well, c'est la vie!
Wikipedia (a marvelous
source of information about nearly anything; also available in many other
languages, including Hebrew!)
The Hunger
Site (you can go here every day to donate food to the hungry for free)
NPR (National Public
Radio)
Jerusalem Post online (my main English-language
source of Israeli news)