tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-74979013811892500412024-03-12T18:09:01.683-07:00Dr. Fuddle's Musical BlogJosephhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15682392925928157043noreply@blogger.comBlogger692125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7497901381189250041.post-38510718317057162432019-11-06T08:36:00.000-08:002019-11-06T08:36:05.204-08:00Keep Your Brain Young with Music<br />
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If you want to firm up your body, head to the gym. If you want to exercise your brain, listen to music.<br />
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“There are few things that stimulate the brain the way music does,” says one Johns Hopkins otolaryngologist. “If you want to keep your brain engaged throughout the aging process, listening to or playing music is a great tool. It provides a total brain workout.”<br />
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Research has shown that listening to music can reduce anxiety, blood pressure, and pain as well as improve sleep quality, mood, mental alertness, and memory.<br />
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<b>The Brain-Music Connection</b><br />
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Experts are trying to understand how our brains can hear and play music. A stereo system puts out vibrations that travel through the air and somehow get inside the ear canal. These vibrations tickle the eardrum and are transmitted into an electrical signal that travels through the auditory nerve to the brain stem, where it is reassembled into something we perceive as music.<br />
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Johns Hopkins researchers have had dozens of jazz performers and rappers improvise music while lying down inside an fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) machine to watch and see which areas of their brains light up.<br />
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“Music is structural, mathematical and architectural. It’s based on relationships between one note and the next. You may not be aware of it, but your brain has to do a lot of computing to make sense of it,” notes one otolaryngologist.<br />
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<b>Learn an Instrument </b><br />
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When 13 older adults took piano lessons, their attention, memory and problem-solving abilities improved, along with their moods and quality of life. You don’t have to become a pro, just take a few lessons.<br />
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<b>Everyday Brain Boosts from Music</b><br />
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The power of music isn’t limited to interesting research. Try these methods of bringing more music—and brain benefits—into your life.<br />
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<b>Jump-start your creativity.</b><br />
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Listen to what your kids or grandkids listen to, experts suggest. Often we continue to listen to the same songs and genre of music that we did during our teens and 20s, and we generally avoid hearing anything that’s not from that era.<br />
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New music challenges the brain in a way that old music doesn’t. It might not feel pleasurable at first, but that unfamiliarity forces the brain to struggle to understand the new sound.<br />
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<b>Recall a memory from long ago.</b><br />
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Reach for familiar music, especially if it stems from the same time period that you are trying to recall. Listening to the Beatles might bring you back to the first moment you laid eyes on your spouse, for instance.<br />
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<b>Listen to your body.</b><br />
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Pay attention to how you react to different forms of music, and pick the kind that works for you. What helps one person concentrate might be distracting to someone else, and what helps one person unwind might make another person jumpy.<br />
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<a href="https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/wellness-and-prevention/keep-your-brain-young-with-music">Read more</a><br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7497901381189250041.post-16193817791771122282019-10-22T14:41:00.000-07:002019-10-22T14:41:04.329-07:00The Composer and his Muse: Franz Liszt and Caroline de Saint-Cricq First Love<div style="text-align: center;">
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After Adam Liszt’s death in Bologne-sur-mer in 1827, Franz Liszt met his mother in Paris where they settled down. Liszt, at sixteen, was now the breadwinner of the Liszt family. In order to earn regular income for his mother and himself, Liszt became a piano teacher in Paris for the aristocracy. was sixteen when she met Liszt. He became her piano teacher, and the two quickly fell in love.<br />
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Caroline’s lessons were supervised by her mother. Additionally, her mother approved of the relationship. After becoming ill quite quickly in 1828, she told the Count from her deathbed: “If she loves him, let her be happy." The Count likely thought these words were demented mutterings of a woman at death’s door. He probably did not take this comment seriously and therefore was not fully aware of the relationship blooming between Liszt and his student. Caroline’s mother died in June of 1828.<br />
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Though the lessons were postponed due to a period of mourning, Liszt continued to stop by the Saint-Cricq home to check on the grieving Caroline. Their lessons resumed, according to Sitwell, the death of Caroline’s mother may have been an excuse to continue lessons as a distraction. The Count was often away on government business, and as such the young couple spent time together daily without supervision. Zsolt Harsányi in his book, Immortal Franz: the Life and Loves of Franz Liszt, mentions an aunt who supervised at first, but their gradually extending lessons tired her and she left the two young people alone.<br />
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On one fateful occasion, Liszt stayed conversing on topics such as music, poetry, and religion with Caroline past midnight. He had an encounter with the porter of the Saint-Cricq building when he needed to be let out. Adam Walker claims that Liszt was ignorant of the need to fill the porter’s purse in order to remain anonymous. Derek Watson, alternatively, says that Liszt failed to tip the butler who complained to the Count of the late hour. Either way, the servant in question informed Pierre de Saint-Cricq of this occurrence, and the Count met Liszt the next time the musician stopped by. After reminding Liszt of the difference in class between Caroline and himself, the Count ended the lessons and told Liszt that he was not to return to their household, nor see his daughter again. This class difference was already chafing at Liszt, so it was probably a heavy blow.<br />
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From the end of the affair in 1828 to about the time of the July Revolution of 1830, Liszt was depressed and ill. He was mistakenly pronounced dead in October of 1828 by an article published in Le Corsaire.<br />
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Liszt was certainly not dead, but his romantic relationship with Caroline de Saint-Cricq was over. Though she played an absent role in his life as the symbol of his first love, he only saw her once again in 1844, at her home in Pau, France. He wrote "Ich möchte hingehn" (I would like to go away), later, inspired by their reunion. According to Adrian Williams, she said that Liszt was the “single shining star” of her life. <br />
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<a href="http://the100.ru/en/lovers/franz-liszt.html">Read more</a><br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7497901381189250041.post-24343000367832895852019-10-15T13:25:00.000-07:002019-10-15T13:25:23.383-07:00Lang Lang Highlights the Lack of Music Education<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="480" src="//player.ooyala.com/static/v4/stable/4.32.8/skin-plugin/iframe.html?ec=J0ZnZlaDE6uHACW-lXY4GLCSQrJ09paJ&pbid=ab76c1ef73e1464c9aaacc8b369f967e&pcode=lybG4xOtZ5VVs97XtFOmFWfHkY5g" width="640"></iframe>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7497901381189250041.post-77537037007768583182019-10-10T00:00:00.000-07:002019-10-07T18:58:31.580-07:00Happy Birthday Giuseppe Verdi the "King of Opera"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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He was born near Busseto to a provincial family of moderate means, and developed a musical education with the help of a local patron. Verdi came to dominate the Italian opera scene after the era of Vincenzo Bellini, Gaetano Donizetti, and Gioachino Rossini, whose works significantly influenced him.<br />
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He struggled for success and in 1842, at age 28, it finally came with his bold new opera Nabucco, about the fall of Jerusalem in 587 B.C. While the opera is justly famous for its moving chorus "Va, pensiero" — which became a rallying cry for Italy's struggle for independence and was sung spontaneously by a few hundred thousand people at Verdi's funeral in 1901 — it should be noted that the entire opera is a forward thrusting, rollicking affair. You would not be incorrect in describing it as "ass-kicking Verdi."<br />
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It's fun to trivialize Trovatore, Verdi's 18th opera, because of its outlandish plot. The Marx brothers spoofed it magnificently (but with a palpable appreciation) in their 1935 film A Night at the Opera. OK, so an old gypsy woman throws the wrong baby into the bonfire, setting off a string of unfortunate events. It could happen to anyone! Still, Trovatore is a treasure trove of some of Verdi's best and most hummable tunes, and they come lickety-split one after another. There's the crowd-pleasing "Anvil Chorus," plus "Di quella pira," with its brain-splitting high notes for the tenor, two gorgeous arias for soprano ("Tacea la notte" and "D'amor sull'ali rosee"), the exuberant "Stride la vampa" for the mezzo-soprano and "Il balen," a gorgeous moment of reflection for the baritone.</div>
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Verdi's operas act on deeply sociopolitical levels, and La Traviata is a perfect example. Here Verdi empowers the common individual. The opera stars a prostitute — something unheard of at the time — and she's the smartest, most sane and honest person in the opera. It takes very little imagination to see how this realistic story (nice boy falls in love with hooker, who breaks up with him to save his family's honor) dovetails with our contemporary concerns. La Traviata was also an act of daring for Verdi, a little jab at the conservatives of his native Parma who balked at the fact that he wasn't married to the woman he lived with. The lead soprano role is so multifaceted and difficult it almost requires three different types of sopranos to pull it off.<br />
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By the time Verdi wrote Simon Boccanegra, he was the king of opera. Even so, Boccanegra flopped at its 1857 premiere. (Verdi revised it successfully 24 years later.) It's not too nerdy to note that whatever one thinks of the convoluted plot (a 14th century doge, amid intense political maneuvering, manages to find his long-lost daughter), the work contains examples of two Verdi trademarks: The father-daughter duet and the "Verdi baritone." Verdi excelled at richly drawn, highly expressive roles for the baritone voice (Rigoletto, Falstaff, Macbeth, Iago, Nabucco) and Boccanegra is one of the most rewarding and detailed. He also focused on father-daughter relationships and the duet "Orfanella il tetto umile" from Boccanegra's first act, when he realizes Amelia is indeed his daughter, is a two-hankie affair.<br />
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Near the end of Verdi's incredible six decades in opera, he threatened to quit, but instead came up with one fresh work after another. Finally, after some two dozen serious operas, he capped it all off with a comedy. Falstaff is witty and furiously paced but with the autumnal warmth of an old man looking back on his life with a chuckle. Falstaff's Act 3 monologue is a slice of operatic heaven. Drenched from being dumped in the river (with the laundry), Falstaff muses on his fate in a cruel world. As the wine warms his immense belly in the late afternoon sun, he's revived, and the trill of a cricket (listen for it in the music!) brings a smile. Falstaff is one of three ingenious operas (with Macbeth and Otello) Verdi based on Shakespeare. The composer ends his final masterwork with a chorus of "Tutto nel mondo è burla" — everything in the world is a joke.<br />
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<a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/deceptivecadence/2013/10/09/230068774/act-like-you-know-giuseppe-verdi">Read more </a><br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7497901381189250041.post-60179316904326952162019-10-07T00:00:00.000-07:002019-10-07T00:00:06.611-07:00Children and Music<img alt="An infant at a piano" height="480" src="https://www.brighthorizons.com/-/media/BH-New/ENews-Images/Widen_t15eoc__MG_5596_music_rhythm_children.ashx" width="640" /><br />
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There is no downside to bringing children and music together through fun activities. We are able to enjoy the benefits of music from the moment we’re born. Although a good dose of Mozart is probably not increasing our brain power, it’s enjoyable and beautiful. From the pure pleasure of listening to soothing sounds and rhythmic harmonies, to gaining new language and social skills music can enliven and enrich the lives of children and the people who care for them.<br />
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<b>Toddlers and Music: </b>Toddlers love to dance and move to music. The key to toddler music is repetition, which encourages language and memorization. Silly songs make toddlers laugh. Try singing a familiar song and inserting a silly word in the place of the correct word, like “Mary had a little spider” instead of lamb. Let children reproduce rhythms by clapping or tapping objects.<br />
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<b>Preschoolers and Music: </b>Preschoolers enjoy singing just to be singing. They aren’t self-conscious about their ability and most are eager to let their voices roar. They like songs that repeat words and melodies, use rhythms with a definite beat, and ask them to do things. Preschool children enjoy nursery rhymes and songs about familiar things like toys, animals, play activities, and people. They also like finger plays and nonsense rhymes with or without musical accompaniment.<br />
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<b>School-Age Children and Music:</b> Most young school-age children are intrigued by kids’ singalong songs that involve counting, spelling, or remembering a sequence of events. School-age children begin expressing their likes and dislikes of different types of music. They may express an interest in music education, such as music lessons for kids.<br />
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<b>Teens and Music: </b>Teenagers may use musical experiences to form friendships and to set themselves apart from parents and younger kids. They often want to hang out and listen to music after school with a group of friends. Remember those days of basement and garage bands? Teens often have a strong interest in taking music lessons or playing in a band.<br />
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<a href="http://There%20is%20no%20downside%20to%20bringing%20children%20and%20music%20together%20through%20fun%20activities.%20We%20are%20able%20to%20enjoy%20the%20benefits%20of%20music%20from%20the%20moment%20we%E2%80%99re%20born.%20Although%20a%20good%20dose%20of%20Mozart%20is%20probably%20not%20increasing%20our%20brain%20power,%20it%E2%80%99s%20enjoyable%20and%20beautiful.%20From%20the%20pure%20pleasure%20of%20listening%20to%20soothing%20sounds%20and%20rhythmic%20harmonies,%20to%20gaining%20new%20language%20and%20social%20skills%20music%20can%20enliven%20and%20enrich%20the%20lives%20of%20children%20and%20the%20people%20who%20care%20for%20them./">Read more</a><br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7497901381189250041.post-42351953050364573392019-10-01T00:00:00.000-07:002019-10-01T00:00:09.921-07:00A fun lesson in how to get kids into classical music<br />
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<span style="font-size: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">While the merits of classical music are almost limitless, it is oftentimes a bit tricky to get kids to listen to and love it. With this problem in mind, one of our favorite experimental groups has decided to find a novel way to approach and answer the question. Take a look and listen.<br /><br />By transforming contemporary pop, which kids all love, into some legendary classical compositions, the group </span></span><span style="font-size: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/collectivecadenza">CDZA, short for Collective Cadenza</a>,, has taken a very fun, "spoonful of sugar" approach to the classic (ba-dump-bump!) problem. They write about this latest project:<br /><br />How do you teach the classics to students today? How do you get students thinking critically about how Mozart, Beethoven, and Bach are relevant to music today? These composers provide the building blocks of modern music, and are necessary knowledge to a well-rounded musical education, but how do you get students to pay attention to these long-deceased classical music masters?<br /><br />CDZA presents an innovative way to connect with students and teach them the classics.</span></span><br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7497901381189250041.post-66279211841945520672019-09-26T00:00:00.000-07:002019-09-26T11:40:43.155-07:00Happy Birthday George Gershwin<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">George Gershwin wrote great songs and shows for the theatre, but he always fancied himself as a serious composer. And he was - in fact, one of the 20th century’s greatest.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">George Gershwin was born in New York City into a Russian Jewish immigrant family. As a boy, George frequented the local Yiddish theatres, ran errands for them and appeared onstage as an extra. Around the age of 10, he took to playing the piano his parents had bought for his older brother Ira. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Gershwin began his career as a song plugger in New York’s Tin Pan Alley. To earn extra, he also worked as a rehearsal pianist for Broadway singers. In 1916, he composed his first published song, ‘When You Want ’Em You Can’t Get ’Em.’ His first big hit was 'Swanee', composed in 10 minutes on a bus. Not long afterwards, the singer Al Jolson heard it and recorded it. ‘Swanee’ sold a million sheet music copies, and an estimated two million records. It became the biggest-selling song of Gershwin’s career.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">In his 20s, Gershwin started composing Broadway musical theatre works with his brother Ira writing the lyrics. They even created an experimental one-act jazz opera Blue Monday, set in Harlem – a pre-cursor to Porgy and Bess. In 1924, the brothers collaborated on the stage musical Lady Be Good, which included the classic song Fascinating Rhythm. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Gershwin's most ambitious composition was Porgy and Bess, which he called a ‘folk opera’. The action takes place in the fictional neighbourhood of Catfish Row, South Carolina. The opera contains some of Gershwin's most sophisticated music and some huge hit arias – ‘Summertime’, ‘I Got Plenty o' Nuttin'’ and ‘It Ain't Necessarily So’. When it was first performed in 1935, it was a box office flop. It is now widely regarded as one of the most important American operas of the 20th century. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">After the disappointing reception for Porgy and Bess, Gershwin moved to Hollywood and worked on many film scores. His music for Shall We Dance, starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, married ballet with jazz in a new way, and ran for more than an hour in length. It took Gershwin several months to write and orchestrate it.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Early in 1937, Gershwin began to complain of blinding headaches and there were signs he was suffering coordination problems. He was diagnosed with a brain tumour. An operation was unsuccessful, and Gershwin died on 11 July at the age of 38.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">From the opening clarinet glissando of Rhapsody in Blue to such standards as 'Embraceable You' and 'Someone to Watch Over Me', Gershwin's music has been part of our world for almost a century. It evokes an era of glamour and sophistication and gave the United States its first authentic voice in the concert hall. The American singer Michael Feinstein has said, 'The Gershwin legacy is extraordinary because George Gershwin died in 1937, but his music is as fresh and vital today as when he originally created it.'</span></span><br />
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<a href="https://www.classicfm.com/composers/gershwin/guides/gershwin-facts/george-gershwin-14/"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Read more</span></span></a><br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7497901381189250041.post-55731628335233702422019-09-09T10:40:00.002-07:002019-09-09T10:40:11.045-07:00Four composers at the court of Louis XIV<h3>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">A quick look at those who brought music to the Sun King’s palace</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">Louis XIV was crowned King of France in 1654. His reign of 72 years and 110 days is the longest recorded of any monarch in European history, and he is often seen as the echt example of an absolute monarch – his power, so he perceived, came directly from God. His enthusiasm for the arts brought about musical riches that were the envy of Europe, and influenced composers for years to come.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">While the French court was aware of Italian operatic practices, the musical styles that developed there in the late 17th century were considerably different. Castrati were not a common sight in France, and there was a significant emphasis on vocal and instrumental technique rather than the acrobatic, virtuosic performances seen in Italy. Here, we introduce four of the composers present at Louis XIV's court, as well as our recommended works.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">The Italian born Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632-87) – composer, dancer, violinist and comedian – was the architect of the French national style. He became the most powerful musician in France, a true Troubadour of the era, and held a virtual monopoly over court music. His music is known for its power and vivacity: lively in the fast movements, deep and emotional in the slower. He is also credited with the invention of the French overture, a musical form used extensively in the Baroque and Classical eras, particularly by Handel and Bach. He died from gangrene after driving a conducting stick through his foot.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">Michel-Richard de Lalande (1657-1726) was head of music in the Chapel Royal for longer than any other composer. In this capacity he brought the grand motet – a sacred work pleasing to Louis XIV because of its pomp and grandeur – to its zenith. He delighted in contrasting solo airs with homophonic (all parts moving together like a hymn) semi-choirs, and large choruses using many voices moving independently.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">The Hotteterres were a multitalented family of woodwind players, composers and makers, who in about 1670 did a makeover on the flute, oboe and bassoon. This greatly improved the tuning and tone, and enabled players to perform in an increased range of keys. The family’s most celebrated member was Jacques-Martin Hotteterre, whose first published work, Principes de la Flute Traversière (1707) is the first known essay on flute-playing. The Hotteterres wrote lots of tuneful suites and sonatas for wind instruments.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">François Couperin (1668-1733) was the greatest French composer between Lully and Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683-1764) and the finest composer of chamber music. His exquisite works, likened in their detail to the paintings of Watteau, combine highly ornamented refined melodies with sumptuous harmony. He was known as Couperin ‘the Great’, with the inclusion of the epithet to distinguish him from other members of the musically talented Couperin family.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><i>This article first appeared in the August 2008 issue of the BBC Music Magazine</i></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><i>More at <a href="http://www.classical-music.com/article/four-composers-court-louis-xiv">ClassicalMusic.com</a></i></span></span><br />
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</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7497901381189250041.post-21902736595132950562019-09-09T00:00:00.000-07:002019-09-09T00:00:00.769-07:00Classical music inspired by the Jazz Age:<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">Gershwin, Rhapsody in Blue</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">When it comes to jazzy classical music, Gershwin's your guy. His Rhapsody in Blue from 1924 is one of the most famous examples of his unique style, from the boozy opening clarinet tune to the virtuosic piano solos throughout. It encapsulates the spirit of the Jazz Age - so much so, that Baz Lurhmann uses the piece to accompany the decadent party scene in his film adaptation of The Great Gatsby.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">Copland, Piano Concerto </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">"The slow blues and the snappy number". That's how Copland described the two sections of his impressive Piano Concerto, and it sums up the 1926 piece pretty perfectly. It's the ultimate example of jazz-classical fusion, both indulgent and refined in equal measure.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">Gershwin, An American in Paris</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Strolling through the streets of Paris in 1920s, this piece attempts to capture the sights and sounds of the city. Gershwin even brought back a few horns from Parisian taxis to add some authentic Parisian noise to the New York premier.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">Weill, The Threepenny Opera</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">European swing, American jazz, and opera. It's all there in Weill's 1928 opera, set, unexpectedly, in Victorian London. The opening song, The Ballad of Mackie Messer, translated into English as Mack the Knife, has now become a jazz standard in its own right.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">Songs from The Threepenny Opera have been widely covered and become standards, most notably "Die Moritat von Mackie Messer" ("The Ballad of Mack the Knife") and "Seeräuberjenny" ("Pirate Jenny").</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">Stravinsky, Piano-Rag Music</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">Stravinsky proved himself in the field of angular tunes and stabbing rhythms in his 1910 ballet, The Firebird. It was only a matter of time before the quirky rag-time dance got its own treatment by the composer, and the results are remarkable - it's jazzy and jarring all at once, with a menacing sense of fun.</span><br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7497901381189250041.post-2447365012882752262019-09-05T00:00:00.000-07:002019-09-03T14:59:55.794-07:00Happy Birthday John Cage!<br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">An American composer and music theorist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde. Critics have lauded him as one of the most influential composers of the 20th century. He was also instrumental in the development of modern dance, mostly through his association with choreographer Merce Cunningham, who was also Cage's romantic partner for most of their lives. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br />Born in Los Angeles in 1912, Cage studied for a short time at Pamona College, and later at UCLA with classical composer Arthur Schoenberg. There he realized that the music he wanted to make was radically different from the music of his time. “I certainly had no feeling for harmony, and Schoenberg thought that that would make it impossible for me to write music. He said ‘You’ll come to a wall you won’t be able to get through.’ So I said, ‘I’ll beat my head against that wall.'” But it wasn’t long before Cage found that there were others equally interested in making art in ways that broke from the rigid forms of the past. Two of the most important of Cage’s early collaborators were the dancer <a href="https://www.wfmt.com/2017/02/24/composer-john-cage-choreographer-merce-cunningham-changed-art-collaboration/">Merce Cunningham</a> and the painter <a href="http://www.phaidon.com/agenda/art/articles/2015/march/02/when-john-cage-met-robert-rauschenberg/">Robert Rauschenberg</a>.</span></span><br />
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The piece 4’33” written by John Cage, is possibly the most famous and important piece in twentieth century avant-garde. 4’33” was a distillation of years of working with found sound, noise, and alternative instruments. In one short piece, Cage broke from the history of classical composition and proposed that the primary act of musical performance was not making music, but listening.</div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7497901381189250041.post-23111261131404894432019-08-22T00:00:00.000-07:002019-08-21T13:42:39.860-07:00 Happy Birthday Claude Debussy<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Born in 1862, Claude-Achille Debussy was one of the most important French composers ever to sit at a piano, but he also boasted a romantic history to make even the most salacious tabloid journalist salivate.<br />
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Aged just 18 Debussy began an eight-year affair with Blanche Vasnier, wife of a wealthy Parisian lawyer. After Blanche, Debussy lived ‘in sin’ with Garielle Dupont, a tailor’s daughter from Lisieux. He cheated on Gaby with Thérèse Roger (to whom he was briefly engaged) before leaving her for her friend, fashion model Rosalie Texier, whom he did eventually marry. Rosalie clearly had the looks but not the brain to interest Debussy long-term, and she was soon packed back to her father’s home when Debussy met the captivating Emma Bardac, the mother of one of his students and wife of a Parisian banker. It’s something of an understatement to say that Rosalie did not take the rejection well. She shot herself in the chest while standing in the middle of Paris’s Place de la Concorde. Amazingly she survived this violent suicide attempt, but the bullet stayed lodged in her spine until her death 28 years later.<br />
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This was one scandal too many for Debussy. He and the now pregnant Emma found themselves so unpopular that they were forced to flee to England, before eventually returning to France for the birth of their eponymous daughter Claude- Emma.<br />
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When Parisians first heard Debussy’s music they didn’t
know what to make of it. It was different to anything they had heard
before, but they liked it. His visionary Préludeàl’après-midi d’unfaune
premiered in 1894 and even now when you listen to the music, every note
is surprising. It sounds incredibly earthy and sensuous, yet deliciously
light. Predictably the work was not without its critics, but it got a
standing ovation at its premiere and it is still popular today.<br />
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Inspired
by Stephane Mallarmé’s poem ‘Afternoon of a Faun’, the work tells of a
faun trying to seduce two nymphs. The poem is full of the sounds of
nature and has a sultry, hazy atmosphere, all of which can be heard in
the music. The faun tries to seduce his nymphs with sound by making a
flute, an incident from the poem which can clearly be heard in the work.
Just as Mallarmé’s Faun inspired Debussy, Debussy’s Faun inspired a
ballet by the world renowned Vaslav Nijinsky in 1912.<br />
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Though
he rejected the term himself, Debussy is considered to be a central
figure of the Impressionist movement by music historians.<br />
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When Debussy died in Paris in March 1918 after a long illness, Stravinsky honored his colleague with a musical tribute:<br />
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“I was sincerely attached to him as a man, and I grieved not only at the loss of one whose great friendship had been marked with unfailing kindness towards myself and my work, but at the passing of an artist who, in spite of maturity and health already hopelessly undermined, had still been able to retain his creative powers to the full, and whose musical genius had been in no way impaired throughout the whole period of his activity.”<br />
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When the Parisian Revue Musicale published a memorial supplement to Debussy, Stravinsky submitted a chorale that would, a short while later, form the final section of his Symphonies of Wind Instruments, a single-movement piece for twenty-four woodwind and brass instruments dedicated to the memory of Claude Debussy.<br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7497901381189250041.post-52135239079963618612019-08-19T00:00:00.000-07:002019-08-19T00:00:03.192-07:00Was this man Beethoven’s ‘Salieri’?<h2>
Daniel Steibelt challenged the great composer to a duel.</h2>
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The 1984 film Amadeus made Antonio Salieri practically a household word. After a couple of centuries of relative obscurity, Salieri came to be known to moviegoers as the jealous confidant and rival of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.<br />
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Another musical great, Ludwig van Beethoven, also had a rival, though it’s unclear whether there is a filmmaker out there who is keen on telling his story on the silver screen.<br />
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The story of Daniel Steibelt came to light recently, thanks to an article at the website <a href="http://historycollection.co./">historycollection.co.</a> Steibelt was “a German born classical pianist and composer“ who “apparently also had a huge ego because he challenged the one and only Beethoven to a musical duel in Vienna in 1800,” writes Lindsay Stidham.<br />
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Like Salieri, Steibelt achieved a modicum of success in his day. “He rose to great popularity with ‘La Coquette,’ a song he composed for Marie Antoinette,” Stidham writes. The young composer made his way to Vienna in 1800, where he first floated the idea of a duel with his fellow German composer, Beethoven, who accepted the challenge.<br />
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The city’s music patrons liked the idea of a duel between Steibelt and Beethoven. Each musician got a Prince to sponsor the idea.<br />
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The contest took place at the home of Austrian nobleman Count Moritz von Fries. Steibelt brought along a string quintet, which performed a stormy composition, and with bravado, he improvised at the keyboard.<br />
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Beethoven, not to be outdone, picked up the sheet music from the string quintet, placed it on the piano upside down, and worked out his own improvisation on one of its themes, which he showed up to be overly simplistic. It was clearly the more inspired performance, and the gathering recognized it. Humiliated, Steibelt stormed out of the room while Beethoven was still playing, followed by his prince-benefactor.<br />
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Though Steibelt has been an obscure figure in recent years, he went on to have a fairly successful career, even writing music for Napoleon and Russian Czar Alexander I before his death in St. Petersburg in 1823.<br />
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But it’s the genius of Beethoven that has stood the test of time.<br />
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Daniel Steibelt (1765-1823) : Three Sonatas Op.51 - No.2</div>
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I. Allegro Moderato<br />
II. Air Allemande avec Variations, Moderato<br />
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The second movement is variations on the well-known German air "Ach, du lieber Augustin".<br />
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<a href="https://aleteia.org/2017/04/17/was-this-man-beethovens-salieri/">Read more</a><br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7497901381189250041.post-84937881285606282082019-08-05T00:00:00.000-07:002019-08-05T00:00:16.070-07:00Seven of the best works by Rachmaninov<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Rachmaninov's compositions were the last representations of the Romantic Style in Russia. Rachmaninov was born into a musical family and studied the piano at the Conservatoire in St Petersburg from the age of nine. Despite the enormous span of his hands, his technique was precise and clear. His incredible skills as a pianist make his compositions some of the most difficult for virtuoso pianists.<br />
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<b>Prelude in C sharp minor Op. 3 No. 2 </b><br />
Although less assertive than his later works, the Prelude in C sharp minor won Rachmaninov much of his early popularity and became a frequently requested encore in concert. With its attractive 'dark-hued' disposition, it is impressive that this work was composed even before his graduation from the Conservatoire in St Petersburg in 1891.<br />
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<b>Piano Concerto Op. 18 No. 2</b><br />
Rachmaninov composed his second piano concerto after a particularly low period, professionally and emotionally, spurred by the difficult reception of his first symphony. The piece is notoriously difficult to play (not everyone can span 12 piano keys with one hand!), and was dedicated to his therapist, Dr. Nicolai Dhal, who encouraged him to start composing again despite bouts of depression.<br />
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<b>Prelude Op. 23 No. 5 </b><br />
One of 24 movements in this cycle, No. 5 is a brief, melodic and delicate Prelude. The floating melody, which gradually gains momentum, shows something of Rachmaninov's idiomatic piano writing and perhaps even subtle evocations of Debussy's piano music.<br />
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<b>'Bogoroditse devo' from his All-Night Vigil </b><br />
This painfully evocative movement is set to the well-known Ave Maria text taken from the Russian Orthodox All-Night Vigil ceremony. The texture is dense throughout and reaches an emotional climax.<br />
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<b>Prelude Op. 32 No. 7</b><br />
This prelude adopts a mysterious quality thanks to the recurring dotted rhythmic motif. Tonal ambiguity constantly asks the listener to interpret whether the piece leans more towards a major or minor tonal world.<br />
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<b>The Isle of the Dead (1908) </b><br />
This atmospheric orchestral piece shows the ease with which Rachmaninov was able to evoke a sense of place via musical means (tone-painting). Inspired by a painting by Arnold Bocklin, the orchestral colours reflect the sounds of waves and oars as they meet the dark waters, in a characteristically late Romantic style.<br />
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<b>Moment Musicaux (1829) </b><br />
This set of solo piano pieces are similar to miniatures: each moment musical features unique passage work, and sound like separate introspective worlds. The miniature size of these pieces show a more humble side to Rachmaninov's usual bravura virtuoso style.<br />
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<a href="http://www.classical-music.com/article/seven-best-works-rachmaninov">Read more </a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7497901381189250041.post-74987204122972907692019-07-22T00:00:00.000-07:002019-07-22T00:00:09.228-07:008 Reasons You Should Listen More To Classical Music<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<b>1. It makes your brain work better</b><br />
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At Northumbria University (UK), a research team performed some experiments on students’ brain functioning when doing tests while they listened to Vivaldi’s Spring concerto. They were answering faster and better than when they listened to the sadder Autumn concerto. The conclusion was that brain activity is improved when listening to pleasant and arousing stimuli. If you want to refresh your memory on the uplifting Vivaldi Spring concerto, you can listen to it here.<br />
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<b>2. It helps people with dementia</b><br />
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If a loved one suffers from dementia or Alzheimer’s, it is well worth noting the studies showing how music can help them to regain memories and enormously improve their quality of life. Watch the video here of a man who was brought back to life by listening to music he loved in the past. If your loved one was particularly fond of any music, classical or non, they can be enormously helped by listening to the same music. The explanation is that because music affects many parts of the brain, it can reawaken those parts of the brain not affected by dementia. This is especially true when the music is linked to a particular event or memory. It is fascinating to read the book by the late neurologist Oliver Sacks called Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain which explains the phenomenon and recounts many moving stories.<br />
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“People with Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias can respond to music when nothing else reaches them. Alzheimer’s can totally destroy the ability to remember family members or events from one’s own life—but musical memory somehow survives the ravages of disease, and even in people with advanced dementia, music can often reawaken personal memories and associations that are otherwise lost.”- Oliver Sacks<br />
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<b>3. It can help you sleep better</b><br />
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There are many studies on the beneficial effects of classical music on sleep quality. One study shows that a group of students who listened to relaxing classical music were getting much better sleep quality than when they were exposed to an audio book, for example. Researchers are convinced that music is better than verbal stimuli for the purposes of relaxing body and mind before sleep.<br />
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<b>4. It can calm you down when driving</b><br />
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Are you prone to road rage at times? The German government is worried about the high number of road accidents on the country’s motorways (2.4 million annually). Many of these accidents are caused by aggressive driving and road rage. To counteract this, the German Ministry of Transport has released a CD for drivers which features Mozart’s Piano Concerto No.21. played by the Minister himself! He hopes that the soothing effects of music will calm drivers down. (Fun fact: There is no word in German for road rage). Let us hope they will not need it now.<br />
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<b>5. It can help reduce pain</b><br />
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Various studies show that listening to music can reduce post operative and chronic pain especially after surgery. It will never replace painkillers of course but will be a great help in reducing depression, disability and pain. The reason seems to be that it can help to tune out the pain by increasing the brain’s reward center, thereby alleviating the sensation of pain.<br />
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“One good thing about music, is when it hits you, you feel no pain.”- Bob Marley<br />
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<b>6. It can help you express your emotions.</b><br />
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“If music be the food of love, play on, Give me excess of it.” – William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night<br />
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Music can express what we may never be capable of verbally and thank goodness for that. We may have to struggle with anger, love, depression and many other emotions and feelings. When we connect with music, we can begin to cope. It helps us to be more honest with ourselves. Research at The Southern Methodist University shows that when listening to classical music, undergraduate students were more communicative and open about their emotions. Everyone has their favorite playlist to help them when they feel romantic, lazy or exhausted. Listening to classical music helps you express your emotions in unique ways.<br />
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“Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.” – Sigmund Freud<br />
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<b>7. It can help blood pressure</b><br />
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It is fascinating to discover that cardiologists have found a connection between Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and our blood pressure levels. They found that this piece and many other classical music pieces are in natural sync with our own body’s natural rhythm and that helps to keep blood pressure at optimal levels. Professor Bernardi at the University of Pavia in Italy has done some interesting research on this.<br />
<b><br />8. It can help people on diets</b><br />
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You now how difficult it is to eat slowly, chew your food properly, and really enjoy it. Playing soft music and dimming lights in dining areas has been found to help people enjoy their food more and eat less! This is the main result of a study carried out at Cornell University. On the other hand, places like fast food joints use brighter lights to encourage fast eating and more profit for the business. You can improve the way you experience food by being more intentional in the way you eat, including playing soft music during meals.<br />
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<a href="http://www.lifehack.org/289981/8-reasons-you-should-listen-more-classical-music">Read more at Lifehack.com</a><br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7497901381189250041.post-68582969097985176402019-07-07T00:00:00.000-07:002019-07-10T15:28:28.682-07:00The Composer and his Muse: Gustav and Alma Mahler<br />
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Not just the inspiration behind several of Gustav Mahler’s symphonies, Alma Mahler-Werfel (née Schindler) was the ultimate groupie of the twentieth century's European artistic elite, serving as muse to visionary men in many creative fields. When Mahler first met her, she was already a renowned beauty in Viennese intellectual circles, with the painter Klimt wrapped around her little finger and an affair underway with her composition teacher Alexander von Zemlinsky.<br />
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During his second season in Vienna, Mahler acquired a spacious modern apartment on the Auenbruggerstrasse and built a summer villa on land he had acquired next to his new composing studio at Maiernigg. In November 1901, he met Alma Schindler, the stepdaughter of painter Carl Moll, at a social gathering that included the theatre director Max Burckhard. Alma was not initially keen to meet Mahler, on account of "the scandals about him and every young woman who aspired to sing in opera". The two engaged in a lively disagreement about a ballet by Alexander von Zemlinsky (Alma was one of Zemlinsky's pupils), but agreed to meet at the Hofoper the following day. This meeting led to a rapid courtship; Mahler and Alma were married at a private ceremony on 9 March 1902. Alma was by then pregnant with her first child, a daughter Maria Anna, who was born on 3 November 1902. A second daughter, Anna, was born in 1904.<br />
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Friends of the couple were surprised by the marriage and dubious of its wisdom. Mahler's family considered Alma to be flirtatious, unreliable, and too fond of seeing young men fall for her charms. Mahler was by nature moody and authoritarian—Natalie Bauer-Lechner, his earlier partner, said that living with him was "like being on a boat that is ceaselessly rocked to and fro by the waves". Alma soon became resentful that, on Mahler's insistence that there could only be one composer in the family, she had given up her music studies. She wrote in her diary: "How hard it is to be so mercilessly deprived of ... things closest to one's heart". Mahler's requirement that their married life be organised around his creative activities imposed strains, and precipitated rebellion on Alma's part; the marriage was nevertheless marked at times by expressions of considerable passion, particularly from Mahler.<br />
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The Adagietto of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony is dedicated to his young wife in what friends and contemporaries described as a “declaration of love”. <br />
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The Sixth may be subtitled Tragische but, ironically, his most
pessimistic symphony was composed in 1903-4 during a period of relative
domestic bliss and features a soaring melody widely known as the “Alma
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He also dedicated the Eighth Symphony of a Thousand to his wife.
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In June 1910, after becoming severely depressed in the wake their daughter Maria's death who died of scarlet fever or diphtheria, Alma began an affair with the young architect Walter Gropius (later head of the Bauhaus), whom she met during a rest at a spa.<br />
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Alma's affair with the architect Walter Gropius wrenched from Mahler some of his most anguished musical outpourings. The manuscript of his Tenth, unfinished, symphony is littered with annotations of broken-hearted utterances: “Why hast Thou forsaken me?”… “To live for you! To die for you!”<br />
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Following the emotional crisis in their marriage after Gustav's discovery of Alma's affair with Gropius, Gustav began to take a serious interest in Alma's musical compositions, regretting his earlier dismissive attitude and taking promotional actions. Gustav edited some of her songs (Die stille Stadt, In meines Vaters Garten, Laue Sommernacht, Bei dir ist es traut, Ich wandle unter Blumen).Upon his urging, and under his guidance, Alma prepared five of her songs for publication (they were issued in 1910, by Gustav's own publisher, Universal Edition).<br />
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In February 1911, Gustav fell severely ill with an infection related to a heart defect that had been diagnosed several years earlier. He died on 18 May.<br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7497901381189250041.post-21788364015179798882019-06-24T00:00:00.000-07:002019-06-25T13:37:51.541-07:00Beethoven Suffered from Lead Poisoning<iframe frameborder="0" height="290" scrolling="no" src="https://www.npr.org/player/embed/5041495/5041522" title="NPR embedded audio player" width="100%"></iframe>
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-mQrSjQbiB_U/XQPpTjThRbI/AAAAAAAAnRU/h8BmdbwutlkpkqFKRwKtkd33A0dzeYOfQCLcBGAs/s1600/beethovens-hair-auction-sothebys.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1175" data-original-width="1000" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-mQrSjQbiB_U/XQPpTjThRbI/AAAAAAAAnRU/h8BmdbwutlkpkqFKRwKtkd33A0dzeYOfQCLcBGAs/s320/beethovens-hair-auction-sothebys.png" width="272" /></a>Tests confirm that Ludwig van Beethoven suffered from lead poisoning. The legendary composer, who experienced decades of illness that left him in misery for most of his life, died in 1827.<br />
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Researchers aren't sure why his lead levels were so high, but they have some ideas.
"There are many possibilities," says Bill Walsh, who headed a team that studied Beethoven's hair samples and fragments from his skull at the Department of Energy laboratory in Argonne, Ill.<br />
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The composer was a wine lover, and wine at the time was known to contain high lead levels. He also drank out of a goblet made partially of lead and stayed at a spa where he drank mineral water, Walsh says.
But Walsh says Beethoven may not have been exposed to higher-than-normal lead levels. The composer may have been hyper-sensitive to lead and his body may not have been able to eliminate it, Walsh says.
Walsh says researchers are convinced the hair and bone samples they tested are Beethoven's because they came from two different sources and were matched by DNA tests.<br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-AuhRlc8-I9c/XRJ941YgnKI/AAAAAAAAnZA/7Vz4X0HCwOs2r2bsPT3nDsqay6FUxtPBACK4BGAYYCw/s1600/beethoven_bonechart200-5518e60e9f1bf91076ca6e7589e1563d9f4826c9-s600-c85.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="260" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-AuhRlc8-I9c/XRJ941YgnKI/AAAAAAAAnZA/7Vz4X0HCwOs2r2bsPT3nDsqay6FUxtPBACK4BGAYYCw/s320/beethoven_bonechart200-5518e60e9f1bf91076ca6e7589e1563d9f4826c9-s600-c85.jpg" width="320" /></a><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><b>The blue rise at the center of the chart shows high levels in Beethoven's bones; the red lines show much lower levels in a bone from a control subject, who lived in the same historical period.</b></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><b>Argonne National Laboratory</b></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><b><a href="https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5041495">Read more</a></b></span><br />
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Around 1801, Beethoven began to lose his hearing. He suffered a severe form of tinnitus, a "roar" in his ears that made it hard for him to appreciate music and he would avoid conversation. Over time, his hearing loss became acute: there is a well-attested story that, at the premiere of his Ninth Symphony, he had to be turned round to see the tumultuous applause of the audience, hearing nothing. In 1802, he became depressed, and considered committing suicide. He left Vienna for a time for small Austrian town of Heiligenstadt, where he wrote the "Heiligenstadt Testament", in which he resolved to continue living through his</div>
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As Beethoven's hearing loss worsened, he tried to improve his situation with these "hearing trumpets." They did not work for him.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 16px;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">Beethoven's Ear Horns</span></b></td></tr>
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As a result of Beethoven's hearing loss, a unique historical record has been preserved: he kept conversation books discussing music and other issues, and giving an insight into his thought. Even today, the conversation books form the basis for investigation into how he felt his music should be performed, and his relationship to art - which he took very seriously.<br />
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-VWbLrv7UBUE/XRKB6GX9kfI/AAAAAAAAnZM/YM8EzKK83-gD1bEMmnFpXNHTiY0ZOb23wCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/6a00d83542d51e69e201543380f384970c.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="316" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-VWbLrv7UBUE/XRKB6GX9kfI/AAAAAAAAnZM/YM8EzKK83-gD1bEMmnFpXNHTiY0ZOb23wCK4BGAYYCw/s400/6a00d83542d51e69e201543380f384970c.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<a href="https://www.beethoven.ws/loss_of_hearing.html">Read more</a><br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7497901381189250041.post-53486408856075658352019-06-06T17:40:00.000-07:002019-06-14T10:47:07.193-07:00The Man Who Wrote Mozart's words: Librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">Lorenzo Da Ponte Engraving by Michele Pekenino</span></span></td></tr>
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Lorenzo Da Ponte, was a Venetian priest and poet. Da Ponte wrote the words for 28 operas by 11 composers, including three of Mozart's greatest and most beloved operas — Don Giovanni, and The Marriage of Figaro and Così fan tutte.<br />
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At certain creative junctures, even the greatest of artistic minds depend on empathetic collaborators to unlock their true potential.<br />
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Mozart, of course, composed numerous operas – a total of 22 musical dramas, to be precise – but more than 225 years after his death, it remains the realm of scholarly critical debate why he enjoyed such a prodigious, prolific run alongside Da Ponte. It cannot be a coincidence – lightning, as they, say, does not strike twice, let alone thrice.<br />
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Historically, listeners have tended to overlook Da Ponte’s contributions, characterising the Venetian wordsmith as smartly workmanlike, rather than inspired – the true genius, of course, was Mozart, his librettist a historical footnote.<br />
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Yet it remains amusing to remember that, when the pair first met in 1783, it was Mozart who was starstruck by his illustrious elder. Some seven years the composer’s senior, Da Ponte was at that time already shining among Vienna’s brightest lights. As the official poet to the Habsburg’s court theatre, he was ironically best known for composing librettos for Antonio Salieri.<br />
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Mindful of Salieri’s success, and eager to establish himself further in the same city, Mozart surmised that the key to fame was penning an Italian “opera buffa” in the same light-hearted, comic mould.<br />
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"The best thing is when a good composer, who understands the stage enough to make sound suggestions, meets an able poet, that true phoenix,” Mozart wrote around this time.<br />
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He rightly supposed Da Ponte to be his “true phoenix”, yet the librettist repeatedly rejected the advances of the impoverished composer, overworked as he was writing for better-known names. Eventually, Mozart landed on a project he would not resist. A recent audience favourite had been Paisiello’s The Barber of Seville – more famously adapted by Rossini, three decades later, based on the French play of the same name by Pierre Beaumarchais.<br />
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Despite the fact the source material was banned, Mozart convinced Da Ponte to write a libretto based on its sequel, The Marriage of Figaro. After the latter succeeded in convincing his employer, Emperor Joseph II, that the play’s “subversive” content had been cut, the pair had themselves a modest hit.<br />
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Continuing the plot from Paisiello’s work, the opera told the farcical story of how the lowly barber Figaro eventually succeeds in marrying his beloved Susanna, despite the efforts of their lewd employer Count Almaviva.<br />
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Figaro was not quite the Viennese blockbuster Mozart was hankering after, running for only nine nights in total, but it did make history in its own way. Following the opera’s May 1786 premiere, conducted at the Burgtheater by Mozart himself, the stars returned to the stage for five encores, repeating favourite musical moments from the score – leading the impatient Joseph II to issue an official decree ordering that in future no vocal piece should be performed twice at the historic hall on a single evening.<br />
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However, Figaro did prove a smash in Prague, then the second city of the Habsburg Empire, early the next year, and Mozart was promptly commissioned to write another opera. This time it was Da Ponte who had the pertinent suggestion of revisiting the centuries-old tale of Don Juan.</div>
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The dramatic potential offered by this legendary libertine was to prove an intoxicating inspiration to Mozart, with the monumental Don Giovanni artistically eclipsing even its two chronological neighbours. Blurring the conventional boundaries between comedy and drama, there was a maturity and intensity to the score, and a metaphysical gravity to the theme, which paved the way for the romantic movement to come. The conflict between masked Juan’s roguish vice and Donna Anna’s earthly righteousness, between sensualist pleasure and religious invocation, willingly subverted Mozart’s perceived role as a mere entertainer.<br />
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Following its Prague premiere in October 1787, Don Giovanni was to have a rippling effect beyond the world of music – it is said Goethe began work on his masterpiece Faust after sitting down to the opera, while philosopher Kierkegaard was lyrically moved.<br />
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“The usefulness of Don Giovanni is that it puts a stake through the heart of the chocolate-box Mozart, the car-radio Mozart, the Mozart-makes-you-smarter Mozart,” once wrote the New Yorker music critic Alex Ross. “If the opera were played in bus stations or dentists’ waiting rooms, it would spread fear. It would probably cause perversion in infants.”<br />
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The pair’s final collaboration Così Fan Tutte, another opera buffa which premiered 43 months after The Marriage of Figaro. Translated directly as 'Women are Like That', Mozart reluctantly wrote the lead role of Fiordiligi for Da Ponte’s mistress Adriana Ferrarese del Bene.</div>
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Recent research has undermined the well-worn legend that Joseph II commissioned the work. Instead, newer research supports the ironic notion that Mozart took on the project after Salieri felt unable to score a libretto – a harbinger of the further changes in favour to come.</div>
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In either case, Così Fan Tutte marks something of anomaly in Da Ponte’s oeuvre, as one of the only two original librettos from a catalogue of more than 50 which were otherwise based on existing material.</div>
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It was to prove not just his final work with Mozart, but his last contribution to the city which made his celebrity. Shortly after its premiere, at Vienna’s Burgtheater in January 1790, Joseph II passed away and, haunted by malicious rumours, Da Ponte was exiled by the succeeding monarch, Leopold II. He fled to London, where he was persecuted by debt and arrest, and later New York, where he worked variously as a grocer, a milliner, bookseller and an Italian teacher. Mozart, meanwhile, went on to write just three more operas before his death less than two years later.</div>
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<a href="https://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/the-relationship-between-mozart-and-lorenzo-da-ponte-1.623880">Read more</a></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7497901381189250041.post-85245870604479775412019-06-04T00:00:00.000-07:002019-06-06T16:45:11.659-07:00The Composer and His Muse: Salieri, Mozart and Nancy Storace<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Did Salieri plot Mozart's demise to the point of actually poisoning him? Or is it just as fanciful as all those serpents and magic bells in the younger composer's opera The Magic Flute?<br />
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Antonio Salieri was a hugely influential composer of opera and a much in-demand teacher who taught Schubert, Beethoven and Liszt. The chances are, however, that you've only ever heard of Salieri because he happened to be the arch-rival of the irrepressible Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Or was he? <br />
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<b>The rise of the poisoning tale</b><br />
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Mozart's rivalry with Salieri could have originated with an incident in 1781, when Mozart applied to be the music teacher of Princess Elisabeth of Württemberg, and Salieri was selected instead because of his reputation as a singing teacher. In the following year Mozart once again failed to be selected as the Princess' piano teacher.<br />
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In addition, when Lorenzo Da Ponte was in Prague preparing the production of Mozart's setting of his Don Giovanni, the poet was ordered back to Vienna for a royal wedding for which Salieri's Axur, re d'Ormus would be performed. Obviously, Mozart was not pleased by this.<br />
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Within six years of Salieri's death, the Russian writer Pushkin wrote a play, Mozart and Salieri , which portrayed the danger of envy. In 1898, Rimsky-Korsakov turned Pushkin's play into an opera. In both, it's suggested that Salieri's jealousy of Mozart led him to poison the younger composer.<br />
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However, even with Mozart and Salieri's rivalry for certain jobs, there
is very little evidence that the relationship between the two composers
was at all acrimonious beyond this, especially after 1785 or so, when
Mozart had become established in Vienna. Rather, they appeared to
usually see each other as friends and colleagues, and supported each
other's work. In several of Mozart’s letters, there is evidence that the Italians (supposedly lead by Salieri) in Emperor Joseph’s court did get in the way of several attempts to advance Mozart's career, and some of these are portrayed in the film Amadeus. There is, however, no clear proof that Salieri hated Mozart or plotted against him or planned his death, although those ideas made for a much more exciting story.<br />
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Where the film rings true is in its portrayal of Mozart's uncanny improvisational ability, his computer memory and instant recall, his effortless skill at composition - "without setting down his billiard cue" - his talent for languages and his genius for musical and verbal mimicry. That the divine Mozart could also curse like a sailor, improvise obscene verses and even talk backwards was also true though its doubtful Salieri and his faction would have been as offended by Mozart's language as he is in the film. The late 18th century was not noted for its delicacy of language. However - all quibbles aside - this moving and hugely entertaining film is still an excellent introduction to Mozart, his music and his world.<br />
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<b>Lost cantata by Mozart and Salieri found in Prague</b><br />
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A long-lost composition co-written by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Antonio Salieri was rediscovered in the Czech National Museum in Prague. German musicologist and composer Timo Jouko Herrmann found the piece while doing research on Antonio Salieri in the collection of the Czech Museum of Music. It’s a libretto written by Lorenzo Da Ponte, a Venetian priest and poet who wrote the librettos for three of Mozarts most beloved operas — Don Giovanni, The Marriage of Figaro and Così fan tutte — and published by printer to the Imperial court in Vienna Joseph von Kurzböck. Very unusually for a libretto, this one includes the sheet music in a simple piano arrangement. Mozart and Salieri’s names do not appear anywhere in the pamphlet, only their initials in the musical notation identifying which measures were written by which composer. There is also a third composer credited, one Cornetti, who is unknown under that name.<br />
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The piece is entitled Per la Ricuperata Salute di Ofelia (“For the
recovered health of Ophelia”) and was written in 1785. The Ophelia in
question was Nancy Storace, an English coloratura soprano who was
friends with and muse to both Mozart and Salieri.<br />
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Nancy was a musical prodigy from a very young age. She gave her first public performance when she was eight years old and debuted at London’s Haymarket Theatre the next year. Her older brother Stephen was also a child prodigy, taught by his father to play violin so expertly that by the age of 10 he was performing the most complex, difficult pieces of the time.<br />
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Nancy traveled to Venice to take voice lessons from composer Antonio Sacchini and began getting professional gigs, rapidly rising from minor parts to leads and becoming something of a sensation. While still a teenager in 1782 she performed the role of Dorina in the Milan premiere of Giuseppe Sarti’s opera Fra I Due Litiganti Il Terzo Gode, a part that Sarti wrote specifically for her, to great acclaim.<br />
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When in 1783 Austrian Emperor Joseph II decided to put together a company dedicated to performances of Italian opera buffa (comic opera), he snapped up the 18-year-old Nancy Storace for his prima donna.<br />
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The opera that Nancy premiered was Antonio Salieri's La scuola de gelosi (The School of Jealousy), in which she took the role of the Countess Bandiera. The plot of the opera involves love intrigues, attempted seductions and provocations to jealousy between members of the three different social strata: the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie and the working class, which was typical for plots in the early to late 1780s.<br />
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Mozart had first seen Nancy when she made her Viennese debut in
Salieri’s La Scuola De’ Gelosi. He immediately fell in love with her as
an artist and, it was rumored, their relationship actually went much
deeper. Certainly Nancy and Stephen became part of Mozart’s circle and
were often at his house, while he frequently had dinner with them and
their mother.<br />
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The role of Susanna in Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro was written for
and first performed by her. it is possible that her lively acting style
was the inspiration for the central character of Susanna.<br />
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When she was about to leave Vienna, Storace performed in a farewell
concert on 23 February 1787. For this occasion Mozart wrote the concert
recitative and aria "Ch'io mi scordi di te?<br />
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The rediscovery of Per la Ricuperata Salute di Ofelia underscores that Mozart and Salieri were on good terms in 1785, even though a few years earlier Mozart had written in letters to his father of his frustration with the Italian cabal at the Viennese court. He thought Salieri, Da Ponte and other Italians who had the ear of the Emperor were blocking his ascent, but by 1785 Mozart was well-established and was working closely with said Italians. Salieri would go out of his way to express approval of Mozart’s work, even directing performances of several of his compositions.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Vasiliy Shkafer as Mozart and Fyodor Shalyapin as Salieri<br />
(Russian Private Opera, 1898)</td></tr>
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Nonetheless, decades after Mozart’s premature death rumors were rife that Salieri had poisoned his rival. The rumor was immortalized in art when, six years after Salieri’s 1825 death, revered Russian poet Alexander Pushkin wrote a verse drama Mozart and Salieri that posited Salieri as the bitterly jealous poisoner of the greater man. Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov set the play to music in the opera Mozart and Salieri, and playwright Peter Shaffer based his 1979 play Amadeus on Pushkin’s drama. That in turn was adapted for film in the Oscar-winning movie of the same name directed by Miloš Forman. So now when people think of Mozart and Salieri they think of a rivalry unto the death, when in fact the two men were on quite good terms.<br />
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And now, possibly for the first time and certainly for the first time in centuries, here is Per la Ricuperata Salute di Ofelia by Wolfgang Mozart and Antonio Salieri, played on the harpsichord by Lukas Vendl.<br />
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<span style="color: #cccccc; font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">Sources: http://www.classicfm.com/composers/mozart/guides/did-salieri-murder-mozart-mythbuster/#yi3zSJWK2xaMF3wI.99http://www.classicfm.com/composers/mozart/guides/mozart-love/#dS2kjorX0xDfOkRh.97<br />http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/40680 https://reelrundown.com/movies/Historical-Inaccuracies-in-Amadeus</span></span><br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7497901381189250041.post-33902993993018996492019-05-28T00:00:00.000-07:002019-05-28T16:24:03.997-07:00 Music Education: More Than Just Music!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Whether your child is the next Beyonce or more likely to sing her solos in the shower, she is bound to benefit from some form of music education. Research shows that learning the do-re-mis can help children excel in ways beyond the basic ABCs.<br /><b><br />More Than Just Music</b></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br />Research has found that learning music facilitates learning other subjects and enhances skills that children inevitably use in other areas. “A music-rich experience for children of singing, listening and moving is really bringing a very serious benefit to children as they progress into more formal learning,” says Mary Luehrisen, executive director of the National Association of Music Merchants (NAMM) Foundation, a not-for-profit association that promotes the benefits of making music.<br /><br />Making music involves more than the voice or fingers playing an instrument; a child learning about music has to tap into multiple skill sets, often simultaneously. For instance, people use their ears and eyes, as well as large and small muscles, says Kenneth Guilmartin, cofounder of Music Together, an early childhood music development program for infants through kindergarteners that involves parents or caregivers in the classes.<br /><br />“Music learning supports all learning. Not that Mozart makes you smarter, but it’s a very integrating, stimulating pastime or activity,” Guilmartin says.<br /><b><br />Language Development</b></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br />“When you look at children ages two to nine, one of the breakthroughs in that area is music’s benefit for language development, which is so important at that stage,” says Luehrisen. While children come into the world ready to decode sounds and words, music education helps enhance those natural abilities. “Growing up in a musically rich environment is often advantageous for children’s language development,” she says. But Luehrisen adds that those inborn capacities need to be “reinforced, practiced, celebrated,” which can be done at home or in a more formal music education setting.<br /><br />According to the Children’s Music Workshop, the effect of music education on language development can be seen in the brain. “Recent studies have clearly indicated that musical training physically develops the part of the left side of the brain known to be involved with processing language, and can actually wire the brain’s circuits in specific ways. Linking familiar songs to new information can also help imprint information on young minds,” the group claims.<br /><br />This relationship between music and language development is also socially advantageous to young children. “The development of language over time tends to enhance parts of the brain that help process music,” says Dr. Kyle Pruett, clinical professor of child psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine and a practicing musician. “Language competence is at the root of social competence. Musical experience strengthens the capacity to be verbally competent.”<br /><br /><b>Increased IQ</b></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br />A study by E. Glenn Schellenberg at the University of Toronto at Mississauga, as published in a 2004 issue of Psychological Science, found a small increase in the IQs of six-year-olds who were given weekly voice and piano lessons. Schellenberg provided nine months of piano and voice lessons to a dozen six-year-olds, drama lessons (to see if exposure to arts in general versus just music had an effect) to a second group of six-year-olds, and no lessons to a third group. The children’s IQs were tested before entering the first grade, then again before entering the second grade.<br /><br />Surprisingly, the children who were given music lessons over the school year tested on average three IQ points higher than the other groups. The drama group didn’t have the same increase in IQ, but did experience increased social behavior benefits not seen in the music-only group.<br /><b><br />The Brain Works Harder</b></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><b> </b><br />Research indicates the brain of a musician, even a young one, works differently than that of a nonmusician. “There’s some good neuroscience research that children involved in music have larger growth of neural activity than people not in music training. When you’re a musician and you’re playing an instrument, you have to be using more of your brain,” says Dr. Eric Rasmussen, chair of the Early Childhood Music Department at the Peabody Preparatory of The Johns Hopkins University, where he teaches a specialized music curriculum for children aged two months to nine years.<br /><br />In fact, a study led by Ellen Winner, professor of psychology at Boston College, and Gottfried Schlaug, professor of neurology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School, found changes in the brain images of children who underwent 15 months of weekly music instruction and practice. The students in the study who received music instruction had improved sound discrimination and fine motor tasks, and brain imaging showed changes to the networks in the brain associated with those abilities, according to the Dana Foundation, a private philanthropic organization that supports brain research.<br /><b><br />Spatial-Temporal Skills</b></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br />Research has also found a causal link between music and spatial intelligence, which means that understanding music can help children visualize various elements that should go together, like they would do when solving a math problem.<br /><br />“We have some pretty good data that music instruction does reliably improve spatial-temporal skills in children over time,” explains Pruett, who helped found the Performing Arts Medicine Association. These skills come into play in solving multistep problems one would encounter in architecture, engineering, math, art, gaming, and especially working with computers.<br /><b><br />Improved Test Scores</b></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br />A study published in 2007 by Christopher Johnson, professor of music education and music therapy at the University of Kansas, revealed that students in elementary schools with superior music education programs scored around 22 percent higher in English and 20 percent higher in math scores on standardized tests, compared to schools with low-quality music programs, regardless of socioeconomic disparities among the schools or school districts. Johnson compares the concentration that music training requires to the focus needed to perform well on a standardized test.<br /><br />Aside from test score results, Johnson’s study highlights the positive effects that a quality music education can have on a young child’s success. Luehrisen explains this psychological phenomenon in two sentences: “Schools that have rigorous programs and high-quality music and arts teachers probably have high-quality teachers in other areas. If you have an environment where there are a lot of people doing creative, smart, great things, joyful things, even people who aren’t doing that have a tendency to go up and do better.”<br /><br />And it doesn’t end there: along with better performance results on concentration-based tasks, music training can help with basic memory recall. “Formal training in music is also associated with other cognitive strengths such as verbal recall proficiency,” Pruett says. “People who have had formal musical training tend to be pretty good at remembering verbal information stored in memory.”<br /><b><br />Being Musical</b></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br />Music can improve your child’ abilities in learning and other nonmusic tasks, but it’s important to understand that music does not make one smarter. As Pruett explains, the many intrinsic benefits to music education include being disciplined, learning a skill, being part of the music world, managing performance, being part of something you can be proud of, and even struggling with a less than perfect teacher.<br /><br />“It’s important not to oversell how smart music can make you,” Pruett says. “Music makes your kid interesting and happy, and smart will come later. It enriches his or her appetite for things that bring you pleasure and for the friends you meet.”<br />While parents may hope that enrolling their child in a music program will make her a better student, the primary reasons to provide your child with a musical education should be to help them become more musical, to appreciate all aspects of music, and to respect the process of learning an instrument or learning to sing, which is valuable on its own merit.<br /><br />“There is a massive benefit from being musical that we don’t understand, but it’s individual. Music is for music’s sake,” Rasmussen says. “The benefit of music education for me is about being musical. It gives you have a better understanding of yourself. The horizons are higher when you are involved in music,” he adds. “Your understanding of art and the world, and how you can think and express yourself, are enhanced.”<br /> </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Laura Lewis Brown caught the writing bug as soon as she could hold a pen. For several years, she wrote a national online column on relationships, and she now teaches writing as an adjunct professor. She lives in Baltimore with her husband and three young children, who give her a lot of material for her blog, EarlyMorningMom.com.</span></span></i></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.pbs.org/parents/education/music-arts/the-benefits-of-music-education/">Read more </a></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7497901381189250041.post-64165717381420107012019-05-21T00:00:00.000-07:002019-05-21T11:47:32.510-07:00The Composer and his Muse: Richard Wagner<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Born on May 22, 1813. German composer, theater director, polemicist, and conductor who is primarily known for his operas (or, as some of his later works were later known, "music dramas"). Unlike most opera composers, Wagner wrote both the libretto and the music for each of his stage works. <br />
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Until his final years, Wagner's life was characterized by political exile, turbulent love affairs, poverty and repeated flight from his creditors. His controversial writings on music, drama and politics have attracted extensive comment since the late 20th century, especially where they express antisemitic sentiments. The effect of his ideas can be traced in many of the arts throughout the 20th century; his influence spread beyond composition into conducting, philosophy, literature, the visual arts and theater.<br />
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Wagner began composing the music for Das Rheingold between November 1853 and September 1854, following it immediately with Die Walküre (written between June 1854 and March 1856). He began work on the third Ring opera, which he now called simply Siegfried, probably in September 1856, but by June 1857 he had completed only the first two acts. He decided to put the work aside to concentrate on a new idea: Tristan und Isolde, based on the Arthurian love story Tristan and Iseult.<br />
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One source of inspiration for Tristan und Isolde was the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, notably his The World as Will and Representation, to which Wagner had been introduced in 1854 by his poet friend Georg Herwegh. Wagner later called this the most important event of his life.<br />
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Amongst the conducting engagements that Wagner undertook for revenue during this period, he gave several concerts in 1855 with the London Philharmonic Society, including one before Queen Victoria. The Queen enjoyed his Tannhäuser overture and spoke with Wagner after the concert, writing of him in her diary that he was "short, very quiet, wears spectacles & has a very finely-developed forehead, a hooked nose & projecting chin."<br />
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Wagner's uneasy affair with Mathilde collapsed in 1858, when his wife Minna intercepted a letter to Mathilde from him. After the resulting confrontation with Minna, Wagner left Zürich alone, bound for Venice, where he rented an apartment in the Palazzo Giustinian, while Minna returned to Germany. Wagner's attitude to Minna had changed; the editor of his correspondence with her, John Burk, has said that she was to him "an invalid, to be treated with kindness and consideration, but, except at a distance, a menace to his peace of mind." Wagner continued his correspondence with Mathilde and his friendship with her husband Otto, who maintained his financial support of the composer. In an 1859 letter to Mathilde, Wagner wrote, half-satirically, of Tristan: "Child! This Tristan is turning into something terrible. This final act!!!—I fear the opera will be banned ... only mediocre performances can save me! Perfectly good ones will be bound to drive people mad."<br />
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After grave difficulties in rehearsal, Tristan und Isolde premiered at the National Theatre Munich on 10 June 1865, the first Wagner opera premiere in almost 15 years. (The premiere had been scheduled for 15 May, but was delayed by bailiffs acting for Wagner's creditors, and also because the Isolde, Malvina Schnorr von Carolsfeld, was hoarse and needed time to recover.) The conductor of this premiere was Hans von Bülow, whose wife, Cosima, had given birth in April that year to a daughter, named Isolde, a child not of Bülow but of Wagner.<br />
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Cosima was 24 years younger than Wagner and was herself illegitimate, the daughter of the Countess Marie d'Agoult, who had left her husband for Franz Liszt. Liszt initially disapproved of his daughter's involvement with Wagner, though nevertheless the two men were friends. The indiscreet affair scandalised Munich, and Wagner also fell into disfavour with many leading members of the court and was finally forced to leave Munich.<br />
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Minna had died of a heart attack on 25 January 1866 in Dresden. Wagner did not attend the funeral. Following Minna's death Cosima wrote to Hans von Bülow on a number of occasions asking him to grant her a divorce, but Bülow refused to concede this. He only consented after she had two more children with Wagner; another daughter, named Eva, after the heroine of Meistersinger, and a son Siegfried, named for the hero of the Ring. The divorce was finally sanctioned, after delays in the legal process, by a Berlin court on 18 July 1870. Richard and Cosima's wedding took place on 25 August 1870. On Christmas Day of that year, Wagner arranged a surprise performance (its premiere) of the Siegfried Idyll for Cosima's birthday. The marriage to Cosima lasted to the end of Wagner's life.<br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7497901381189250041.post-34084726265009005162019-05-12T12:06:00.000-07:002019-05-12T12:17:56.122-07:00Classical Works Inspired by Rain<div style="text-align: left;">
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "roboto" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 16px;">‘I love all films that start with rain…’ writes the poet Don Paterson. But how has rain been rendered in music? Is the mood of a rainy day necessarily melancholic and disappointing or can the rhythm of a good downpour suggest something joyful or cathartic? Here are examples of how rain has been made in music. </span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "roboto" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 16px;">Chopin: Prelude Op. 28, No. 15 – ‘Raindrop Prelude’</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "roboto" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 16px;">A sudden rain shower can create both distance and intimacy. It can often induce a meditative or dream-like mood in the adult, or for the child who cannot go out to play. It is thought Chopin’s ‘Raindrop Prelude’ was indeed inspired by a dream, according to his partner George Sand’s account of the moment of composition.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "roboto" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 16px;">In her autobiography, Sand writes that: ‘He saw himself drowned in a lake – heavy, icy drops of water falling rhythmically on his chest - and when I had him listen to the drops of water falling rhythmically on the roof, he denied having heard it. He was even angry at what I translated by the expression ‘imitative harmony.’’ </span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "roboto" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 16px;">This story is part of the mythology that surrounds the magic of this intimate, introspective piece.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "roboto" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 16px;">Britten’s opera for children, Noye’s Fludde, depicts the dramatic story of Noah’s Ark. The sound of the first drops of this epic deluge is actually made and inspired by domestic objects: the china mug and the wooden spoon. </span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "roboto" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 16px;">Britten’s assistant, Imogen Holst, recalls her own involvement in this moment of experimental composition shared with Britten: ‘I had once to teach Women’s Institute percussion groups during a wartime ‘social half hour’, so I was able to take him into my kitchen and show him how a row of china mugs hanging on a length of string could be hit with a large wooden spoon.’</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "roboto" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 16px;">Debussy Estampes, ‘Jardins sous la pluie’</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "roboto" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 16px;">‘Jardins sous la pluie’ or ‘Gardens in the Rain’ is from Debussy’s Estampes for solo piano. It evokes the light and colour of a spring shower through its trembling, fluid and slightly frenetic sound. It also seems to capture the delicate quality of each raindrop through this rapidity of notes.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "roboto" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 16px;">Pianist Stephen Hough writes that ‘Debussy’s discovery of new sounds at the piano is directly related to the physiology of hands on keyboard.’ As we are transported by the intense mood of rain communicated in this piece, we are also experiencing the physicality of the piano and the movement of fingers in a new way.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "roboto" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 16px;">Judith Weir, The Welcome Arrival of Rain</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "roboto" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 16px;">Rain in this piece is a response to the monsoon rains returning in India, and is inspired by an extract of verse from the Hindu text, Bhagavata Purana. The piece captures the sense of sudden rain, its syncopating rhythmic energy, and the change, renewal and growth it brings. </span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "roboto" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 16px;">It also becomes a metaphor for the process of creativity itself, as Weir describes: ‘Whilst I composed it, as the notes and the pages multiplied, I began to think of a comparison with the arrival of the monsoon in India, when aridity is pierced by life-giving rain; and humans, animals and vegetation revel in sudden activity and fertility.’</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "roboto" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 16px;"> John Luther Adams, In the Rain</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "roboto" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 16px;">How does rain sound? In the Rain investigates and experiments with how we hear its changing rhythms. Adams encourages us to attend to the sonic expression of the natural world, as well how the rain encounters and catches on objects and surfaces. There is a numinous, otherworldly quality to this work.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "roboto" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 16px;"><a href="http://www.classical-music.com/article/six-best-classical-works-inspired-rain">Read more</a></span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "roboto" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 16px;"><br /></span></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7497901381189250041.post-39650391735261600062019-05-08T00:00:00.000-07:002019-05-08T10:06:01.966-07:00The Composer and his Muse: Mothers<b>Brahms: German Requiem</b><br />
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While the death of his dear friend Robert Schumann provided an initial impetus for Brahms's German Requiem, the composer dedicated it to his mother, who died nine years later. The memory of Johanna Brahms is particularly apparent in the work’s fifth movement, which takes Isaiah 66:13 for its text: “As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you.” <br />
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<b>Strauss’s “Muttertändelei” </b><br />
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Any proud mama would be charmed by Richard Strauss’s “Muttertändelei” (Mother-chatter) in which a new mom brags about her angelic-looking child, with a disposition to match. Using verse from the 18th-century German poet Gottfried August Burger, Strauss wrote the piece in 1899, two years after his wife Pauline gave birth to their son Franz. Apparently Pauline was so taken with the work she would not lend the manuscript to fellow musicians.<br />
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<b>Dvorak: "Songs My Mother Taught Me"</b><br />
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Dvorak’s melancholy folk melody “Songs My Mother Taught Me” is part of the Czech composer’s collection of Gypsy songs. The short melody tells of a woman passing down the songs she learned to her own children. It was an immediate hit when Dvorak composed it and still remains one of his best-known melodies.<br />
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<b>Webern: Six Pieces for Orchestra</b><br />
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Though Anton Webern dedicated his Six Pieces for Orchestra to his teacher, Arnold Schoenberg, the works attempt to sort out his emotions from his mother’s recent death. "The first piece is to express my frame of mind when I was still in Vienna, already sensing the disaster, yet always maintaining the hope that I would find my mother still alive,” wrote Webern. The subsequent miniatures express the composer’s grief and also joyous memories with his mom.<br />
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<b>Barber: Knoxville Summer of 1915</b><br />
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Samuel Barber’s destiny towards becoming a composer seems to have been cemented in a prophetic letter the nine-year-old composer wrote to his mother, begging her to let him make music rather than playing football (“I have written to tell you my worrying secret...I was meant to be a composer, and will be I’m sure”). While Barber dedicated his orchestral suite, Knoxville Summer of 1915, to his father (as did its original author, James Agee), the piece tenderly describes a mother “who is good to me.”<br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7497901381189250041.post-27606733512178198352019-04-30T19:35:00.004-07:002019-05-01T09:16:45.629-07:00Angelica Hale Debuts Her New Single Feel the Magic!<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">From Dr. Fuddle's very own honorary Messenger of Music. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1c1e21;"><a href="https://play.google.com/store/music/album/Angelica_Hale_Feel_the_Magic?id=Bqmum3zotv7c765lmgkjvllxd6i&hl=en_US">Available at Google Store Music</a> </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1c1e21;">download, stream, and leave a review!</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1c1e21;">Angelica </span></span><span style="text-align: center;">on Listen World Tour with the TNT Boys </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="text-align: center;">Performs Feel the Magic</span></span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7497901381189250041.post-407290929138057872019-04-30T00:00:00.000-07:002019-04-30T17:15:49.144-07:00The Composer and His Muse: Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and Désirée Artôt<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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The Belgian mezzo-soprano Désirée Artôt started her career at the Paris Opera in 1858 when Giacomo Meyerbeer engaged her to sing in his Le prophète. Berlioz, uncharacteristically, could not find enough accolades to praise her singing. However, she quickly bid farewell to the French repertoire and went on to sing in Italy a year later. With an Italian opera company under the direction of Merelli, she extensively toured throughout Europe, and in 1868 arrived in Moscow. Moscow immediately fell in love with her. An anecdote relates that at a reception for her at the home of Maria Begicheva, “the hostess knelt before Artôt and kissed her hand.” But Begicheva was not the only artistic personality smitten with Artôt. Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky had also met Artôt at a Begicheva soiree, and when they met again a couple of months later, she “started to send him invitations every day, and he became accustomed to visiting her every evening.”<br />
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He later told his brother Modest, that she possessed “exquisite gesture, grace of movement, and artistic poise.” He even stopped working on his symphonic poem Fatum to give her all his attention. Tchaikovsky did, however, write a little Romance in F minor for piano, which he dutifully dedicated to her.<br />
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Artôt’s mother was fiercely opposed to the marriage on official grounds that Tchaikovsky was too young—he was seven year’s her junior—and that he would force Désirée to live in Russia. It is more likely that she found out about Tchaikovsky’s sexual orientation and wasn’t going to allow her daughter to engage in a destined to be unhappy union.<br />
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Désirée was quickly rushed off to her next singing engagement and kept far away. Tchaikovsky sensed that something was afoot, and writes to his brother Anatoly, “This affair is beginning to fall apart.” Maybe he instinctively knew that Artôt had quietly married the Spanish baritone Mariano Padilla y Ramos without telling him. Tchaikovsky was in the middle of rehearsals for his opera The Voyevoda, and when Nikolai Rubinstein brought him the news, “he became quite upset, abandoned the rehearsal, and left immediately.” Musicologists have suggested that the musical chipper of her name, in the manner of Schumann, appears in his First Piano Concerto, and Tchaikovsky certainly never revealed the program of Fatum. And let’s not forget that Romeo and Juliet was completed a mere two months after Artôt’s clandestine marriage.<br />
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It was in December 1887 that they actually renewed their acquaintance in Berlin. He spent an evening at her place, and later wrote in his diary. “This evening is counted among the most agreeable recollections of my sojourn in Berlin. The personality and the art of this singer are as irresistibly bewitching as ever.” She asked him to compose a song on a text by a French poet, and he sent her a set of six. “I have tried my best,” he writes, “to serve you and hope that you will be able to sing them all, since all six of them correspond to the current range of your voice. I sincerely hope that you will enjoy these melodies, but unfortunately, I am not so sure of this. I must confess that I have been working very hard lately and that my latest compositions have sprung from good intentions rather than from true inspiration. And besides, it is a little awkward to write for a singer whom I consider to be the greatest among the greatest.”<br />
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Tchaikovsky never revealed exactly how deep a wound this affair inflicted, he in his personal letters, always praising her beauty and artistry. His torch for Artot may perhaps never have been totally extinguished.<br />
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Tchaikovsky may have coded her name into works such as his First Piano Concerto and the Romeo and Juliet Fantasy-Overture. The use of initials spelled out in musical pitches is a device often used by Robert Schumann (for example, in his Carnaval), and Tchaikovsky was a great admirer of Schumann's music.<br />
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There are other suggestions that Tchaikovsky coded his own name into the concerto, and Artôt's name into the symphonic poem Fatum, the Symphony No. 3, and the Romeo and Juliet Fantasy-Overture. He never revealed the program of Fatum, and later even destroyed the score (although it was reconstructed from the orchestral parts and published posthumously as Op. 77).<br />
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The Artôt episode was very fresh in Tchaikovsky's mind at the time he wrote Romeo and Juliet. He could easily have drawn a parallel between his personal loss and the tragedy of Shakespeare’s drama.<br />
<a href="http://www.interlude.hk/front/category/spotlight/in-person/"><br /></a>
<a href="http://www.interlude.hk/front/category/spotlight/in-person/">Read more</a><br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7497901381189250041.post-13145776304822568052019-04-25T12:44:00.000-07:002019-04-25T13:17:50.738-07:00The String Quartet <div style="text-align: left;">
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The string quartet is one of the most prominent chamber ensembles in classical music, with most major composers, from the late 18th century onwards, writing string quartets.</div>
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The origins of the string quartet can be traced back to the Baroque trio sonata, in which two solo instruments performed with a continuo section consisting of a bass instrument (such as the cello) and keyboard. A very early example is a four-part sonata for string ensemble by Gregorio Allegri (1582–1652) that might be considered an important prototype string quartet. By the early 18th century, composers were often adding a third soloist; and moreover it became common to omit the keyboard part, letting the cello support the bass line alone. Thus when Alessandro Scarlatti wrote a set of six works entitled “Sonata à Quattro per due Violini, Violetta [viola], e Violoncello senza Cembalo” (Sonata for four instruments: two violins, viola, and cello without harpsichord), this was a natural evolution from existing tradition.</div>
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The string quartet rose to prominence with the work of Joseph Haydn. Haydn’s own discovery of the quartet form appears to have arisen essentially by accident.</div>
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The young composer was working for Baron Carl von Joseph Edler von Fürnberg sometime around 1755-1757 at his country estate in Weinzierl, about fifty miles from Vienna. The Baron wanted to hear music, and the available players happened to be two violinists, a violist, and a cellist. Haydn’s early biographer Georg August Griesinger tells the story thus:</div>
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"<i>The following purely chance circumstance had led him to try his luck at the composition of quartets. A Baron Fürnberg had a place in Weinzierl, several stages from Vienna, and he invited from time to time his pastor, his manager, Haydn, and Albrechtsberger (a brother of the celebrated contrapuntist Albrechtsberger) in order to have a little music. Fürnberg requested Haydn to compose something that could be performed by these four amateurs. Haydn, then eighteen years old, took up this proposal, and so originated his first quartet which, immediately it appeared, received such general approval that Haydn took courage to work further in this form."</i></div>
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Haydn went on to write nine other quartets around this time. These works were published as his Op. 1 and Op. 2; one quartet went unpublished, and some of the early “quartets” are actually symphonies missing their wind parts. They have five movements and take the form: fast movement, minuet and trio I, slow movement, minuet and trio II, and fast finale. As Finscher notes, they draw stylistically on the Austrian divertimento tradition.</div>
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Haydn then ceased to write quartets for a number of years, but took up the genre again in 1769-1772 with the 18 quartets of Ops. 9, 17, and 20. These are written in a form that became established as standard both for Haydn and for other composers, namely four movements, consisting of a fast movement, a slow movement, a minuet and trio and a fast finale .</div>
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Ever since Haydn’s day the string quartet has been prestigious and considered a true test of the composer’s art. This may be partly because the palette of sound is more restricted than with orchestral music, forcing the music to stand more on its own rather than relying on tonal color; or from the inherently contrapuntaltendency in music written for four equal instruments.</div>
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Quartet composition flourished in the Classical era, with Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert writing famous series of quartets to set alongside Haydn’s. A slight slackening in the pace of quartet composition occurred in the 19th century; here, composers often wrote only one quartet, perhaps to show that they could fully command this hallowed genre, although Antonín Dvořák wrote a series of 14.<br />
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The String Quartet in F major, Op. 96, nicknamed the American Quartet, is the 12th string quartet composed by Antonín Dvořák. It was written in 1893, during Dvořák's time in the United States. The quartet is one of the most popular in the chamber music repertoire.</div>
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With the onset of the Modern era of classical music, the quartet returned to full popularity among composers, and played a key role in the development of Arnold Schoenberg, Béla Bartók, and Dmitri Shostakovich especially. </div>
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After WWII, some composers, such as Pierre Boulez and Olivier Messiaen questioned the relevance of the string quartet and avoided writing them. However, from the 1960s onwards, many composers have shown a renewed interest in the genre.</div>
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<a href="https://courses.lumenlearning.com/musicapp_historical/chapter/string-quartet/">Read more</a></div>
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