Use the links after each section or scroll.
See my introductory essays on Music, which will be refered to for background information as specfic music is discussed. I will update these as needed.
See the Introduction to the essays. Follow the links to essays on several interesting topics about music. These will be updated from time to time.
TopFor the past day I have been experimenting with Note Pad, which is a demo, freeware version of Finale, a professional grade notation and scoring program. Of course the former is much simplified, but it meets my simple needs just to be able to set music and see and hear some results. There are many notation programs out there with their individual strengths and weaknesses. Most will get the notes you give with little fuss, but to do much more than that is a chore.
Earlier I had tried Lillypond which is Open Source and has promise for short-cuts. It is not WYSIWYG, using a separate document and a language for editing the parts. It will print notation and create MIDI, but not as an integrated step like some of the others. It has the interesting feature of shortcuts such as being able to give chord names and inversions, but not full figured bass. This would make an excellant concise language for getting basic harmony in.
The true composition editor would allow one to enter a figure and vary it on the fly with a set of transformations such as invert, retrograde, transpose in mode or not, raise to scale degree, augment or diminish, and so forth. This would facilitate composition of counterpuntal music in which the composer would add or modify parts as aesthetically required.
I have seen a java library that implements many of the transformations but it uses its own language. There is nothing wrong with an internal notation language, such as MusicXML, provided the composer gets the option to edit music notation directly. The transforms would act like macros in a text or programming editor, and reduce the drugery of typing all the notes in by hand. This java app is not WYSIWYG. I don't think that it attempts to render natation, which I perfer because I have learned to think that way.
TopOver the past couple of days I have been listening to the last four Schubert String Quartets, in particular No. 13 in A Minor which is memorable because of the famous quote in its second movement of the music from Rosemunde. I know well the rest, especially No 14 in D Minor "Death and the Maiden" whose second movement is a variations over the lied of the same name by Schubert, and No 15 in G Major which is a huge advancement over the earlier quartets, reminding one more of Beethoven in scale. Its first movement was used in the Woody Alan movie Crimes and Misdemeniors. The remaining work of the four last quartets is the extremely fetching single quartet movement No 12 in C-Minor, which clearly is a strikenly successful Sonata movement with a very loverly and lyrical second subject that is worthy of the finest of Schubert's songs. There is another quartet movement which was discovered much later than the Urtext, so it is not in the Dover Edition complete works for strings. Prehaps these were like the "Unfinished" Symphony, gems that remained uncompleted because no fitting responding movement could be written at the moment, and went misplaced untill long after the composer's death.
TopOne of the first serious pieces I paid attention to as a youngster in junior high was Gershwin's Concerto in F, and now decades later hearing the Leonard Slatkin/St. Louis Symphony set of all of Gershwin's concert pieces I realized that the last movement is a Rondo whose episodes are entirely qotes from the preceeding two movements of the Concerto. This makes the Rondo cyclic with the other movements, an approach which is new to me.
TopIt is a challenge to keep track of the large body of Mozart's output for strings and piano. I had been listening today to the two wonderful Piano Quartets in G-Minor K 478 and E-Flat Major K. 493, whose slow movements I love especially. The opening movement of the G-minor quartet is very grand. There is something about G-Minor for Mozart. There is also the Wind Quintet with Piano in E-Flat K. 452, so far so good. As we consider smaller ensambles the numbers of works increases greately. The very nice Dover score I have counts eight piano trios and today I was able to find a recording. Of these I know the last couple and the one with Clairnet called "Kegelstat" or bowling alley. So, I will get to learn the others, having read through them from the score to find that I had not heard them performed.
The Mozart Violin Sonatas present several challenges. The little three volume set I have published by the now defunct Lea Pocket Scores uses the Complete Works published by Breikoph and Hartel and gives 26 works, but from the Urtext the last violin Sonata is numbered 43. I have the first volume of two sets of the same corpus from Dover and it numbers from low Koechel numbers. Asside from the obvious fact that some works for violin and piano are not true sonatas, but other forms including several variations and at least one prelude and fugue (K. 402 in A Major). I must conclude that several works attributed to Mozart in the Urtext are not his, or my editions do not include very youthful works. The discrepancy would have to account for about 15 works.
TopA wonderful chamber work from late in the composer's life for string quartet plus an extra viola. the first movement is especially brilliant, with shakes and tremolos throughout and wonderful quadruple stopped chords, especially in the cello. The performance I am working with is from an Issac Stern retrospective cd set. The second subject is lyrical being voiced in the two violas, who get to play duets several times in this work but the most transcendent passage of the first movement is the modulation that begins the development followed by a more or less expected circle of fifths modulation with flat ninth chords. One thinks that this might conclude the development, but no, there is a lengthy speculation, more modulation with a rich sonority of double stopped chords, before a recapitulation occurs.
The two inner movements, a slow movement and a scherzo, the latter reminding me somewhat of the corresponding movement of Schubert's last string quartet, and followed by a powerful finale, with the same Hungarian twist as at the end of the Clarinet Quintet Op 115 and the Piano Quartet Op. 25.
TopI have listened to recent recordings by Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony of the better part of the cycle of Mahler Symphonies still in progress, and most recently The Firebird, Rite of Spring ballets Persephone (cantata?) by Igor Stravinsky. MTM's abilities with two very different composers who are each so demanding is impressive as witnessed by one who knows most of the pieces pretty well. I know the Mahler Symphonies intimately and better than the Stravinsky and have the printed scores to all these pieces. To me, the value of a new experience for music I think I know is didactic, I learn by listening. I hear some detail of musical rhetoric I never noticed before that I can choose to go find by looking in the score. Lately, I have been content to listen mostly and if some detail really excites me, I pull out the score, follow along and read and sing the detail.
The Rite of Spring is a work I've heard many times, but I can't claim to really understand all its details even after years. The score ( 1947 revision Boosey and Hawks ) is challenging simply for the sheer quantity and complexity of the parts. MTM's performance in 1999 is carefully conducted, good tempi, and engineered, so that I have heard details that are new to me.
There were two revisions of these ballets, one in 1919 and the great early works were again revised in 1947. The Dover Books scores are all of the older versions. The pocket scores from Boosey & Hawks and Kelmus are of the later revisions. These changes are mostly to orchestration.
TopFor the past two years I have been compressing my CDs to MP3. I can get about ten CDs onto one CDR. The collection exceeds 50 CDRs most of which is serious music. I keep working set of chronological labeled CDRs intentionally unlabeled so that as I cycle through them I am a little surprised although the date gives me a clue of what I was listening to on the date I made each CDR.
The past couple of days have been gray in the mornings and I picked the next CDR from the set made about 18 months ago. On it the first album was a fine performance of Bach's St. John Passion whose opening chorus is done in a most stirring fashion with a regular heart-beat throbbing 4/4 in the bass at a good walking cadence. The string and voice parts alternately swirl and shout over the bass and the mournful suspension harmony of two oboes in the key of G minor. This is a da cappo chorus whose opening is repeated in the performance after a longer than expected pause.
TopThe numerous four-part chorales in this work are sung in the performance with great feeling. I actually like the chorales in this work a little more than the St. Matthew Passion, though that work in mightier in all the other ways. The St. John is smaller and more intimate, that Passion has more of the personal drama than the St. Matthew. The last chorale of the St. John fits the personal feeling of tragedy in the work. The corresponding closing chorus in the St. Matthew is more didactic in tone, preaching the reason Christ was sacrificed.
The mood of these cool days has picked up the affect of the opening chorus of the St. John Passion, and that section has stayed in my mind. In some ways this piece makes up for the lack of the large chorale settings in the Bach St. Matthew Passion, its opening of Part I and the great chorale that ends Part I, "O Mensch, bewein' dein' Sunde Gross".
I am always amused on how the meanings of words changes over time. "Passion" clearly means something totally different in current usage than it has meant for much of the history of Europe, referring specifically to the martyrdom of Christ or a Saint. A Passion is clearly a feeling with great ardor and challenge, and it is something that even in the modern meaning can involve out-of-the-ordinary emotion, perhaps even spirituality. This is even possible in the context of romance, although in Christian history, physical and emotional attraction were denigrated.
TopStill, something like Bach's music is visceral, even erotic. Bach was very aware of the theology in his day, of what the Lutheran clerics who were his influential peers thought of Scripture and what traditions were to be upheld. His music served a consciously didactic purpose in schooling his listeners to the theological content of the words and symbolized through affect and musical convention what his interpetion meant. As for the opening chorus of the St. John Passion, the physical mortality of Christ and all of us is unmistakable in the throbbing rhythm and the intertwining invertible counterpoint of the strings and voices.
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Off and on during the past year Bach's Well Tempered Clavier has held my
interest, certaintly because of the wonderful Glen Gould performances of
1955. There are many other recorded performances that are more recent that
seem to be inspired by Gould's trend setting interpetation of the '48'.
Today, the F-Minor and A-Flat Fugues from Book I fascinate me. The draw
is the beauty of the subjects and the effectiveness of the asnwer and its
role in episodes. The Subject of the F-Minor Fugue is a wonderful descending
chromatic tune and its answer provides a rich source of invention both
as a subject for inversion and stretto ( overlap of entries of subject or
answer ). In the A-Flat Fugue the role of the answer is different, to
provide episodes of invention.
Here is a link to a page I wrote last year that points to a MIDI file. I decided to not move it here. 2004 notes.
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