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San Antone

#108
August 27, 2015, 07:23:12 AM
Josquin des Prez : Passed away in the year 1521, the 27th of August



In an era when music was generally performed a few times before being replaced by something newer, Josquin des Prez was a rarity: a composer who was remembered and honored long after his death. Throughout the sixteenth century, his works were cited in theoretical treatises and extensively quoted in the music of other composers. In 1538, seventeen years after Josquin died, Martin Luther extolled him as "the master of the notes, which must do as he wishes, while other composers must follow what the notes dictate." Even in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Josquin's music was not entirely forgotten, while the nineteenth century saw him acclaimed (alongside Palestrina) as one of the two greatest composers of the Renaissance.

https://www.youtube.com/v/nfVnqU8hyxU

San Antone

#109
September 01, 2015, 04:53:53 AM
Today I sing of Othmar Schoeck (1 September 1886 – 8 March 1957)



Two of his song cycles stand out, Elegie op. 36 for baritone and chamber orchestra was developed between 1921 and 1923 and was Schoeck's first song cycle, summarizing 24 poems of Nikolaus Lenau and Joseph von Echiendorff. 

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Notturno, op. 47, his 45-minute work for low voice and string quartet or string orchestra.   Schoeck set to music poems of mourning, loneliness and despair by Nikolaus Lenau, as well as a fragment by Gottfried Keller. Schoeck chose the title Notturno for a reason: it matches the dark underlying character of the music which, with or without vocal parts (the first, extended movement has a long instrumental part), expresses the pain, the lamentation and the resignation of the narrator in a late-romantic style.

[asin]B002G1TS5E[/asin]

San Antone

#110
September 02, 2015, 04:05:52 AM
John Zorn : happy birthday



I first came to know John Zorn's music from his band Masada, a jazz quartet recalling Ornette Coleman, at least to my ears.  He made a series of ten recordings, all named using the first ten letters/numbers of the Hebrew alef-bet (Alef, Bet, Gimel, etc.).  He also released several live dates with this same line-up: Zorn (alto saxophone), Dave Douglas (trumpet),Greg Cohen (double bass), and Joey Baron (drum set). On occasion, different drummers filled in for Baron – most regularly Kenny Wollesen.  These recordings were all released on Zorn's record label Tzadik.

Zorn's breakthrough recording was 1985's widely acclaimed The Big Gundown: John Zorn Plays the Music of Ennio Morricone, where Zorn offered radical arrangements of themes from The Big Gundown (1966), Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), A Fistful of Dynamite (1971), and Once Upon a Time in America (1984), that incorporated elements of traditional Japanese music, soul jazz, and other diverse musical genres.

San Antone

#111
September 03, 2015, 04:38:51 AM


Morton Feldman : died 9/3/1987

Morton Feldman was a big, brusque Jewish guy from Woodside, Queens—the son of a manufacturer of children's coats. He worked in the family business until he was forty-four years old, and he later became a professor of music at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He died in 1987, at the age of sixty-one. To almost everyone's surprise but his own, he turned out to be one of the major composers of the twentieth century, a sovereign artist who opened up vast, quiet, agonizingly beautiful worlds of sound.

San Antone

#112
September 03, 2015, 10:20:18 AM


Early Romanticism : the solo piano music of John Field and others

The characteristic texture is that of a chromatically decorated melody over sonorous left hand parts supported by sensitive pedaling. Field also had an affinity for ostinato patterns and pedal points, rather unusual for the prevailing styles of the day. Entirely representative of these traits are Field's eighteen nocturnes and associated pieces such as Andante inedit, H 64. These works were some of the most influential music of the early Romantic period: they do not adhere to a strict formal scheme (such as the sonata form), and they create a mood without text or program. These pieces were admired by Frédéric Chopin, who subsequently made the piano nocturne famous, and Franz Liszt, who published an edition of the nocturnes based on rare Russian sources that incorporated late revisions by Field.

Along with Field two other composers deserve to be mentioned, Jan Latislav Dussek and Václav Tomášek.

Dussek wrote numerous solo piano works, including 34 Piano Sonatas as well as a number of programmatic compositions. His The Sufferings of the Queen of France (composed in 1793, C 98), for example, is an episodic account of Marie Antoinette with interpolated texts relating to the Queen's misfortunes, including her sorrow at being separated from her children and her final moments on the scaffold before the guillotine.

Tomášek wrote a good deal for the piano and became a forerunner of the lyric piano piece which later reached its apogee in the works of Schubert and Chopin. At first he remained loyal to the Classical style, but later was influenced by the newly born Romanticism.  He created a form which he called ecologues, which were almost stream of consciousness piano solos.  He also wrote rhapsodies and dithyrambs.

https://www.youtube.com/v/2bx66RJ1m94&list=PL9D2736529BA73225&index=2

jlaurson

#113
September 09, 2015, 12:30:33 AM
 fresh from Forbes:



AUG 22, 2015
The 2015 Bayreuth Festival: Tristan & Isolde

T'was a coolly refreshing evening in the inner courtyard of the vast baroque priory
of St. Florian in Upper Austria, just before the final concert of the St. Florian
BrucknerTage (Bruckner-Days) on August 21: The brass section of the Altomonte
Orchestra – basically a purpose-assembled summer-band – get rid of excess energy
by regaling the guests of the monastery's restaurant with a selection of brass-band
favorites from hunting songs to Wagner chorales: Got you in the mood alright for
Bruckner's Ninth Symphony under Rémy Ballot, a Sergiù Celibidache disciple with a
penchant for glorious length, especially in the music of Anton Bruckner.

For this grand finale of the week-long celebration of Bruckner, the vast, gorgeous
baroque basilica was filled to the brim, except for the side balconies, allegedly among
the best places but cordoned off on this occasion. (That fact made a most determined
Austrian journalist lady – habitually taking her seat there and with little intention to
yielding to some stripling with a badge squeaking "Verboten" – reveal a whole new
color-range in her vocabulary when she ultimately had to follow others' instructions
over her instinct.) With everyone seated and standing in the right places, the sounds
of Debussy's Images pour orchestra, the concert's amuse-gueule, rose to the organ
balcony on which I had found myself at the last minute...

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jenslaurson/2015/09/08/the-second-coming-of-sergiu-celibidache-bruckner-in-st-florian/

...

San Antone

#114
September 11, 2015, 10:44:27 AM
Happy Birthday, Arvo Pärt



For several years (from 1968) he concentrated on exploring tonal monody and simple two-part counterpoint in exercises inspired by his studies of early music and Gregorian chant. During this period he produced two works (Laul armastatule – subsequently withdrawn – and the Third Symphony) which reveal the strength of these preoccupations. It was only in 1976, however, that he began to compose fluidly again, this time using a tonal technique of his own creation which he calls 'tintinnabuli' (after the bell-like resemblance of notes in a triad).

RTRH

San Antone

#116
September 16, 2015, 12:36:07 PM
Nadia Boulanger : teacher of the century



Nadia Boulanger,  (born Sept. 16, 1887, Paris, France—died Oct. 22, 1979, Paris), conductor, organist, and one of the most influential teachers of musical composition of the 20th century.  In addition to Aaron Copland, Boulanger's pupils included the composers Lennox Berkeley, Easley Blackwood, Marc Blitzstein, Elliott Carter, Jean Françaix, Roy Harris, Walter Piston, and Virgil Thomson.

North Star

#117
September 17, 2015, 06:21:04 AM
Quote from: sanantonio on September 16, 2015, 12:36:07 PM
Nadia Boulanger : teacher of the century



Nadia Boulanger,  (born Sept. 16, 1887, Paris, France—died Oct. 22, 1979, Paris), conductor, organist, and one of the most influential teachers of musical composition of the 20th century.  In addition to Aaron Copland, Boulanger's pupils included the composers Lennox Berkeley, Easley Blackwood, Marc Blitzstein, Elliott Carter, Jean Françaix, Roy Harris, Walter Piston, and Virgil Thomson.
The list of some of her prominent music students in Wikipedia is indeed astonishing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_music_students_by_teacher:_A_to_C#Nadia_Boulanger
"Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it." - Confucius

My photographs on Flickr

San Antone

#118
September 17, 2015, 06:58:51 AM


Charles Griffes - American Impressionist (September 17, 1884 – April 8, 1920)

In about 1911 Griffes began to abandon the German style. The works written from then until about 1917 are highly coloured, free in form, and generally reflect many other elements of musical Impressionism. The piano pieces, for example, are pictorial and employ descriptive titles and/or poetic texts (e.g. Three Tone-Pictures and Roman Sketches). But as often as not Griffes added the texts and titles after he had completed the works. Impressionistic moods are established by gliding parallel chords, whole-tone scales, augmented triads, ostinato figures across the bar-line, and other devices. Of the songs from this period, the Tone-Images and Four Impressions most clearly reflect Griffes's brand of Impressionism. The Three Poems op.9, on the other hand, are extremely dissonant, tonally obscure, and stylistically experimental.

The Pleasure Dome of Charles Tomlinson Griffes

https://www.youtube.com/v/Vfl0N1tzoG0

San Antone

#119
September 18, 2015, 05:00:43 AM


Haflidi Hallgrímsson : 9/18/41

One of the most important figures in this flowering of Icelandic music is Haflidi Hallgrímsson, born in 1941 in the small town of Akureyri on the north coast of Iceland. He began playing the cello at the age of ten and studied in Reykjavik and at the Accademia Santa Cecilia in Rome. On returning from Rome, he continued his studies in London with Derek Simpson at the Royal Academy of Music and was awarded the coveted Madame Suggia Prize in 1966. The following year he began compositional studies with Dr Alan Bush and Sir Peter Maxwell Davies. On leaving the Academy, he remained in Britain, eventually making his home in Scotland on being appointed Principal Cellist with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra.

Although he admits to some major influences, Hallgrímsson's musical style is entirely original, showing a sensitivity to line and colour, shape and texture, not surprising from a composer who in 1969 performed one of his earliest compositions,Solitaire for solo cello, surrounded by an exhibition of his own drawings and paintings. Such involvement with the visual arts remains a key influence on Hallgrimsson's musical style and in 1996 he was commissioned by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra to write Still Life, in conjunction with a specially commissioned painting by Craigie Aitchison. Aitchison's work is also an influence behind Hallgrimsson's Symphony No.1 (Crucifixion) (1997), commissioned by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra as part of the Maxwell Davies Millennium Programme of commissions.

https://www.youtube.com/v/PMb_8YwKqHI
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