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This work is full of #suspensionporn but here are two examples. (J.C.) W.A. Mozart: Mass in C minor KV 427 (417a). Et Incarnatus (beginning) Kyrie bars 4-5

#mozart #suspensionporn #cminormass #suspensions #classicalmusic #Kyrie #etincarnatus #sacred music

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Definition of Sturm und Drang

1:  a late 18th century German literary movement characterized by works containing rousing action and high emotionalism that often deal with the individual's revolt against society.

2:  turmoil; literally: ‘Storm and Drive’

Once an ideology is embraced to a level that can be considered extreme, it necessitates a reaction - “villains are born from the excess of good intentions”, not that artistic movements are “villainous”. But it makes sense when one considers that the only way to fully understand any kind of artistic or scientific movement was to discover what existing beliefs or movements it was challenging. 

Sturm und Drang proceeded a movement known as ‘the Age of Enlightenment’ which was focused on reason, rationality and facts as a source of authority and truth, and began to embrace large societal ideals such as liberty, fraternity and government (thereby rejecting typical religious and dogmatic systems). Think Mr Spock - rational, fact-driven, analytical. Very useful when it comes to breaking down a scenario and looking for how its elements combine to produce precise and mathematical perfection and beauty. But this carries with it an element of deindividuation - if logic and facts is the only authority present, then each and every member of society is given no importance to their own personal feelings and ideas. The extreme of Enlightenment is a world populated by clever and innovative machinery.

The crux of the Sturm und Drang movement came from its stress on the importance of individualistic, emotional and spontaneous 'purposely irrational’ expression and subjectivity, reacting to the perceived hyper-rational and objective constraints of the Enlightenment movement. Artistic works in this movement drive the audience’s attention to action and excitement, never through an attitude of nobility or heroism, but by something raw and human - vengeance, longing or catharsis. 

You can pretty much tell how the Romantic era grew out of this.

Listen to a slightly angsty Symphony No. 25 in G minor here to hear Sturm und Drang in the form of Mozart throwing accents and arpeggios around like a maniacal genius.

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“Ravel has been described as a Swiss watchmaker, such is the precision of his notation, the clear intent of every dot, every line, every slur. Debussy could never be mistaken as a time-keeper. Many of his pieces could lose their barlines or time-signatures without losing their way. You always see the individual drops of rain in Ravel’s mists, whereas Debussy invites us to look at the garden beyond, blurred by the moisture.”

So to answer my question, Ravel uses orchestration as precise, fleeting ornaments to a form or melody. Debussy takes an orchestral effect and stretches it into an entire texture, constantly layering it with other sound colours, although with mechanical control of dynamic and duration.

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Not many people I have spoken to are great fans of Mahler. They always support this by referencing the fact that often his music contains melodramatic ‘mood swings’ of extreme proportions, whereas other well-known romantic composers tend to write consistently within a few select musical characters and exploit the hell out of each one.

This makes a fair amount of sense. A person who is prone to suddenly lashing out in a completely different mood is dangerous, whereas if you know that someone is going to act differently but without anything extreme or violent, you feel a bit more secure. (Also, it must be difficult for people to try and mentally retain all these ideas throughout the piece.)

But it was also Mahler who said “A symphony must be like the world. It must contain everything.” Clearly he thought that such a grand musical genre written for an ensemble of such fantastical diversity, size and volume shouldn’t be limited to one or two attitudes per piece. And I think that also makes a tremendous amount of sense.

I recently got stuck into Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 (particularly the last movement) because Alondra de la Parra is conducting it in my city this year. In a video where she discusses Mahler, Alondra points out something which I constantly (and accidentally) point out to myself - Mahler’s music was the bridge between absolute music, program music and film music (she describes him as the first cinematographer, but one who used sound rather than image). The work is extremely episodic and constantly flipping between extreme complexity and roaring major chords lasting a minute. Every fortissimo is earned.

Something I found particularly interesting about Mahler is his use of theme. Symphony No. 2 has a lot - the last movement has at least five that are constantly reused and about 5 - 10 more that occur once or twice, but they are often superimposed and interlocked and developed within each other (particularly in the development or 'death march’ section of mvt 5). Each of them had a cute nickname given to it by Mahler, in order for it to represent some aspect of resurrection - not awfully important to the absolute quality of the music, but it does feel good knowing that the last massive fortissimo in Eb is adorned with a theme named 'Eternity’. Of course, Mahler's symphonies aren't intended to be absolute in meaning.

Watch Alondra conduct the end of the symphony while you marvel at how awesome she is. And Mahler. Mahler’s cool too.

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How I feel when I start sight-reading practice:

How I feel when I finish sight-reading practice:

How I feel when I come back the next day:

#piano #sightreading #imsureyoucanrelate #dontlie

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Why do orchestras alternate between playing with or behind the conductor’s beat?

Once something regular is established, it becomes easy to anticipate - something that needs to be exploited in rhythmic works, or works with many individual parts which form one larger phrase, to keep the ensemble punctually on beat. Fluid moments that push and pull the tempo? Unless one is psychic, I don’t see a similar thing happening. Best to wait a split second for the conductor to put the beat where they want it.

Visit the link above to contemplate this while you watch Alondra being a goddess up on stage as usual.

#alondra de la parra #conductors #beat

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Just thought I’d share seeing as how she’s so badass.

Also Alondra’s the MD of my state’s orchestra next year. Be jealous. All of you.

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Intro. to the Rite of Spring arranged for piano. Anyone want to have a go?

#stravinsky #rite of spring #piano #piano music

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“For Gubaidulina, music was an escape from the socio-political atmosphere of Soviet Russia. For this reason, she associated music with human transcendence and mystical spiritualism, which manifests itself as a longing inside the soul of humanity to locate its true being.”

After hearing such exquisite sounds and extreme mood-whiplashes in her music, it might be surprising to remind yourself that Gubaidulina was a composer in the time of Soviet Russia. In fact, whilst she was awarded a Stalin fellowship, her music was also deemed ‘irresponsible’ due to her experiments with tuning. Heartwarmingly, encouragement came from none other than the great Dmitri Shostakovich - one will undoubtedly find some internet meme of him pondering how next to disgrace Stalin in his music. 

A convinced Russian-Orthodox believer, Gubaidulina’s musical sounds are most often abstract associations to mystical and religious elements, transcendence and one’s connection with ;the Absolute’. Listen to how striking the elements of her music are when you first hear them, particularly in her use of percussion instruments and the occasional bout of improvisation.

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So my arrangement of the camping song Baby Shark has about 370K views. I guess it’s feeling a bit... invincible.

#babyshark #choir #acapella #mario #campingsong

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I would have posted a video of Edgar Meyer playing a classical or even jazz piece like the virtuousic Grammy Award-winning MacArthur fellow he is, but I feel that this duet where he plays absurdly fast runs behind his back says all there is to say about this man. 

Referred to as ‘the best bassist alive’ Meyer has also gained international acclaim as a composer and arranger. For those who DO want to see something classical, here’s his string trio. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ynkiw-svFE

Actually, he was recently in my city, performing a double-concerto for double bass and trumpet with James Morrison. Just thought I’d mention that. 

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Totally my intention whenever I conduct.

#conducting #music #blatant lies

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I first started getting really interested in jazz after developing a slight muso-crush on Dr Kirby Shaw after meeting him in Melbourne for a choir concert (he conducted us too - be jealous). It’s a form of music that is indigenous to the United States of America with African-American roots. It emerged at the beginning of the 1900s as a result of intermingling ethnic, cultural, religious and other social factors in society at the time, particularly in the southern states and particularly particularly in New Orleans. 

Blues, often thought to be jazz’s greatest influence, is defined by That Other Wiki as:

“ ..a genre and musical form that originated in African-American communities in the "Deep South" of the United States around the end of the 19th century. The genre is a fusion of traditional African music and European folk music, spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts and chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads.”

It also talks about how blues can be characterised by call-and-response, specific chord progressions such as the infamous twelve bar blues, blue notes (from the blues scale), swing rhythms and the walking bass. If you want to look at types of blues, 32 of them are discussed here.

Difficulty arises in pinpointing the origins of blues. Blues was generally regarded as a lower-class form of music, and the earliest blues musicians had a tendency to wander through various communities leaving little or no record of the music they played. We do know that the blues itself began as a type of African-American folk music originating in an area known as the Delta, or the ‘flat’ area between the Yazoo river and the Mississippi river, which was then spread across the southern states by travelling shows and songsters.  The blues scale itself appears to pre-date blues - a number of African-American songs before the turn of the century make use of blue notes. It was then taken up, rather enthusiastically, by New Orleans’ jazz musicians and became a cornerstone of the genre in the early years of the 20th century.

Just check out this badass little hexatonic thing. Flattened fifth? Yes please...

Listen to ‘Hymn to Freedom’ in the link above because Oscar Peterson is incredibly boss.

#blues #jazz #oscar peterson #hymn to freedom

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Ladies and dudes, meet the octatonic scale. Sometimes he goes by the name ‘diminished scale’ to jazz theorists. He’s also mode #2 in Messiaen’s modes of limited transposition.

What’s so special about him?

There’s only three modes of the octatonic scale in the twelve-tone system. 

C, D, E♭, F, F♯, G♯, A, B

D♭, E♭, E, F♯, G, A, B♭, C

D, E, F, G, A♭, B♭, B,  C♯

The octatonic scale is based on a pattern (earning it its symmetrical status) - ‘tone, semitone’ or ‘semitone, tone’. I guess you could also think of it as two interlocking diminished seventh chords a tone above the other (or semitone, depending on how you look at it). What’s so great about this? Simple attern = limited transpositions = no obvious tonal centre. No ‘home’ note. Beautiful, ambiguous harmony.

As for chords? Four major triads, and their parallel minor variants, are all in the octatonic scale. Each of these has its minor seventh, but (thanks to the diminished quality of the tone-semitone pattern) none can resolve properly onto a chord whose tonic is a fifth below, as normally found in classical harmony. Within the two diminished seventh chords that make up the scale can be found four diminished triads, again, none of which are able to ‘resolve’ properly according to classical harmony.

There’s also this ‘alpha chord’ that crops up. Wikipedia tells me that it’s ‘"a vertically organized statement of the octatonic scale as two diminished seventh chords," such as: C♯–E–G–B♭–C–E♭–F♯–A’ which is very cool.

Listen to Messiaen’s Vingt regards sur l'enfant Jésus : XI Première communion de la Vierge above to truly appreciate the octatonic scale in all its glory.

#messiaen #octatonic scale

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I just read a newspaper article about this composer-prince called Gesualdo: titled “Carlo Gesualdo: composer or crazed psychopath?” 

If I had been shown this work and asked to identify when it was written, there is almost no way in hell that I would have said anything before the the late 19th century. My primary interest is the flow of the chords he uses: the above example opens with a C# major chord smoothly falling to an A minor chord (all the sharps to no sharps). And it continues from there if you can stand the moments of ever-so-slight flatness caused by a domino-effect of just intonation across the range of tonalities.

Also, turns out he married his first cousin, murdered her and her lover when he found them in bed together and left their corpses in front of his palace for everyone to see. Not that I’m being judgemental...

The newspaper article is here if you feel like trusting a journalist to hand you your opinion: http://www.theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2010/mar/18/carlo-gesualdo-composer-psychopath.

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Tuning a chord

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Gergiev cond. LSO

I found this nice quote about Debussy’s music from Classical Notes:

Debussy was the first composer to create music of sheer sonority that simply was allowed to exist, without constantly having to progress toward a prescribed goal. As David Ewen put it, for Debussy color, nuance, mood, atmosphere and sensation were far more significant than drama or realism – his music is intended to appeal to the senses, not the intellect.

Having started deconstructing the orchestral score of the work in the link above, I can definitely agree with this, although the harmonies, sonorities and orchestral colours he does produce are incredibly satisfying to take apart and analyse. Overlapping fragments of whole-tone octaves, held fifths that clash with the previous fragment before evolving into their own variation of a flowing motif, dramatic whole-tone motions that roll over each other... that’s only what I’ve found so far.