#and bach. he played bach violin sonatas when he was 10

[beesholmes]

sherlock holmes loves sibelius violin concerto the most but he plays tchaikovsky vc more regularly bc john loves it

[incorrecttwoset]

IM-

ASDFGHJKL- WHAT THE FUCK YES

Im not sure if this warrants a lesson time but fUCK IT IMMA DO IT ANYWAYS

Lesson time with Dani?????

The lesson we all learned here today is... that Davie was nice enough to put in markers. For the vid. So I can judge it better. You win just this once bass... just this once...

Anyways, LETS LEARN SOME LESSONS BOIS

0:00, the beginning (of the end) of the war. This part of the vid was a small teaser of what'll happen later on in the vid and a somewhat biased recount of the war. I'm saying somewhat because i just woke up and this is the second video ive watched today, first one being metling metal with magnets. Nice Dani is very much alive in the mornings... only if given ample time to ready themselves for socializing. oKAY BACK TO THE TOPIC. So after this recount of events, Davie transitions it to section 2:04 of the video with the line "bass is better than violin". And speaking of top 10 things to say if you wanted to be smited down by Ling Ling, lets go to that part.

2:04, they gave up? (Lol nopes) This section starts off with Brett's wonderful voice sightreading rapping to Eddy's lofi beats. (But no srsly, if you watch the vid it becomes sO APPARENT that Brett didnt memorize his LINES AHAHAHA HE KEEPS LOOKING OF TO THE SIDE AND READING IM DYING WHAT A MOOD) Which then goes into the famous transition from movement teo to three with that famous "sIKE" that probably tricked like, at least half the people that viewed. I know i was lol. Also, Eddy calm down with that tongue. You'll decimate half the fandom. But... he probably already did. And speaking of decimation, lets move to the next part shall we?

2:50, phone call. Violin-chan's life flashes before their eyes, wondering how the fuck Davie will end her life with a pizza cutter wHEN SUDDENLY. Ring ring. The phone rings. He answers it. (If you get that reference i love you) Its the bOIS! Just in time for violin-chan too. (Also dear god tHOSE WIGGLY EYEBROWS. EDDY IM A BRETT STAN STOP IT) They then show off a taste of the fruits of 40 hours practice by showing how they got his number and fINALLY legitimately declare battle directly to him. They then goad him into actually proving his worth as an instrumentalist, all for Violin-chan's sake. And we FINALLY ENTER INTO THE INSTRUMENT BATTLE. This is all for you violin-chan, we love you babe.

3:40, battle. Dude. Lemme just say. If they release a vid or a track with just the music from the battle, i will get it and blast it into my earphones all the time. I swear. Also, yt commenter TheVorshevsky was nice enough to get the piece names and place them all in their respective order. So, we'll follow that along with my own, albeit little, knowledge of classical music. Thanks for the help dude!

Pre-movement 1, WA Mozart Rondo Alla Turca AKA Turkish March. This part is short and sweet as it serves as the opening to the rest of the four movement battle. It slightly shows us how the battle will work, with alterations between bass and violin when its musically pleasing. (Dat butt wiggle dow. So cute! Thank you for stealing back my heart Brett) Of course, thats not how the whole battle will go as we blast off into the actual 1st movement.

Movement 1, JS Bach Cello Suite No. 1 G Major. As this part goes on, we see them take th main theme which they played at the start, and slowly add in their own twists and variations to it. And by slowly, I mean immediately after playing the theme. It was basically unrecognizable at the end. And i love it. And Brett showing off his perfect pizz? Oh baby, IVE MISSED THAT SO MUCH. Also, i love how they just ever so casually bUSTED OUT THE ADVANCED TECHNIQUES. LIKE OKAY. FLEX.

Movement 2, Vivaldi Summer. Personally, this feels like more of an endurance test to me. Like, see who breaks first. It would judge it musically but after finally being (slightly) educated on calssical music, I've looked back at all the times I've heard Vivaldi Summer. And oH GOD, IT WAS RUINED FOR ME. Well, not completely but like- its like asking a world class pianist to play Fur Elise. I mean, it's a great piece but its so overused. My music senses did not tingle with glee at this part. Twas only a light hum. Like how it sounded like. No offense. But I did like the intensity it added to the battle. Very epico in that regard.

Movement 3, Beethoven Moonlight Sonata 1st Mvt. I'm still sHOOKT at how they transitioned it from the intense, heart racing, fiery tones of Vivaldi Summer to the calmer, more melancholic melody of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata. Like hUH okay. Show off your arrangement skills. Also, is it just me or does the part after they introduce the main theme of the piece sound like the Twoset Concerto Battle??? Because, ive listened to that concerto battle for AGES and honey, i detect some concertos sneakin in this here battle. Also when Davie tried to take over with that simple yet sweet bassline which was complemented by Twoset's violin playing? Ohhhhh we sTAN. Do we stan Davie? Twoset? Both? I dont know, and i dont care because this is probably the best world war ever. And oH JEEZ WHEN EDDY TOOK THAT BASSLINE AND MADE IT HIS OWN WHILE BRETT BOUNCES HAPPILY IN THE CORNER? Ded. I would gush more about this part but we need room for movement 4 babey!!!

Movement 4, Paganini Caprice 24. When you thought that fighting two violin bois was easy but then you were wrong. AKA AnimeBassMe's rETURN. Fuckin hilarious i love it. Lowkey think that AnimeBassMe, Edwina, and Brettany would probably enjoy each other's company. Or ykno. Do the same instrument battle.

And finally, the thing we've all been dreading.

7:00, holy slapp. Not much to say really. Let's all gove a moment of silence for violin-chan. Wherever she is. At least she got to hear the EPIC music from this battle. And that Davie, on some level, respeccs the Twoset bois.

7:36, what happened to Violin-chan? Well, we can only hope that our bois in soft Twoset merch can save Violin-chan. (Also look at Brett's little run off screen im-)

[genvieve-of-the-wood]

Music Shuffle

Ok, @tristanundisolde I am game.  My list will be all over the place because I listen to lots of different genres so if I shuffle on what I use by songs alone it’s a jumble.  I have moods, eras, dancing, meditation, etc songlists. 

Confession:  Due to my age, I’ve been listening to stuff from my high school - college- early 20′s. I like to listen to new stuff if it appeals to me.  But honestly, in times of stress, like now, we all fall on the music we fell in love with when we were younger as a kind of comfort food for the mind in stressful times. I don’t claim any music better than others, listen to what makes you feel alive.  I didn’t post links or Youtube videos.  If you are curious, you can find the songs on a platform you like to use.  

1. “Rock Lobster” - The B52′s - I love them because they were doing their own thing long before others were.  They are just fun and this song was fun to learn on the guitar back when I used to play in my 20′s.

2. “Join in the Chant” - Nitzer Ebb - When I was early in college, I was diagnosed with clinical depression. But I had bouts of rage at everything I saw back then  and to my own personal life.  Industrial night at the club, besides alternative night back then were so therapeutic.  Pull on some Doc Martens, gather others just like yourself and I swear we could have invoked something pretty wrathful with our intentions as we danced. Song was ahead of its time. Saw them in concert with Depeche Mode in 1990.

3.  “Proud Mary” - Tina Turner - If you don’t know the song, or Tina Turner, I feel sorry for you.  She is a goddess.

4.  Chemical Brothers - “Block Rockin’ Beats” - I like a lot of their stuff, but this one is also good to do with a punching bag workout which helps with stress, too.

5.  Digital Underground - “Doowhutchayalike”  - I wasn’t just dancing on alternative night, y’all.  This one and the lots of hip hop from that era was just impossible to sit down to.

6.  Simple Minds - “All the Things She Said” - I pretty much love everything they do.  This is my favorite song by this band.  And you have to love the video - the effects, the 80′s fashion and he’s holding a falcon!

7.  J.S. Bach - “Sonatas and Partitas for lute” - I have always loved this music, even as a child.  This, Spanish classical guitar, cello, violin, can listen to for hours.

8.  Queen - “Flash Gordon theme” - I love Queen.  Anything.  Anything by them is worth a listen.  This is a cult favorite for terrible movies of the 80′s.  But dammit, it’s Queen!  

9.  David Bowie - “As the World Falls Down"- Imagine you are anywhere from 12-14 years old.  And you are introduced to David Bowie through him as Jared, the Goblin King in Labyrinth singing this song.  Between him and Adam Ant, I’m pretty sure that was where my sexual awakening happened. And I am so glad I was introduced to Bowie to get to know his earlier stuff and remain a huge fan.

10. Johnny Cash - “She Used to Love Me a Lot” - I like older country,(although this song/album was only a few years ago) blues, bluegrass if it hits me right.  I particularly love this song because after you walk away as a woman from a relationship, the lyrics are simple but poignant.  

I also listen to classic rock, jazz, Latin, Motown, Celtic, pagan, space electronic, and yes, I do listen to stuff after the year 2000.  (Lady Gaga, Billie Eillish, Hozier, etc.) My record collection is all over the place.  Fleetwood Mac  to Echo and the Bunnymen to Gipsy Kings to John Coltrane to Dolly Parton to Van Morrison to Diana Ross to Debussy, etc. Music is like food - you must sample a bit of everything to see if you enjoy it.

I don’t know if anyone wants to participate, but I enjoyed watching what popped up in my song list when I letit pull songs out randomly.  Thanks for the invite, @tristanundisolde    !

[catsbest-uk]

Music to Make Cats Sleep - Best Music For Cats

CATS AND MUSIC: WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW 

Music for Cats? Is there such a thing – and if so – what information do we need to choose the right kind? 

Here is everything you need to know. 

Music moves us as human beings. This is due to the fact that the human brain sends all kinds of acoustic signals which are triggering emotions in the brain. But is the effect the same for cats and does it yield the same reactions?

All of these are questions that scientists and musicians have examined by performing tests on what influence music has on cats: A very positive one! – given, the right type of music is played. 

But what exactly is the right kind of music for cats and why do they like it?

Can cats anticipate distinct tunes?

How do they perceive music?

Cats are excellent hunters, all their senses are refined for exactly that reason. 

Not only do they know how to approach their prey soundlessly, they can also feel their environment via specifically sensitive hair on their front paws. 

Thus, they perceive even the slightest of vibrations that we as humans normally would not even recognise – cats are purring seismographs! 

In the animal realm, the hearing of cats is one of the best; it is developed to an extent that they can hear the slightest peep of a mouse. 

Even in their dreams! 

This is a matter of survival – because in the wild, they would become easy prey to their predators during nap time.

Music is always preceived by cats – even if noted down by the composer as “ppp” – pianissimo possibile (as low as possible). 

Species-appropriate music

Scientists of the University of Wisconsin in Madison took a closer look and examined how different cats reacted on a variety of music initially composed for human ears only.

The result: There is a special kind of music which is pleasant to cats’ ears – not surprisingly, it is the type of sound best suited for their highly sensitive feline ears.

Orientated on cats’ sounds

So what tunes flatter your cat’s ears the most?

Scientist have found out that sounds perceived as pleasant during the first weeks of childhood remain the most enjoyable ones for cats throughout their lives. 

When kittens come into this world, they are well fitted with a number of survival reflexes. However, in the beginning, they can’t see or hear. Only in the second week of their lives can kittens perceive their environment with all their senses.  

Want to know more about a kitten’s development stages?

The first rhythms that a kitten perceives are the vibrations of their mother’s heartbeat, purring, or the drinking noises they make when sucking on their mom’s teats. These sounds are connected with comfort and security.

High frequencies

Cats’ feel-good music entails sounds connected to positive early-life experiences. Purring or sucking noises are therefore “top of the pops” for cats – they lead the feline charts, so to speak.

Cats like to communicate in rather high frequencies, since they simply like the sounds that are – in most cases – an octave higher than the human voice.

Anyone composing music for cats should therefore include instruments with a high pitch. 

Perfect are the violin, cello and electronic keyboard instruments – with these, also beginners have a good chance of achieving a good spot in the cats’ top ten.

The right speed

But it is not only the tone which makes the music, dynamics and tempo also play a role!

For comparison: Purring creates 1000 beats per minute!

Based on the structure of purring sounds, frequency and tempo are most pivotal to making music which is pleasant for cats. This “purring speed” synchronises the heartbeat and allows our feline housemates to completely relax. 

Cats don’t like noise

Music for cats should never be too loud.

Since cats have a much more sensitive hearing than humans, keep the volume down!

Aggressive sounds, repeating staccato rhythms and chords don’t sound right to your cat’s ear – they are definitely not techno, trash or heavy metal fans!  – Stick to the headset to avoid stressing them out. 

Many different instruments and a mix of tonalities are not the right thing either – you would not find multiphonic jazz combos in a cat’s record collection. 

Which soothing music is right for cats?

Now you know what type of music is not well received. But what are the cats’ favourites?

What is the ideal chill-out music?

Is there any music which is not only pleasant but also de-stressing for cats? 

For example, relaxing and sleep-enhancing music?

Classical music is often a safe choice: Baroque composers like Johann Sebastian Bach and Georg Friedrich Händel appease and relax our feline friends. 

Soft classical music

Classical pieces are soothing not only for humans but also for cats. Tests have shown that music influences the vegetative nervous system which in turn controls the cardiovascular function. The kind of music we listen to even affects our blood pressure and breathing.  

The soft, harmonious sounds also calm down our cats and lead to relaxed breathing and a well-balanced heartbeat – with some cats, even the pupils get smaller.

But which exact music has this effect? Not all cats like the same tunes – play a few pieces to your cat to find out about it’s taste. 

Here are some examples that should have a relaxing effect:

Johann Sebastian Bach Goldberg-Variations (BWV 988)

Ludwig van Beethoven Moonlight Sonata (op. 27, Nr. 2) Piano concert No. 4 G-major (op. 58)

Frédéric Chopin Fantaisie-Impromptu (op. 66)

Claude Debussy La Mer

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Symphony No. 40 G-minor, 2nd movement (KV 550)

Maurice Ravel Piano trio in A-minor

Camille Saint-Saëns Symphonie Nr. 3 c-minor (op. 78)

Natural sounds and frequencies  If you are looking for soothing music for your cat, also try playing natural frequencies and sounds.  

Natural sounds have a relaxing effect on both humans and cats.

A prime example is the sound of sea waves.

This frequency (twelve vibrations per minute) is perceived as soothing, as it resembles our breathing rhythm during sleep. It does therefore not only remind us pleasantly of holidays on the beach, we also – subconsciously – connect it with relaxation and rest. 

Also our cats search for these natural sounds and vibrations, which to them send “pleasant” and “calming” signals. Certain music used for meditation practise may for example have the same soothing effects on both you and your cat.

Music composed for cats

Various scientists have meanwhile conducted research on the musical taste of cats. The results were used to compose special cat music related to the frequencies used for communication among the animals.

By adding some conventional musical elements, these compositions were then made “human-friendly”, so that we can also enjoy them. Then, they were played to cats.  

– The test subjects were thrilled! And this is how it was done: 

Composers like Oliver Kerschner, Charles Snowdown or David Teie created species-appropriate music using the research results. 

Admittedly, some pieces may be a little hard to get used for human ears at first – but cats just love it!

“Music for Cats”– David Teie

David Teie is a professional cellist with the Washington National Symphony Orchestra and teaches at the University of Maryland.

Together with Professor Charles Snowdon,  psychologist and expert for animal behaviour at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, he composed “Music for Cats”.

Cat fans from all over the world were enthusiastic and reported relaxed and soothed cats, caressing the loudspeakers!

You can get both the “Music for Cats” albums by David Teie here

Sensitive hearing

As opposed to eyes, ears unfortunately cannot be shut: Whoever shares a flat wit a cat knows when things are getting too loud for the feline housemate – a harmless vacuum cleaner may border unbearable conditions!

In that case, cats choose flight over fight – off to a quiet refuge. 

Your cat’s hearing is extremely sensitive!

Even better than the hearing of a dog! 

Their ears are like big, movable hearing aids, consisting of 64 single muscles (32 in every ear); with those they can point their ears quickly in all possible directions. 

For this, they don’t even have to move their head. 

High frequencies

Imagine, you have an amplifier implanted in your ear – hearing everything better and louder. 

Cats hear a lot more than we do. They perceive sounds that we don’t even realise;  much lower sounds for example, or other frequencies we are not aware of – mostly among the higher pitches. Humans only hear sounds between the frequencies of 16 Hz to 20 kHz.

Animals can hear ultra sounds of up to 20kHz to 1.6 GHz – too high a frequency for us to perceive.

Localisation of sounds

Nothing escapes a cat’s ear!

Outside or inside – even in the dark – cats know how to find their prey before the victim itself knows where it is. 

The cat’s hearing does not only amplify sounds many times over – the animals can also estimate perfectly, where the noise is coming from; because their ears are extremely movable and can rotate to up to 180 degrees.  

The sound hits the eardrum after having been transmitted by fine hairs, membranes and small bones through the ear canal, and signals to the cat’s brain, where the noise is coming from. 

Bad hearing in old age

Cats can suffer hear-loss in old age, just the same as humans do.

This is mostly a matter of blood circulation; if the ears are not well supplied with blood any more, the cat will hear less. You will realise this e.g. by an increased jumpiness because they can’t hear you approaching – or even their meowing gets louder, as they can’t hear their own voice as well as they used to. 

Most cats hear less after reaching the 10th year of their life. However, cats normally learn to cope with age-related loss of hearing and will find a way to work around it.  

The other senses will take over part of the tasks and help out, so to speak; an older cat has a rich wealth of experience to fall back on and will know how to adapt to the new situation.   

Music has a calming effect

Music influences emotions.

In many a vet’s practice, music will be used to calm animals down and make the visit easier for them. – And it works!

Certain types of music are known to be especially effective for calming cats. When cats hear this kind of music, you can tell, how quickly they relax – even fighting tom cats will calm down. 

Playing relaxing music is also a good way of easing unknown or stressful situations. Prime examples are holidays like new year’s eve or long car trips – not very popular with many cats. 

What music suits a cat?

Is there such a thing as cats’ music?

How about the musical “Cats”? Should our feline friends not go for it automatically?

Andrew Lloyd’s melodrama counts as the most successful musical of all times – and all the leading roles are cats!

But seriously, do cats really like the same music as we do – or do they perceive it entirely differently and therefore have a much different taste in music? 

What counts as pleasant to them?

“What kind of music do cats like and what effect does it have on them?” – Many scientists have asked themselves the exact same question – and found an answer to it...

[tenjouu]

unorganized headcanons for a classical trained musician ikevam!MC

1. 

The moment Mozart reluctantly introduces himself at the dinner table your very first night at the mansion, you accidentally spill wine from your mouth into your own lap. 

(Did he just say his name is Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart? Does that mean Haydn’s here too? Beethoven? And if Napoleon's around, then every time period is fair game right? What about Chopin? Lizst? Paganini? Bach? Rachmaninoff?) 

You hurriedly grab a napkin to wipe your skirts. He’s absolutely disgusted. 

2. 

You already have a crush. Of course, his disastrous first impression of you has put a damper on some things.

Even if Mozart’s…personality could use some work, to you, his cold reception isn’t enough to deter you from harboring the ultimate infatuation…for his music. Sometimes, when Mozart leaves the piano room ajar to get coffee, you stare longingly at the piano from outside, wondering if he’d let you play it if you asked. (You know very well that most musicians are touchy about their instruments. And you two aren’t even acquaintances at this point.) 

Sebastian thinks you just want to be friends with Mozart. You don’t have to be friends with Mozart. You just want to play his songs!

3. 

After you’ve worked hard helping Sebastian around the house, the Count of Saint Germaine insists on giving you some kind of reward, to honor your labor. You miss playing…and the Count knows that you used to be a musician. The Count then says casually that he might have a few old rusty instruments in storage. When he says ’old rusty’, you discover he’s actually talking about a Stradivarius. When he tries to get you to take it, you nearly die on the spot.

4. 

You tune the instrument and get choked up thinking about how you’re holding an actual Stradivarius in your hands. Catgut strings require more frequent tuning, but the sound is so much more richer than the synthetic strings of your day and you’re absolutely in love. You jam out loudly in your room, going absolutely wild with Bach’s Ciaconna. 

5. 

Of course, the sound is so loud that people in the hallway can hear. This is therefore how Arthur finds out. And once Arthur finds out, so does everyone else in the mansion. Arthur tries to joke that you���re trying to give Mozart a run for his money. You have no such illusions; you know Mozart is more of a virtuoso than you ever will be. Still, now that there are two musicians out in the mansion, this means that a confrontation is inevitable. Or not really a confrontation, but one day, Sebastian asks you to deliver some rouge to Mozart. You go to the piano room, and when Mozart sees it’s you, he freezes up. It’s so awkward——but then he says, “You. Get your violin.”

You don’t think Mozart’s feeling threatened by your presence, because him, one of the greatest composers of all time, being contested by you? Laughable. But warily, you wonder why he’s asking, so you say, “Sure, but may I ask why…?”

“I want to hear you,” he says bluntly. When you look hesitant, because can you really play in front of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart——he takes your stalling for a refusal and points out, “You listen to me playing all the time.”

Well, yeah, you listen to him all the time. It’s because he’s Mozart. This is accidentally what comes out of your mouth too: “I like listening to you play,” you say without thinking. You’ve heard so many people play Mozart’s songs, but there’s something different about hearing the original artist. “Your music is beautiful.”

This is the first time you catch Mozart off guard. He schools his expression in an instant and says, “Don’t make me repeat myself,” so you hurry to grab your violin with some apprehension.

6. 

The second time you catch him off guard is when you decide to play his Concerto No. 3 in G major, K. 216. You expect him to feel free to stop you at any point, but then it comes to the section where every violinist does their own cadenza. Judging by the way he sucked in a breath, you have either impressed him or irrevocably offended him. When you finish, he looks astounded. And then his eyebrows knit together almost like he’s mad. You lower the violin awkwardly. 

“…Not bad,” he says, and leaves it at that. 

You’re pretty enthused though. You just got a not bad from the composer himself. Considering how nervous you were when you flubbed your cadenza and accidentally went into the parallel key on a major-turned-minor sixth and decided to roll with it, turned your whole improvisation minor, only to barely redeem yourself at the end by flipping back… if he thought it was not bad, then that would probably be the closest he’d ever get to liking it.

You beam at him. “Thank you,” you say genuinely, ecstatic, and to your surprise, you catch him off guard a third time.

“Don’t get ahead of yourself,” Mozart says, sounding baffled and a little panicked. To cover up his wrong-footedness, he starts lecturing you instead. “Don’t attempt a double stop trill if you’re going to hesitate. Your up-bow stuttered on the string. And——”

You dip your head in acknowledgment, a little amazed. It’s just——you’re being so well-received right now that he’s even giving you advice. You never particularly had the desire to be a soloist——you just enjoyed the music and playing with everyone. And being at a virtuosic level wasn’t a requirement for that. You weren’t going to be playing any Paganini caprices after all.

“That’s all,” he says, finally, after he’s listed out everything that you needed to improve. “Dismissed.”

He’s dismissed you like a student. The both of you catch on to the behavior he’s defaulted to in self-defense, and you smile, strangely happy. He glares at you, so you decide not to impose anymore and leave him to his music again.

7. 

Arthur expresses some lament when Mozart starts making you play for him more often. So often, in fact, that you spend most of your free time in the piano room, playing his old pieces back to him.

(“I was the one who discovered you first,” Arthur complains when he catches you waiting at the piano room door. “Now Mo-kun’s keeping you all for himself.”

You have no idea how to respond to that. Arthur leans in close.

“Won’t you play for me some time?” Arthur asks with a wink.

The door opens right then. Mozart asks what you two are doing in front of someone else’s room. You explain you were waiting for Mozart to open the door. Arthur explains that Mozart can’t just hog you like this.)

8. 

Mozart refuses to play at dinner because (1) he doesn’t possess a violin and he says that rather than asking him to play yours, then you should just use it to practice, and (2) he would rather die before he wheels the piano out of the piano room. You refuse to play because if Mozart’s not playing, then you certainly won’t. But with some encouragement from Vincent, you play for him apres un reve, when you’re free from chores and Mozart’s busy. (It’s so weird since Faure would have been Vincent’s contemporary.)

9. 

One time, Mozart makes you really angry. It’s when he expresses his disappointment in the fact that you don’t want to be a virtuoso, even if you have the potential that he seems to see in you. 

When you try to explain that you lack that ambition and you just like playing music for fun (something that he has difficulty comprehending), he accuses you of enjoying music like a bystander. For Mozart, music has been his everything since birth. His means of survival, his reason for living, his reason for resurrection. Music supersedes all else. In your world, music meant something different. Kids who could afford it got lessons and cultivated their talent early on and went to conservatories and musical colleges. Kids who couldn’t joined their orchestras in school arts programs. Kids like you were stuck somewhere between mediocrity and excellence. Mozart lived by his music. You learned to live with music too, with gratitude, in a way that wasn’t painful.

Because you do get a little upset——since this is Mozart himself expressing his disappointment in you——you play everything but his music. It’s not to spite him, but because you can’t bring yourself to touch his music. Maybe it’s a little true. Maybe you don’t deserve to play it after all.

Music remains the best way to communicate to Mozart though, even more so than words. Your playing lets him realize very quickly that he’s upset you. And the way you play lets him know your true feelings——he knows too, that it isn’t out of spite, in the way your vibrato lingers with regret. So the next time he calls you to the music room, he hands you a score.

You want to refuse; you don’t even have your violin with you, but he shakes his head.

“Play it, or don’t,” he says, before you can say anything. “Do what you want.” It’s a symbolic gesture.

That’s probably the closest to a verbal apology you get, but when he tells you that you can sit down on the sofa (if you want), and when he plays a quick sonata, you know he’s saying sorry in his melody.

10. 

Although, he does say that he’ll do one thing as a token of reconciliation. This is a once and a life-time opportunity, so you ask him to play a duet with you. When he agrees, after some hesitation, you propose Handel-Halvorsen’s Passacaglia. Mozart doesn’t recognize the Halvorsen part, and that’s when you realize that Halvorsen was after Mozart’s time, even after the nineteenth century as well. Stumped, you decide to cancel the whole thing, but Mozart surprisingly insists.

“No, I’ve already agreed,” Mozart says, sounding annoyed. “It’s no matter. You seem to know the piece well. If you know your partner’s part, just play it for me.”

You’ve always wanted to hear Mozart on the violin, so you play the violin part for him. He just needs to hear it once, and then he’s got the entire thing down. You’re amazed. You hand the Stradivarius to him. He replays the part you played for him twenty minutes later, perfectly.

“Wait here,” you blurt out, and run for the Count’s room to ask him for a viola.

The Count has someone retrieve a viola immediately for you. It’s a Guarneri this time. You wonder how the Count could possibly have this many connections——but no matter; you hurry back to the piano room.

Mozart watches you tune the viola with interest, arching a brow.

“Are you any good with that?” he asks, curious. 

“I would like to think that I’m average,” you reply honestly, settling the viola into the crook of your neck. “Let’s start.”

11. 

You get distracted by Mozart’s playing because he improvises where he can. It’s so beautiful, in fact, that, unbeknownst to you, your own playing turns lovesick. By the end of your duet, the two of you are breathing hard. And Mozart’s face is flushed from exertion——but also, it’s just plain indignant.

“I wasn’t going to interrupt, so I didn’t say anything during our duet, but——what are you doing?” he demands.

You’re completely clueless. Mozart may be good at reading people through music, but you’ve never been able to read Mozart, period. You think he’s probably talking about your proficiency with the viola this time——but he’s talking about the way your notes are dipped in longing, the rawest form of love communicated to him in the way that he can best understand——and he sees just exactly how lost you are and shakes his head, deciding not to broach the subject. 

“Never mind,” he says, miffed. “Forget it.”

12. 

When he asks you all of the other instruments you can play, you reply honestly that you’re fine with all string instruments. You’ve never tried woodwind. Your musical career started at the piano. He’s begrudgingly impressed, but it shouldn’t be surprising. All musicians hone their craft, but all of them have breadth. He himself could probably play all of the instruments you’ve listed. But then he asks you to sing.

Horrified, for the first time, you tell him directly, “No.” (You hate your singing voice.)

13. 

Hearing other people perform his songs makes him crave the opera scene again. And you do encourage him because the people of nineteenth century Paris would be blessed to receive Mozart’s music. Therefore, he once again engages patrons under a new name: Wolfram Theophilius Pertl. It’s…a little obvious, personally, since you know him, and you’ve read his WIkipedia article! But then he gets to engage with other musicians. You’re worried about being left in the dust for better musical company, but you suppose it’s a little inevitable. You’re glad Mozart’s going back out into the world, but you are a little sad that you won’t be able to spend as much time with him, or that it’ll change what you have with him right now. In the interim, Arthur and the others do try to cheer you up a little, and keep you more company now that Mozart’s no longer requesting your free time. But this lasts for two weeks before he decides that he hates it again and leaves the conducting to others.

14. 

You ask him why, when he once again returns to secluding himself in the mansion. He says very candidly that he can’t stand the pomposity of musicians who mistakenly think they’re the soloist that will save this generation. He says that he’d rather deal with an obedient and aimless player like you.

Although you protest, “Obedient? And aimless…”

He smiles at you. It’s a mean smile, a teasing one, but a smile nonetheless. “It’s a compliment,” he says. “Receive it.”

15. 

You may not be good at reading people, but even you can tell when Mozart’s writing love songs. And he usually at least shares his new pieces with you, if not to ask you to play them. But these, he doesn’t let you see the sheet music, so you assume that you shouldn’t play it by ear either. And so they must be love songs…for someone else.

Your budding attraction toward Mozart (and not just his music, this time) makes this a very complicated and loaded realization for you. Because you like Mozart. Sebastian asks how you know that Mozart’s in love——so you explain that it’s through his music. It just sounds like he’s pining. Sebastian chooses to trust your judgment, since you seem to know Mozart best.

16. 

You’re pretty saddened by this, actually. For all you know, it could be that one soprano whom he specifically requested to be the primadonna in his new work after watching her perform the Queen of the Night aria (the two of you went together, and it was pretty good; it was also funny watching Mozart’s face turn pained each time the cellist went off). She was beautiful. The epitome of nineteenth century French beauty. The two of you had to dress nicely to enter the opera house, but you still felt rather plain in comparison when you saw her bright costume. Mozart was appraising. So you play the saddest songs you know because you know the emotion in them very well. Despair——

17. 

Mozart, for some reason, is absolutely infuriated by this. 

He demands to know why you’re playing songs of unrequited love. Adagio, of all songs. You’re repurposing Ciaconna for the entirely wrong reasons! It’s a rhetorical question, but he asks you, ‘You’re playing other people’s songs again. Who are you playing these songs for?’ You want to ask the same question. Who are those love songs for? But does Mozart even think of you in such a way that would warrant you asking? Would he understand why you want to know? Does he even consider you a possibility?

“Your silence in four-four time is turning into demisemiquavers rests,” Mozart notes.

“Because I’m anxious,” you reply. “I like you, Mozart.”

18. 

Farewell, your dignity. You toss your instrument to him, and while he’s caught off-guard, fumbling to catch it, you make a run for the door.

19. 

“You——hey!” Mozart says after you. “I already know that.”

You stop short of yanking the door open and turn around, eyes wide. “What?”

Of course he would know. But then——

“Then why didn’t you know,” you say, voice trembling, “that those songs were for you?”

“I knew,” Mozart says, exasperated. “Which is why it doesn’t make sense why you would play them. You really are an idiot. It’s not unrequited.”

“Wha——but the bella,” you blurt. “Your love songs.”

“What? What bella?”

“Never mind,” you say with a cough. It’s you. Those love songs were for you?

“You knew they were love songs, but you couldn’t tell who they were for,” Mozart says, reproachful.

Maybe Mozart was broadcasting his attraction to you this entire time through his music. But with a language that you’re only barely conversational in, he could be as obvious as day and it would still be subtlety at best through your eyes. And you’re not good with subtlety. 

“Because,” you mumble. “Why would it be me?”

“And why wouldn’t it be?” he demands. You open your mouth, but he cuts you off before you can speak. “No. Never mind. Knowing you, you’ll actually answer with your ridiculous thoughts.” 

[inneralpacacheesecake-blog]

Post #5

1.     Describe Bach’s personality.

Johann Sebastian Bach seemed to live a simple life and just wanted to keep creating great music. It seemed as if he wasn’t even interested in fame and that is probably why he didn’t become super famous until after his death. He seemed to have a very modest lifestyle and always lived within his means. In the text, The Great German Composers, the author states that “by frugality, the simple wants of himself and his family never overstepped the limits of supply” (Titus 4). The reading suggests that Bach was more interested and devoted to creating great music than he was to living a lavish lifestyle. This can also be seen in how other composers thought of him. He has often been described as a “musician for musicians”(Titus 6) and his work inspired many composers during his time while he was alive and also in many generations to come.

 2.     When did the German Renaissance occur?

There isn’t an exact time period that was given in the reading however it said that Germany was experiencing musical renaissance around the time that Bach was getting his musical education at Lune-Burg. He attended Lune-Burg in 1703 so it was probably sometime during the early 18th century. During this time many German capitals had seen an increase in enthusiasm for the arts.

 3.     How many wives and children does it say he had? 

After looking at the Family tree it looks like Bach had two wives and 10 children, however, in the reading the author says otherwise. The author states that Bach was “twice married, and the father of twenty children” (Titus 4), so I’m not really sure which one to believe!

 4.     How many were musicians?

The family tree article says that 4 of his children had musical talents. Two became musical leaders of their time and two others showed substantial musical talent. In the text, though it says that 3 of his sons became famous musicians and one, Emanuel Bach, is known for developing the sonata which in turn became the foundation for the symphony (Titus 6).  

 5.     Is there musical talent in your family?

My Papa played the piano and he also loved to paint. My Dad played either the tuba or the trombone in his high school marching band, but I never seen him play an instrument before. I bought him a ukulele for Christmas 2 years ago and he tried to play it a couple of times that day but I haven’t seen it since. I also had to play the recorder in elementary school for music class but my dad wouldn’t let me play it in the house so I never learned any song except for “hot cross buns”.

St. Matthew’s Passion:

1)    I think that the tonality of this piece is major. I wanted to say modal at first because it kind of sound like something you may hear in a church and it also sounds kind of old, but it sounds much different than all the other pieces that we have listened to and those were all modal. When I hear this piece it sounds happy to me and a little more modern than the other pieces we have heard so far and that is why I think it is major.

 2)     At the beginning of the piece the tempo seems kind of slow and each note sounds like they are being dragged out. These two things along with the lyrics makes me feel like they are mourning the death of Jesus Christ. Then there is a break in the music around 3:13 and the music begins again at 3:17 and it seems to be much louder. The notes seemed to be pronounced and it sounds like the people are begging for forgiveness during this part of the piece.

 3)    From watching the video I think that an oratorio is a large orchestra that includes both instrumental musicians and also vocalists.

 4)    I think that it defiantly tells a story and I enjoy this piece much more than the others that we have listened to so far for that reason.

 Concerto for two Violins, Strings, and Continuo in D minor BWV 1043:

Vivace: In the beginning of the piece, the tempo sounds fast. To me, it sounds like there are two or melodies being played which is why I believe that the texture is polyphonic. The tonality of this piece sounds happy to me so that is why I thought it was major, but in the title it says in D minor so I’m not really sure which one it is. I couldn’t hear any instruments that weren’t in the sting family which makes me wonder if the only instrument being played are violins.  

Largo ma non tanto: There was a pretty long break in between these two parts which made me wonder if it was two different pieces or if they all went together. The tempo seemed to slow down a bit in this second part. I believe that the texture is still polyphonic because I can still hear multiple melodies. I still only hear strings but I see a lady something that looks like a piano. I can’t really tell what it is and I can’t hear a piano so I thought it may have been a harpsichord. I think that the tonality is minor for this part because it sounds kind of sad. There was a part around 5:58 where it seemed like the dynamic changed which I thought sounded decrescendo because the volume that the violins soloist were playing at went down.

Allegro: There was another break in the music and then the tempo picked way up again. Now I’m pretty positive I hear a harpsichord. The texture is still polyphonic and I think the tonality is still minor because it still sounds kind of sad.  

[henry33tan]

Leeds Piano Competition 2021, and a look back!

I remember Leeds 1972 when my classmate from High School, Murray Perahia entered and prevailed as the First Place winner. “Murray” as he was known at the NYC HS of Performing Arts-“P.A.” (aka the FAME school) was rightly recognized as a teen phenom! I, for one, would gather with other piano majors, around an old, rather beat up grand where Murray was rehearsing a Mendelssohn Piano Trio with violinist, Diana Halperin (another big talent) and cellist, Marsha Heller. Naturally, the music-making was divine, as Perahia drew listeners into his singing tone, phrase-loving cosmos. (This was after school hours in a musty practice room.)

Even when P.A. orchestra conductor, Julius Grossman asked Murray to play the figured bass of a Corelli Concerto Grosso, ears became pinned to what the young student drew out of the piano that pulled members of the ensemble into collaborative harmony.

Who cannot forget Murray at the podium for a Conducting exam waving his fluid baton in an impassioned late Haydn Symphony reading. (As a Second Violin section member, I felt a surge of excitement that rose to new heights and dwarfed past rehearsals under our regular music director!)

Perahia, as would be expected, took Leeds by storm 8 years later at the urging of his mentor Mieczysław Horszowski. The 25 year old pianist from the Bronx, had largely been playing Chamber music at Marlboro and well beyond, partnering with Rudolf Serkin, Casals, and the Budapest String Quartet (a natural route for him), until he was jettisoned into the solo spotlight by his Leeds victory!

Fast forward to Leeds 2021 where so many competitions now abound in a crush for attention. Pianists from all over the over the world amass first, second, and third place medals, wondering how many they can collect before they solidify a career.

It’s a rat race to the top that’s often beyond reach since there’s always another contest on the horizon that trumps the last! (Given this testy, high-wire, environment, one worries about competition fatigue or burnout!) For pure relief, players hypnotize themselves into a non-competitive bubble, allowing the music to envelop them from start to finish without nerves eating them up alive!

For Leeds 2021 entrants, there’s a demanding Contemporary composition performance requirement that’s layered in with Solo piano repertoire and Chamber Music specifications. Here’s the list of Contemporary works to choose from.

Pierre Boulez1st Sonata10′Luciano BerioSequenza11′Brett DeanHommage a Brahms3 pieces – 8’György LigetiSelection of Etudesup to approx. 10’György KurtágSelection of Játékokup to approx. 10’Thomas LarcherNoodivihik10′Thomas AdesThree Mazurkas9′George Benjamin

Mandatory Chamber Music performances draw on defined works by Dvorak, Brahms, Beethoven among others.

This year, during the Semi-Final round I heard cello and violin sonatas, along with a well known Dvorak Quintet and Brahms Piano Quartet, etc.

Murray Perahia in this posted video for Leeds (as one of its patrons) emphasizes how the Chamber Music component is so intrinsic to the competition and a valued feature.

Were he, however to choose from the list of contemporary SOLO works at the 2021 Leeds website, his enthusiasm might wane.

In media interviews over decades, Perahia often referred to his career-embracing “Classical programming” of Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Chopin, Schumann, Mendelssohn, and Brahms. He resisted critics such as New York Times Arts Editor, Anthony Tommasini who faulted him for omitting serial-based, atonal repertoire on his programs. (See my embedded blog about this repertoire issue that resonates into the present as Competitions insist on Contemporary music exposure.)

When a NY Times music critic and reader clash over a piano recital

Murray responded to his detractor that he “did not understand” many of the Contemporary works urged upon him, though perhaps he might feel differently at this juncture of his life. (Somehow Leeds 2021 officials overlooked Perahia’s recorded comments about the “classically-based” repertoire that he underscored as being a pivotal dimension of Leeds.) Oops! Did anyone check the total footage before it was amplified at the Competition’s website?

About the Leeds 2021 Jury. There are NINE members of which 4 are Pianists! (and only two women!)

Dame Imogen Cooper (UK) Chair of the Jury. (Pianist)

Adam Gatehouse (UK) Artistic Director / Juror. (Conductor)

Inon Barnatan (Israel/ USA) Juror. (Pianist)

Adrian Brendel (UK) Juror. (Cellist)

Silke Avenhaus (Germany) Juror. (Pianist/Chamber Musician/Arranger)

Gaetan Le Divelec (France) Juror. (Oboist)

Ryan Wigglesworth (UK) Juror. (Composer/Conductor)

Ludovic Morlot (France/ USA) Juror. (Conductor)

Steven Osborne (UK) Juror (Pianist)

By contrast the 1972 Leeds Competition had 11 judges, Chaired by the late Fanny Waterman, pianist. From having watched the 1972 Leeds Documentary on You Tube, I ingested the sagacious words of jurors, Ingrid Haebler, Raymond Leppard, Nikita Magaloff, and Waterman. Notice the appearance on the panel of Nadia Boulanger as well. (There were 4 women on the Jury.)

In 1972, when female pianist contenders including Uchida, obtained considerable recognition–though not passing into the Finals where 3 males prevailed, 2021 LEEDS eliminated NOTABLY gifted Semi-Finalists, Elizaveta Kliuchereva–Russia, age 22 and Yuzhang Li–China, age 22 from the Finals leaving FIVE MALES in the culminating Concerto round. These choices revealed a glaring gender disparity!

To make matters worse, Leeds instituted an Audience Favorite limitation, allowing only a voting selection among the FIVE FINALISTS. (This is highly unusual. Most respected Competitions give an option to pick from ALL entrants through a progression of Rounds) Such tight Leeds imposed control is likewise manifest in the Concerto portion of the Finals where Jurors select two piano Concertos for each player, barring contenders any autonomy. One might question the way these pairs of concertos of different length are assigned. Officials justify it as an attempt to adjudge what each entrant needs to play in order to further expand the jurors’ understanding of individual abilities. (This is atypical in the competitive arena.)

Leeds principles also assert in the main, that they want to avoid redundant performances of the same concerto in their assignments, though repetition of repertoire including concerti is par for the course at renowned Competitions such as the Tchaikovsky, Van Cliburn, and Chopin (in Poland) among others.

Leeds 2021 definitely has a different face this year that’s caused a bit of an uproar among its followers around the world. Surely, it should respond in accordance with public opinion and make appropriate adjustments. In the meantime, some ardent piano lovers who tuned into 2021 Leeds from day one, are bidding it farewell until there’s more gender equality and an opportunity to voice their choice of a FAVORITE pianist without restriction.

***

LEEDS 2021, Competition Website

https://leedspiano.medici.tv/en/about/the-leeds/

from Arioso7's Blog (Shirley Kirsten) https://arioso7.wordpress.com/2021/09/16/leeds-piano-competition-2021-and-a-look-back/

[ofpensandmusic]

15 Things You can Practice in 10 Minutes

 I present to you - 15 things you can practice in 10 minutes.

1. Practice a study

Spend 10 minutes working on a study. It could be either one that your teacher has set you, or maybe one that you’ve found and want to read through. Can’t encourage working on studies enough (although not to extremes. Everything is best in moderation), so always try to have one on the go. You might even like to go back and look at a study that you’ve done in the past. Keep an idea of what studies you’ve done, as if a technical problem arises, then you’ll know where you can go to fix it again (though with a fresh mind as it obviously wasn’t permanent last time).

2. Spend 10 minutes on that difficult passage

Having trouble with those 10 bars or so? Rest of the piece is fine but it all comes apart just there. Spend 10 minutes working on it each day. Just those 10 bars. Put 10 minutes of intensive practice and you’ll start to see improvements soon enough.

3. Focus on playing a piece with the most beautiful tone you can manage

Playing with a beautiful tone is a skill, and it takes practice. Playing around with a tune to find out what makes it more beautiful will help you know what to do when it comes to other pieces.

4. Sight-read

Sight-reading is a great skill to develop, and is one that you do need to practice. I suggest getting a tune book with lots of short tunes in there - something such as The Fiddler’s Tune-Book 200 Traditional Airs would be ideal due to the large number of tunes in there. Take a tune, look through it, play it through, and then try doing it again with some musicality (or develop a habit of playing it the first time with musicality). You’ll then be able to transfer these ideas through to your new pieces.

5. Memorise

Have you been trying to memorise something? Spend 10 minutes going over it, making sure it’s absolutely solid and not going to slip. Doesn’t have to be the whole piece, you might just want to spend 10 minutes working on one section. Memorisation has many benefits, but I’ll leave that discussion for an upcoming post.

6. Ultra-slow practice

Everyone knows the benefits of slow practice. However, as I said in a previous post, you’ll want to be careful with slow practice as you use a different technique, and you end up practicing the wrong thing. However, apart from the techniques I described in that article, another practice method to avoid getting used to something is to practice ultra-slow. Slow the piece right down, and really get an idea of what’s happening. If the piece is normally Crotchet=120, slow it down to quaver=60, or possibly even slower. This is great for violinists as you can really focus on your intonation, wind players will need to focus on their breath support.

7. Try out different interpretations

Whether it’s a difficult passage, or one that you’re not sure what to do with musically, 10 minutes is a good chance to try out some different interpretations of that passage. Try exaggerating the dynamics, playing around with rubato and vibrato (if applicable), try it at some different tempi to see what feels best. Remember what you try and what sounds good.

8. Play through the passage focusing on one area

This goes back to the TV Channels post I did, which advised focusing on one “Channel” at a time. It helps you focus your mind and really pick up what’s going wrong. Some areas you might like to focus on are: just the right hand, just the left hand, articulation, dynamics.

9. Sing your part

Singing is a great, yet perhaps underused practice tool. We discover when we sing where are natural places to breathe, natural places to add rubato, and also we can visualize the attacks on notes. Is it a Ka or a Sa, a Ma or a Ba. That will help you determine what sort of attack you want.

10. Visualise a Passage, then play. Repeat

The mind is a wonderful, powerful tool. Visualise the passage you’re working on, and note everything about it. How the attack works, where the rubato is, the line of the piece, the phrasing. In your mind, this can all happen without having to worry about technical difficulties. Then play it, trying to get everything that you visualised. Compare it to the visualised version. Try it again.

11. Visualise

As above, but without the playing. This is a great technique to do if you’ve got 10 minutes, but you don’t have your instrument with you. You can visualise your practicing, and actually learn instead of just sitting around doing nothing. James Morrison, the great Australian Jazz Trumpeter, in his book Blowing my Own Trumpet, talks about how he learnt many of the instruments that he knows how to play by dreaming. He dreamt about playing the double bass, and woke up the next morning with calluses on his fingers. The power of the human mind.

12. Play a piece in a completely different style

This comes back to my post on “Playing” Music. PLay around with your music, and try it in a different style. If you’re playing a Brahms sonata, try playing it in a Baroque Style. If you’re playing Bach, try playing it like it was Brahms (There are plenty of recordings available of this very thing). You’d never perform it like this, but it can sometimes show us parts of the music that we had never listened for before.

13. Play through related repertoire

It helps to know what other pieces are similar to the piece that you’re working on. Playing through similar pieces will help you realize links and similarities. But also think further about a field. If you’re learning a Mozart Violin Concerto, you might play through the other violin concertos by Mozart, possibly the ones by Haydn as well, but you might also want to listen to and play through some of Mozart’s Opera overtures, which have some very similar compositional ideas.

14. Listen

Music is obviously an aural experience. We need to listen when we’re playing. But I also encourage you to listen to music as well. Just as you have played through similar pieces in the previous point, you can also listen to them to get an idea. Learning “Summer” from the Four Seasons? Makes sense to at least listen to the other 3 concertos.

15. Cool Down

Music is very much a physical activity, so a warm up and cool down is a very smart idea. Some of the ideas at the top are great ways to warm up, and can also be used to cool down. What you ideally want is something not too difficult that will let your body, and your mind, rest. Folk tunes are great, but any simple piece that you can play through will do the job.

Have you got any other ideas that you can practice in 10 minutes?

[boribrindzik-blog]

“Music has to be a living thing!” - David Fray interview

David Fray is one of the most well-known young pianists of recent years, and he’s considered to be one of the foremost interpreters of Bach. He performed Bach Goldberg-variations at the Liszt Academy of Music with great success on the 4th of March, 2019. This conversation took place the following day.

Bori Brindzik: You entered the world of classical music after you were awarded the 2nd Grand Prize at the Montreal International Music Competition. What are your thoughts about competitions?

David Fray: It’s a mixed opinion. Although I’ve only partaken in two competitions in my life - one in Japan, and one in Montreal - they’ve both helped me a lot. Especially the one in Montreal, because it got my career off to a good start. I remember that just before the semi-final, I didn’t want to go out on stage. In some ways it felt like a very difficult and rather unnatural situation. I think people who do 10-20 competitions eventually become very “dry” and desensitized, since they no longer work with music in the same way as before. At a certain level, how do you really want to judge the music when they’re all similarly talented musicians? I’d suggest young musicians to prepare very well for 2-3 competitions in their life, but I wouldn’t tell them to do more competitions than that.

BB: You mostly play by german composers. Why is this german repertoire so special to you?

DF: In my opinion, the german repertoire is the most difficult one, since it requires a lot of discipline. However I prefer this repertoire, because it constantly keeps me working hard in order to be able to play these pieces. Also keep in mind that no matter what age you are, you’ll always be a student. When I’m on stage - for instance yesterday, playing this masterpiece for only the 2nd time in my life - I have to be humble, not perfect. It’s the road - the process - that is interesting, not the destination.

BB: How acceptable is it to make a mistake on stage? I feel like a lot of pianists are struggling with worries of “messing up”..

DF: Everybody makes mistakes. I think perhaps those who rarely make mistakes are not really the most interesting ones. The music is what’s important. Of course you have to offer audiences the best quality, but art is also about making a mistake, because you learn from them. If I make a mistake, naturally it bothers me as well. However, at the same time I also try to accept the fact that even if a mistake was made, I’m still trying to do my best. You had a wonderful pianist yourselves here in Hungary, Annie Fischer. She made some mistakes as well, but who cares? I’m sure that you could find hundreds of pianists who made fewer mistakes than her, but still, who do you remember today? You remember Annie Fischer, because she took risks. Even if she made mistakes every now and then, everything she played was grounded in a very serious, genuine and intense way. This is something that tends to be lost today, because we’re constantly trying to be perfect, but that’s not what life is about. If you care too much about those things, you destroy music and life. Anybody is able to make a perfect CD nowadays, but do you think these perfect CDs are the most interesting ones? I’m not sure. I’d rather listen to live performances, because that’s how you really understand what music is about. What does live mean? It’s life. So it’s alive. What we need from music is for it to be a living thing, not something that’s perfect. What is perfection? Just not playing wrong notes? I think the expression in the phrasing is more important than that.

BB: How should we approach a new piece when we start playing it?

DF: The first thing I do when learning a new piece is write the fingering on each note. It really helps the memory, believe me! I’d say that the most important things are the score and the original intention of the composer. First, you have to try to be very objective about the piece and understand what’s written in the score. Naturally you’ll get some of your own ideas, since the piece becomes part of you in a way. But that part of you, that you put into the music, is a process that has to happen very naturally and you shouldn’t place your own perceptions in front of the score. That’s why I placed the closed score on the piano yesterday while I was playing. I didn’t use it, but at the end of the concert I showed it to the audience. We have to feel gratitude towards the composer and the piece, because in a way, the audience not only applauded me, they applauded Bach and the Goldberg-variations as well.

BB: How do you deal with negative criticism and what advice would you give to young musicians in that regard?

DF: It’s difficult. I wish I could say that I have never payed attention to this. Especially when you’re younger, you’re very sensitive to negative criticism. Even if you try to be strong, there’s always going to be be a part of you that wants to be loved and understood. You never know who’s the person behind an article. Maybe that guy likes all the musicians that you don’t like. Maybe that guy has an opinion about music that is the complete opposite of yours, or maybe that guy likes a sort of piano sound that you just hate. So in a way, you shouldn’t take it personally even if sometimes it’s very personal! If you knew exactly what was right and wrong, you wouldn’t need their opinion. Always be your own worst critic! Do what you think you have to do! And then people will comment, but that’s another thing. You just have to be sure that you do things for good reasons.

BB: What are your plans for the next few months?

DF: This month there’ll be a new recording with the french violin player, Renaud Capuçon. We’re playing Bach Sonatas together. I go to Amsterdam and Moscow, and after that, I have a tour with Renaud Capuçon. We’re going to play pieces from the new CD.

BB: How do you like Budapest and the Liszt Academy?

DF: I like Budapest very much, especially the Liszt Academy, because I think it’s a very special place. I feel like people really come here for the music, and not for any secondary reason. That’s something you feel. When you have good people in the audience, it also helps you to play better.

BB: I remember your piano masterclass in 2017. Are you considering doing more masterclasses at the Academy in the future?

DF: Whatever they may ask me to do, I would gladly do it for the Liszt Academy, because I really like this place. If I can, I’ll always come back with great pleasure to Budapest.

[mikrokosmos]

10 pieces under 10 minutes

If you follow my blog, you know that I love classical music and music history [and let’s face it, you probably do too]. But when people who want to get into the genre ask me for recommendations, I don’t know what to choose. The problem is the sheer AMOUNT of music out there...we’re talking hundreds of years worth of music to go through...so I decided to narrow down a list of ten pieces I’d recommend to anyone who’s new to classical and wants to explore more. Also, because time length was a major factor when I started out listening, I’ll keep the pieces relatively short, and I’ll try to pick music for different ensembles, from different time periods, and for different moods. This list is directed to complete newcomers to the genre, so if you’re into classical and want to read this, don’t get too concerned about the different titles and what they mean yet [i.e. you don’t need to know what makes a sonata a sonata in order to enjoy it], check out whichever of the pieces in the list stand out to you. If you like them and want more recommendations, you could always message me. My list of 10 pieces under 10 minutes:

1. Scriabin - Piano Sonata no. 4 [something dreamlike]

Scriabin was a Russian composer from the turn of the century who wrote very lyrical, melodic music. As time went on, his music became more and more unusual and experimental with harmonies, to the point that his late works aren’t written in any specific key. The fourth piano sonata is from his “middle” period, and is in two short movements. The first is a quiet, reflective, and the second is more energetic, ending in an ecstatic finale.

2. Bach - Prelude and Fugue in a minor BWV 543 [something spooky]

Thanks to silent movies, we associate the organ with Halloween, with castles and vampires and other gothic things. The Toccata and Fugue in d minor, attributed to Bach, is the most famous organ work in pop culture. Here is another organ piece that is similar, starting with a flowy prelude, and ending in a more complex movement called a fugue, where one melody is played over and over again in different keys while other lines of music play harmonic compliments.

3. Mendelssohn - The Hebrides Overture (Fingal’s Cave) [something adventurous]

This stand alone orchestral work starts off like a curtain unfolding, like the beginning of a movie, the music takes you on a journey, inspired by the Scottish highlands. This is the kind of music that would give you a rush, the type that could spark your imagination and make you think of cliffs along the ocean, large forests, the bright sun, or whatever else feels “right”

4. Part - Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten [something sad]

This is a work by a contemporary composer that was written after the death of another composer. The music is simple, the same descending melody played over and over again, but layered over each other, the work gets louder and recreates a sense of profound sadness. It moves me every time I listen to it.

5. Chopin - Nocturne op.27 no.2 [something soothing]

I say that tongue-in-cheek, but the music does make me think of a calming evening, eating at a restaurant with family, drinking wine maybe, but despite all that it isn’t forgettable background music. The piece has beautiful melodies, and it’s amazing to hear the pianist play two or three at the same time.

6. Ravel - Pavane pour une infante défunte [something nostalgic]

The music here is supposed to be a call back to old European court dances, and the title being “Pavane for a dead princess” doesn’t refer to anyone specific. You may recognize this music from the dance scene in The Dark Knight Rises. The longing melody is bittersweet, sad but still hopeful.

7. Schubert - Der Erlkönig [something dramatic]

This is a song about a man and his son riding on horses through the woods and being chased by the “Elf King”, a malicious creature that kills whoever he touches. The creepy story is enunciated by the rapid piano playing, and the drama by the singer who has to sing from the perspective of the narrator, father, son, and villain. All the drama of a large scale opera in under five minutes!

8. Vivaldi - Concerto for 4 violins in b minor [something elegant]

Maybe elegant isn’t the best word for this one, but usually when people hear Baroque music like Vivaldi’s concertos they think of powdered wigs and important aristocrats from the 16 and 1700s at dinner parties or balls. Don’t let that idea keep you from enjoying this music, which is very fresh, electric, and wild.

9. Liszt - Paganini Etude no. 6 [something wild]

Niccolo Paganini was a violinist who people say sold his soul to the devil for super human abilities. Franz Liszt was a pianist who fell in love with Paganini’s insane performances and worked to be just as impressive with the piano. This piece is a transcription [like a song cover] of one of Paganini’s and is a set of variations. You can see from the sheet music how difficult this piece is.

10. Copland - Fanfare for the Common Man [something grand]

This is a short piece for brass and drums, and in it we get a feeling of pride, achievement, hope, other sappy feelings. You’re probably heard this piece played at sports games. Overall it sounds like something motivational and fulfilling.

[theaesesthetic]

sleep-deprived musician rates songs they’ve played: piano edition

let’s start off with the basics

moonlight sonata, first movement: 6/10

it’s cool and all

but i’ve been playing it for almost a fucking year

bonus point for the chaotic section in the middle

————————

clair de lune: 7/10

long piece with some big chords

but it has potential for very sudden and loud bangy chords if you play it right

also my grandma used to play this all the time and it’s very pretty when she does it

——————-—

a romance, by some polish dude whose name i forgot: 9/10

very pretty

lost a point for actually being a violin piece that i added harmony and a bit of improv to

learned this like four years ago and i still play it occasionally

———————

the entertainer: 8/10

joplin is amazing

not my style though

i am a heavy romantic musician

———————

the introduction from swan lake: 9.7/10

TCHAIKOVSKY

MY GUY

sounds weird without the orchestra

————-—

dance of the sugarplum fairy: 4/10

sounded weird because it wasn’t the full thing

and again, ballet piece require an entire goddamn orchestra

tchaikovsky is the only reason this isn’t a zero

———————

in the hall of the mountain king: 8.5/10

a classic

you might not know it by name

but if you hear it

you know

—————-—

literally anything else by bach, beethoven, mozart, or brahms: 3/10

sounds nice, fun to play

but, as stated above, i fucking live for the romantic period

give me tchaikovsky or fuck, even wagner

and when i descend to the lever of wagner, you know i really dislike classical and baroque

i make an exception for vivaldi because he’s got some amazing violin shit

—————————

my own compositions: 7/10

pretty good, usually just little melodies i tap out

actual complete songs i’ve composed (not written. i hate writing on sheet music):

-a little fun piece that gives me wild horse vibes

-a piece i call ’the midnight hour��� with some creepy waltz vibes

-a march with occasional interjections of creepy themes

-a nice little thing that sounds like it could be a theme in a movie

-my own personal arrangement of carol of the bells

-a song from the musical i’m writing. it’s the villain song. i love it.

i should post some of these eventually

anyways thank you for reading my tired rants or whatever

[dailymusingsofamedic]

12th May 2020 – Bach

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)

Sonata for Violin Solo No.2 in A Minor (c.1720) - https://open.spotify.com/album/2ot197WiXh41pOZaY726OZ?si=fu60xFPwTqacI77-GDLIJg Tracks 13-16

So I’ve gone for Bach because even though he’s the first person you think of when considering composers beginning with ‘B’, I’m much more familiar with Brahms, Beethoven, Bartok, Britten, Berlioz etc. I came across Hilary Hahn looking for good recordings of the Sibelius Violin Concerto and heard she was famous for Bach so I thought I’d give this ago. I immediately recognised the first movements of Sonata no.1 and Partita no.1, so sonata no.2 it is. Let’s dissect this with all of my extensive knowledge of the violin (Grade I with Merit!).

Above - Hilary Hahn is 40. Is Bach the secret of eternal youth?

1. Grave – From the opening, you can tell this player is so in control. Double stops are so in tune, dynamics are varied, but not extreme. I’m just enjoying listening to the start of the first movement to be honest. My only criticism is these pieces can seem a little directionless at times in the slower movements. The climax at just before 2:00 is so tasty. I like the change of section at 2:12, a decidedly pulled back feel, but the sound carries on through it. From 4:19 more tasty double stops. They sound so good. I know next to zero theory unfortunately, but the last bar feels very unresolved. I don’t know if this is the right word. 

2. Fuga – Spanish for Fugue? The interplay between the melody and the lower strings interjecting really makes this feel like more than one player at times. The top line is uninterrupted by the lower part. 1:00 is rather intense really, isn’t it? And 1:10 such nice contrast between the same theme repeated more quietly. It keeps it quite interesting. At 3:00 it sounds quite different, and for the first time it sounds like just one line on a solo violin. Makes the rest seem so much cleverer. Although pleasant to listen to, I’m not ‘hooked’ during the second half of the movement. I could easily skip. The playing is so precise though. I get a bit excited at 7:25 that it’s going to end. It does then get a little bit more exciting and then I’m mouth agape for that little run just before the very end. Cool.

3. Andante – I think the last movement was pretty andante too. That means walking pace for all you cool cats and kittens even less musical than I am. This movement’s a bit boring. Relaxing though actually. Really quiet double stopping at 2:36 is super impressive, sounds amazing. Still a bit boring though, sorry Bach. 

4. Allegro – This is what I’ve been waiting for really. Immediately more exciting than all of the music that’s come before it. It feels like it’s going somewhere. The phrasing is brilliant, makes what’s essentially a long line of notes musical. I love the way Hahn lets the passing notes (I don’t think I meant that) speak with just as much clarity as the more important notes of a run. The sound is constant and clear throughout. Again, playing repeated phrases in different ways keeps it interesting all the time. I like that a new section starts precisely on 4:00. 5:00 onwards sounds really difficult. I couldn’t manage 3 blind mice really. Yum yum tasty vibrato in the final low note. 

Overall – Piece 5/10, Recording – super good/10. It’s hard/impossible to criticise the playing of this piece in this recording but the piece isn’t that interesting overall. It could do with 2. or 3. being replaced with another good presto. This is probably sacrilegious to sonata form or something but I think it’d be better.  There are individual movements from these sonatas and partitas which are amazing though. Just not this one really. Oh well.

Here’s some more Hilary, not Bach though...sorry.

[sheilacwall]

JS Bach – Toccata and Fugue in D Minor (1705)

Toccata and Fugue in D Minor – Written by JS Bach Performed by Hannes Kästner

Hannes Kästner Album: Bach, J.S.: Organ Music – Preludes and Fugues – Toccata and Fugue in D Minor – Chorales Preludes.

The original song was written between 1703 and 1707, but no-one knows exactly when.

This album was released in 1988 and it’s also available on iTunes : https://itunes.apple.com/ca/album/bac…

This could be one of the scariest tunes written of all time.  This guy had thirteen children and half of them died. I can’t imagine the suffering & pain him and his wife went through. But, he obviously channeled it all through music.

There must have been a lot of praying with the high rates of infanticide and child deaths. Smallpox, Polio and measles seemed to have been more virulent then than now. Typhus, spread by lice and fleas, and typhoid, waterborne, killed many. Tuberculosis was less common than it was to become.

From the 1680s to 1789, Germany comprised many small territories which were parts of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. Prussia finally emerged as dominant. Meanwhile, the states developed a classical culture that found its greatest expression in the Enlightenment, with world class leaders such as philosophers Leibniz and Kant, writers such as Goethe and Schiller, and musicians Bach and Beethoven.

Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor is one of the most famous pieces of Baroque organ music ever written – with a particularly iconic opening

Bach probably composed the Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV 565, between 1703-7, but no one is sure of the exact date. It’s important to remember the BWV catalogue number as well – there are actually three pieces of organ music written by Bach with the same name! One of these Toccata and Fugue sets, BWV 538, is even in D minor, but it’s known as the ‘Dorian’, which distinguishes it from Bach’s more famous organ music.

Many people will be familiar with its three dramatic opening flourishes followed by the low, growling pedal note underneath a huge, fortissimo rolling chord. The Toccata is rhapsodic – like an improvisation – and has many features that are unusual for an organ work of its time. The Fugue, too, has elements that are uncharacteristic of Bach.

In fact, there are strong reasons to suggest that Bach’s celebrated Toccata and Fugue was not originally in D minor, nor written for the organ. It might have been written for violin or harpsichord, and some scholars believe it’s too crude a piece to have been written by Bach at all! The earliest score contains many un-Bach-like dynamics and markings, in a copy made by Johann Ringk (1717-78), who was a student of one of Bach’s students. No original manuscript survives, so perhaps we’ll never clear up the mystery.

A magnificent baroque-era composer, Johann Sebastian Bach is revered through the ages for his work’s musical complexities and stylistic innovations.

Synopsis

Born on March 31, 1685 (N.S.), in Eisenach, Thuringia, Germany, Johann Sebastian Bach had a prestigious musical lineage and took on various organist positions during the early 18th century, creating famous compositions like “Toccata and Fugue in D minor.” Some of his best-known compositions are the “Mass in B Minor,” the “Brandenburg Concertos” and “The Well-Tempered Clavier.” Bach died in Leipzig, Germany, on July 28, 1750. Today, he is considered one of the greatest Western composers of all time.

Childhood

Born in Eisenach, Thuringia, Germany, on March 31, 1685 (N.S.) / March 21, 1685 (O.S.), Johann Sebastian Bach came from a family of musicians, stretching back several generations. His father, Johann Ambrosius, worked as the town musician in Eisenach, and it is believed that he taught young Johann to play the violin.

At the age of seven, Bach went to school where he received religious instruction and studied Latin and other subjects. His Lutheran faith would influence his later musical works. By the time he turned 10, Bach found himself an orphan after the death of both of his parents. His older brother Johann Christoph, a church organist in Ohrdruf, took him in. Johann Christoph provided some further musical instruction for his younger brother and enrolled him in a local school. Bach stayed with his brother’s family until he was 15.

Bach had a beautiful soprano singing voice, which helped him land a place at a school in Lüneburg. Sometime after his arrival, his voice changed and Bach switched to playing the violin and the harpsichord. Bach was greatly influenced by a local organist named George Böhm. In 1703, he landed his first job as a musician at the court of Duke Johann Ernst in Weimar. There he was a jack-of-all-trades, serving as a violinist and at times, filling in for the official organist.

Early Career

Bach had a growing reputation as a great performer, and it was his great technical skill that landed him the position of organist at the New Church in Arnstadt. He was responsible for providing music for religious services and special events as well as giving music instruction. An independent and sometimes arrogant young man, Bach did not get along well with his students and was scolded by church officials for not rehearsing them frequently enough.

Bach did not help his situation when he disappeared for several months in 1705. While he only officially received a few weeks’ leave from the church, he traveled to Lübeck to hear famed organist Dietrich Buxtehude and extended his stay without informing anyone back in Arnstadt.

In 1707, Bach was glad to leave Arnstadt for an organist position at the Church of St. Blaise in Mühlhausen. This move, however, did not turn out as well as he had planned. Bach’s musical style clashed with the church’s pastor. Bach created complex arrangements and had a fondness for weaving together different melodic lines. His pastor believed that church music needed to be simple. One of Bach’s most famous works from this time is the cantata “Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit,” also known as “Actus Tragicus.”

Working for Royalty

After a year in Mühlhausen, Bach won the post of organist at the court of the Duke Wilhelm Ernst in Weimar. He wrote many church cantatas and some of his best compositions for the organ while working for the duke. During his time at Weimar, Bach wrote “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor,” one of his most popular pieces for the organ. He also composed the cantata “Herz und Mund und Tat,” or Heart and Mouth and Deed. One section of this cantata, called “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” in English, is especially famous.

In 1717, Bach accepted a position with Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen. But Duke Wilhelm Ernst had no interest in letting Bach go and even imprisoned him for several weeks when he tried to leave. In early December, Bach was released and allowed to go to Cöthen. Prince Leopold had a passion for music. He played the violin and often bought musical scores while traveling abroad.

While at Cöthen, Bach devoted much of his time to instrumental music, composing concertos for orchestras, dance suites and sonatas for multiple instruments. He also wrote pieces for solo instruments, including some of his finest violin works. His secular compositions still reflected his deep commitment to his faith with Bach often writing the initials I.N.J. for the Latin In Nomine Jesu, or “in the name of Jesus,” on his sheet music.

In tribute to the Duke of Brandenburg, Bach created a series of orchestra concertos, which became known as the “Brandenburg Concertos,” in 1721. These concertos are considered to be some of Bach’s greatest works. That same year, Prince Leopold got married, and his new bride discouraged the prince’s interest in music. Bach completed the first book of “The Well-Tempered Clavier” around this time. With students in mind, he put together this collection of keyboard pieces to help them learn certain techniques and methods. Bach had to turn his attentions to finding work when the prince dissolved his orchestra in 1723.

Later Works in Leipzig

After auditioning for a new position in Leipzig, Bach signed a contract to become the new organist and teacher at St. Thomas Church. He was required to teach at the Thomas School as a part of his position as well. With new music needed for services each week, Bach threw himself into writing cantatas. The “Christmas Oratorio,” for example, is a series of six cantatas that reflect on the holiday.

Bach also created musical interpretations of the Bible using choruses, arias and recitatives. These works are referred to as his “Passions,” the most famous of which is “Passion According to St. Matthew.” This musical composition, written in 1727 or 1729, tells the story of chapters 26 and 27 of the Gospel of Matthew. The piece was performed as part of a Good Friday service.

One of his later religious masterworks is “Mass in B minor.” He had developed sections of it, known as Kyrie and Gloria, in 1733, which were presented to the Elector of Saxony. Bach did not finish the composition, a musical version of a traditional Latin mass, until 1749. The complete work was not performed during his lifetime.

Final Years

By 1740, Bach was struggling with his eyesight, but he continued to work despite his vision problems. He was even well enough to travel and perform, visiting Frederick the Great, the king of Prussia in 1747. He played for the king, making up a new composition on the spot. Back in Leipzig, Bach refined the piece and gave Frederick a set of fugues called “Musical Offering.”

In 1749, Bach started a new composition called “The Art of Fugue,” but he did not complete it. He tried to fix his failing sight by having surgery the following year, but the operation ended up leaving him completely blind. Later that year, Bach suffered a stroke. He died in Leipzig on July 28, 1750.

During his lifetime, Bach was better known as an organist than a composer. Few of his works were even published during his lifetime. Still Bach’s musical compositions were admired by those who followed in his footsteps, including Amadeus Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven. His reputation received a substantial boost in 1829 when German composer Felix Mendelssohn reintroduced Bach’s “Passion According to St. Matthew.”

Musically, Bach was a master at invoking and maintaining different emotions. He was an expert storyteller as well, often using melody to suggest actions or events. In his works, Bach drew from different music styles from across Europe, including French and Italian. He used counterpoint, the playing of multiple melodies simultaneously, and fugue, the repetition of a melody with slight variations, to create richly detailed compositions. He is considered to be the best composer of the Baroque era, and one of the most important figures in classical music in general.

Personal Life

Little personal correspondence has survived to provide a full picture of Bach as a person. But the records do shed some light on his character. Bach was devoted to his family. In 1706, he married his cousin Maria Barbara Bach. The couple had seven children together, some of whom died as infants. Maria died in 1720 while Bach was traveling with Prince Leopold. The following year, Bach married a singer named Anna Magdalena Wülcken. They had thirteen children, more than half of them died as children.

Bach clearly shared his love of music with his children. From his first marriage, Wilhelm Friedemann Bach and Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach became composers and musicians. Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach and Johann Christian Bach, sons from his second marriage, also enjoyed musical success.

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[biofunmy]

Shrink an Orchestra to a Single Piano, Keeping the Magic

In 1988, when I interviewed the pianist Vladimir Horowitz at his elegant Manhattan townhouse, I asked him if he had any regrets. His answer surprised me. He said he deeply regretted never having played Liszt’s transcriptions of the Beethoven symphonies in public.

“These are the greatest works for the piano, tremendous works,” he said.

Transcriptions of Beethoven symphonies, long thought of as a little trashy, as the “greatest works” for the piano? Greater than, say, Beethoven’s piano sonatas?

Yes, Horowitz said, in the sense that these Liszt scores are arguments for what the piano is capable of — for what the piano, in essence, is meant for.

“For me, the piano is the orchestra,” he said. “I don’t like the sound of a piano as a piano. I like to imitate the orchestra — the oboe, the clarinet, the violin and, of course, the singing voice. Every note of those symphonies is in these Liszt works.”

He added that he played the transcriptions all the time for himself, but thought that audiences would not understand the music.

“We are such snobs,” he said ruefully.

Perhaps we are no longer so snobby. A new generation of pianists seems to have caught up with Horowitz’s perspective. Though they present daunting technical challenges, Liszt’s transcriptions of the Beethoven symphonies — as well as his versions of other symphonic works, opera excerpts and songs — are not just virtuosic gimmicks. Rather, they are a great composer’s attempt to use his beloved piano as a means to recreate, penetrate and get at the essence of the original music — without the distractions of the orchestra or voice.

Recently there have been many notable examples of adventurous younger pianists not only championing transcriptions by Liszt and other composers, but also writing their own. Earlier this year, Behzod Abduraimov began a recital at the 92nd Street Y with Liszt’s transcription of Wagner’s “Liebestod” from “Tristan und Isolde,” and ended with Prokofiev’s transcriptions of 10 pieces from his own “Romeo and Juliet” ballet score.

A month later Beatrice Rana, for her New York recital debut at Zankel Hall, played dazzling transcriptions of three pieces from Stravinsky’s “Firebird.”

On his remarkable recent album, “Life,” the superb Igor Levit includes two Liszt transcriptions of Wagner (the “Liebestod” and the Solemn March to the Holy Grail from “Parsifal”) as well as Brahms’s transcription, for the left hand, of Bach’s Chaconne from the Partita No. 2 for Solo Violin.

On another recent album, Jeremy Denk took listeners on a seven-century survey of music, including his transcriptions of some medieval and Renaissance vocal pieces by Machaut, Ockeghem, Josquin and other early composers.

Horowitz, who died in 1989 at 86, believed that the piano’s adaptability is at once its limitation and its glory. This view was echoed by Alfred Brendel in his 2013 book “A Pianist’s A-Z”: The piano “serves a purpose,” he wrote; it’s an “instrument of transformation.” It permits the pianist to suggest the singing voice and the timbres of other instruments.

This “propensity for metamorphosis,” he writes, is “our supreme privilege.” A single pianist can take on the sole responsibility for a performance, becoming “his own conductor and singer.”

Fear of backlash from audiences and critics may have prevented Horowitz from performing Liszt’s transcriptions of the Beethoven symphonies. But Glenn Gould, who looked for opportunities to challenge assumptions, had no such reluctance. He recorded two of them: the Fifth and the Sixth Symphonies. The first movement of the Fifth offers exhilarating proof that Gould took these scores seriously.

To pick one classic recording of this orchestral staple for comparison, Karajan’s take on the first movement with the Berlin Philharmonic is stirring, weighty and rich. Gould could be a quirky interpreter. But his account of the Liszt transcription of that movement is straightforward and revelatory. Minus the myriad orchestra colorings, Gould’s spirited playing makes you listen anew to the music. Textures, inner voices and the grand structure of the piece emerge excitingly. Yet you also relish the performance as a sheer act of pianistic virtuosity.

It’s just as revealing to compare a few outstanding recent recordings of piano transcriptions with the original versions. Stewart Goodyear, taking up the legacy of Liszt, wrote an uncannily detailed and brilliant solo piano transcription of Tchaikovsky’s “The Nutcracker” — not just the suite, but the entire two-act ballet score, which he recorded in 2015 on the Steinway & Sons label. This is a piece he has loved since childhood, he explains in the liner notes, and his affection comes through in every moment.

One might think that Tchaikovsky’s imaginative orchestration is integral to the pleasures of this music. During the Overture, for example, on Rostropovich’s stylish recording with the Berlin Philharmonic, the conductor lavishes attention on the various instrumental colors.

But Mr. Goodyear’s piano version of the same passage offers remarkable clarity — even at the lithe, sparkling tempo he takes. You hear every detail. In the manner of Horowitz, he tries to evoke on the piano the sounds of woodwinds, brass and light, rippling strings — and he succeeds. When I first heard this recording, I was impressed with the virtuosity and dedication. More important, though, I was reminded what ingenious music this is.

Mr. Denk has long been fascinated by the connections he hears between seemingly distant musical eras, a theme he explores extensively on his recent Nonesuch album. A standout example is Dufay’s 15th-century French chanson “Franc cuer gentil.” On a beautiful recorded version of the original by the ensemble Grand Désir, a radiant, light-voiced soprano sings the tune graciously, accompanied by supple lutes and other instruments.

But in his playing of the piano transcription, Mr. Denk highlights what you might not notice listening to the original: the intricacy of the counterpoint as lines mingle and cross; the jumpy vitality of the syncopated rhythms. The music sounds a little less dated, a little closer to our own time.

Sibelius’s wistful “Valse Triste,” with its restrained, sighing melody and warm, dusky strings, has become a popular encore piece. On his recording with the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra (Deutsche Grammophon), the conductor Neemi Järvi sensitively balances elegance and sadness.

But Alexandre Tharaud’s playing of a transcription, for a recording called “Autograph” (Erato), reminds you that this waltz may be sad, but it’s still a dance. The lilt and transparency of his playing lighten the mood — yet, somehow, the music seems even sadder than usual, perhaps because of the simplicity and directness of the solo piano arrangement.

Ms. Rana, who in the last few years has emerged as one of the outstanding pianists of her generation, had a lot on the line for her debut recital at Zankel this year. So it was a daring move to end with Guido Agosti’s 1928 transcription of the “Danse Infernale,” “Berceuse” and “Finale” from Stravinsky’s “The Firebird,” a ballet score best known today as a surefire symphonic work in the concert hall.

As a child I loved Stravinsky’s own recording of the piece, which even then impressed me as the ultimate in orchestral brilliance. Surely a piano transcription would risk sounding slick.

Not so. The slashing frenzy and harmonic grit of the “Dance Infernale,” the forlorn beauty of the “Berceuse,” and the incremental buildup in the jubilant, fanfare-like “Finale” all came through with stunning freshness in Mr. Rana’s solo performance.

Here she was being not just the conductor of Stravinsky’s breakthrough work, but also every instrument in the orchestra. Horowitz would have approved. And Liszt would have been proud.

Sahred From Source link Arts

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[topmixtrends]

IN THREE LINES at the upper right corner of the first page of my copy of the study score of Anton Webern’s Concerto, Opus 24, the words Mark Wallace / July 12, 1983 / San Francisco are written in the kind of rough blue ballpoint pen that has gone seriously out of fashion in the ensuing 35 years. When I made that inscription, at 16 — done with high school a year early and soon off to college — I did not yet understand the Webern Concerto as a masterpiece of both artistic expression and musical design. Nor did I understand it as the piece of music that would determine the course of my life, though that, for a time, is exactly what it did.

My musical education had started early, if informally. I was reading music at the piano by age four or five, taught by my father, who was then in transition from beatnik to hippie and whose own considerable musical talents included a funky touch on the electric bass. I used to think I had inherited not just my father’s musicality, but some spirit of music that also resided in the instruments he played. When my mother was pregnant with me (her first), it occurred to my parents that they wouldn’t be able to afford the hospital bills they’d soon be facing. So my father made the difficult decision to sell his last motorcycle, a handsome early 1960s Norton 500 Single. In my memory of this story, my father had sold his last stand-up bass in order to raise enough cash to buy the motorcycle. But when I check with my father, I find I have embellished the story: I am not, in fact, descended from a stand-up bass. Did my dad really sell his last bike to pay for my birth? According to my father, “Definitely.”

I wasn’t a gifted piano player, but I could manage simple classical pieces by the time I was a teen — up to Mozart sonatas, with luck and concentration — though I had never had lessons. I had begun writing music by then as well, short pieces that hoped to mimic things I had glimpsed in the music I was playing, even if I couldn’t yet express what those things were: the architectural order of Bach; Mozart’s alchemy of the ebullient and the sublime.

I knew so little of music’s building blocks that I scarcely had any idea how those effects had been achieved. Most of what we think of as Western “classical” music is based on the diatonic scale, which uses only seven of the 12 tones available on an instrument like the piano. Some of these tones are thought of as “leading” to other tones — in particular to the “tonic,” the note that names the key (the C in the key of C Major, for instance). Thus certain chords “lead” to other chords, and altering a given set of chords can make them lead to yet a different set of chords. To heighten the pull in various directions, dissonant tones can be added to a chord, creating tensions which, in classical music, must then be resolved. By creating, delaying, and resolving these tensions to various degrees — and by leveraging traditions from the centuries of music we commonly think of as euphonious, as pleasing to the ear — composers of Western classical music can generate everything from delicately balanced cloud cathedrals to the darkest, most plodding of dirges, and almost any other kind of musical effect one can imagine.

I was not able to create such structures then. Composing, at that point, was little more than fanciful for me, just another way to explore, something to do at the piano. Until I heard the Webern.

The particular July 12 noted in my score was a Tuesday. I remember sitting in my friend Scott’s small apartment the previous weekend, an audible river of traffic flowing east over the crest of Oak Street’s hill outside. Inside, I imagined the specter of unseen roommates lurking beyond the door, as if they might catch us at something illicit or transgressive. I hadn’t known Scott long nor had I had more than a handful of conversations with him before that day. He was older, 21 or 22. I had, uncharacteristically, introduced myself to him after seeing him play an acoustic gig at a coffee shop in the suburb where I lived, backing a local singer-songwriter on stand-up bass. Something in his playing that day drowned out my self-consciousness. I had my own common passions: The Beatles, Bach, David Bowie, Elvis Costello. But Scott was the first person I’d met who was as avid and passionate a fan of classical music as he was of “popular” songs. He was tall and handsome and animated and slightly weird, he was extremely talented and enormously knowledgeable, and he spoke to me not as an older person to a younger one, not as master to student, but just as one fan to another, as the thing every slightly precocious kid seems to crave: a peer.

Some things about that day are vivid, while others are lost. I don’t remember whether his roommates were home that day. I don’t recall the Webern album cover. Mostly I remember the objects that enabled our experience: the record player, the printed music. I remember that Scott and I huddled beside each other on the edge of his bed as he placed the stylus on the record and we heard the scratchy hiss of the lead-in groove. And as the woodwinds lit up to open the piece, our eyes followed the notes that cascaded over the pages of Scott’s copy of the score.

For a concerto, Webern’s is sparing. Only nine instruments are called for, and there is never a moment at which they all play at once. At first, the music sounded tentative to me. The piece introduced itself with briefly sounded gestures, two or three notes at a time, not enough to be called a phrase. The opening notes of the woodwinds and trumpet were echoed, altered, in the piano. The woodwinds were joined by the pluck of pizzicato strings to sound a similar idea. Then everyone stepped aside for two bars in which the piano nearly let the music die away. As the instruments reached deeper, almost straining toward their lower registers, I realized that everything till then had happened high up the scale. The rich tones of the violin and viola opened up now, and as the colors continued to shift I made another realization: that melody as I knew it wasn’t part of what was going on here. The concerto seemed composed entirely of these brief, atomic gestures. As I watched them spill across the pages of the score, the effect was thrilling.

No one walked in on us that day, nor would they have discovered anything untoward if they had. All we were doing was listening to music — though the experience felt somehow intimate, like I’d discovered some wonderful, powerful secret, some half-obscured body of knowledge or unspoken lore. Like I’d been introduced to some experience as heightened and risky as sex (an experience I had yet to be introduced to).

It is one of the virtues of musical notation and modern engraving techniques that a thin paper booklet, almost weightless, can be made to contain all the mass and movement and color of an orchestra. The Webern score is slim. The piece’s 70 measures fill only 16 pages, each covered with markings that led deep into a territory I found more and more intriguing as the music played on. I read the German names of instruments arrayed down the left side of the pages, and followed the five-line staffs corresponding to each one as they unfurled to the right. A short phrase in one instrument seemed to call forth something similar in another, as if the voices were in conversation with each other. As Scott turned the pages I sat in silence, noting the changing forces, the dynamics, the ligatures, the markings and directions I didn’t yet understand. It was as if the piano music that was all I’d known till then had suddenly exploded into three dimensions. Somehow, without explanation and without knowing those German words that later became so familiar (Posaune, Bratsche, lebhaft, langsam), I understood what I was seeing on the page.

Music, I discovered, made sense to me.

And this music made a kind of sense that had never been made to me before. I was instantly alert to it, attuned to its evolving three-note motif even as I realized it had none of the structure I had intuited from classical music, none of the same kind of balance and symmetry. This music had a different kind of structure: a framework I could hear, but one I didn’t yet understand. As unfamiliar as its style was, I was aware that it had a style, an internal consistency that told me the music was complete in itself, that it was whole. It was a different kind of wholeness than that of Bach or Mozart. The music was not in any key, and that was intriguing. There was no single tone here with that kind of gravitational pull. Instead, the music built on a foundation it seemed to devise itself, rather than one common to other pieces. It established its own terms with the notes and figures and structures that announced the piece, and then reshaped those arguments in subtle ways with each passing bar. There was much elusive quicksilver here, and little that one would call tuneful. Though I had heard nothing like it before, it was somehow not surprising. Its foundations felt solid and secure.

¤

Perhaps I was drawn to Webern’s structure because my early life had had so little. The music was a kind of homecoming, after years of instability and constant uprootings. My family left New York City in the early ’70s, spurred by my father’s attraction to the emerging lifestyles and back-to-the-land ethos of the time. Upstate we skipped from home to home, and the occasional commune, seemingly without rhyme or reason. Like Webern’s figures, we never stopped moving, pulling up stakes every year or two, sometimes less. Not because we were on the lam or in the military or being transferred from place to place for someone’s job, but only because we were never at rest. We’d moved 10 times by the time I became a teenager, leaving schools behind in the middle of the year, leaving friends. There seemed little direction to our path.

My father worked on farms or at odd jobs: roasting coffee, delivering carpets. With a friend he made extra money dismantling abandoned farm buildings, selling the weathered lumber to interior decorators in New York. I have a memory of him, shirtless and wiry, as he straddles the spine of a once-solid barn now gone trapezoidal, its walls, dirty and red, covered in creeper vines. He rides the building as it leaps and collapses at once, taming it not by might but through devotion, as though letting it know he would stay with it no matter how hard it bucked or charged. With the money, he bought sheets of glass and glass-cutting tools and taught himself to make windows to put in our house, nearly all of which were broken when we moved in.

Our rural life was not without its charms. My parents were loving and we were, for the most part, happy, if poor. I remember crunching the tart stalks of rhubarb that grew in the cool shadow of our house and catching fireflies on the lawn in the warm evenings. I remember Ancramdale and the general store stuck in time there, with its gapped and ancient floorboards, brass fixtures glowing dully against the massive, dark walnut-and-glass display cabinets behind the counter, the paper rolls of candy dots, and penny jars filled with root-beer barrels and jawbreakers. The many-colored candy sticks my younger brother and I always craved. For a year when I was 10 we lived up the road from that store in a 16-room house on many acres of land belonging to the novelist Hilary Masters, son of the poet Edgar Lee Masters, whose Spoon River Anthology chronicled life in a small town not nearly so small as ours. Masters was on a sabbatical or visiting professorship somewhere, and my father was hired as caretaker of the estate for a year.

One task in the Masters house, in the winter of the year we spent there, was to shut up what we called “the library.” In memory’s floor plan, the library consists of a cozy sitting room with a tall stone fireplace, a bedroom we weren’t allowed to enter, and, joining them, a tall and narrow corridor lined floor to ceiling with bookshelves. I remember none of these books’ titles, only the sense of wonder they inspired in me. I had long before read (and loved) Laura Ingalls Wilder and books like Charlotte’s Web and Harriet the Spy. I was an avid reader of my parents’ cast-off paperbacks, having plowed through their copies of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, every volume of science fiction I could get my hands on, and, though it gave me nightmares, Jaws. But the books in the Masters library seemed somehow of greater moment, as though weightier matters were being discussed between their covers. I hardly dared imagine the day I might enter those discussions, let alone perform the magic of conjuring one myself.

That house was our idyll, but most were not like that. Mostly we lived in small country houses that listed nearly as much as the barns my father tore down. At one point (was I seven? eight?), there was a split in which my parents lived apart for a month or more — a split that bewildered me for many years in part because they were otherwise relatively happy together, or at least constant. One image from that period sticks with me: I am looking for my father in the house — a particularly shabby one — and find him in one of the upstairs bedrooms. I peer through the door as light streams in the window opposite to fill the bare and empty room. There is only a mattress on the floor, or that’s all my memory has focused on, for it turns out my father is not alone in the room: on the mattress is a woman, naked or nearly so, who is not my mother. In my memory, the door swings slowly shut and I slink away. My memory has gotten the house wrong, or the time, my father says, but such a scene is entirely plausible: my parents had conducted a years-long experiment in open marriage. The split I remember was brought on when my father, who had instigated our hippie period, decided he wanted a more traditional relationship again.

If we moved upstate to get close to the land, for my father I think it worked. In the country, he discovered a natural grace and connectedness that was in sharp contrast to his earlier life in New York. He’d been a runaway in his teens — his stories tell of drugs, guns, prostitutes, desperation — and while we were hardly settled during my childhood, the life he created for himself (and, by extension, for us) was at least slightly more structured than the years in which he was very much on the road. To me, life felt out of balance, but to him I imagine things felt peaceful by comparison.

If there was a plan to our life in that time, though, a method, it was not one comprehensible to the limited scope of a child’s mind. Stability answers something in us, when we are young. The world should not be nuanced, since we are only just getting our heads around ideas of black and white, forward and back, right and wrong. It was impossible for me to grapple with notions of impermanence when notions of permanence were still only just forming in my mind. I didn’t consciously crave stability in the years in which we knocked around upstate New York; instead, I developed a keen sensitivity to the unstable, a deep and abiding confidence that, at any moment, everything about the scene around me was liable to be upended, that at any moment things could radically change.

So when even our instability changed — when we became stable — it was as jarring as any move that had come before. My father went back to school, for a graduate degree in computer science. We moved to a suburb of Albany so that he could attend the state university there. And then — also bewildering, and especially jarring to me, at 13 — we pulled up stakes once again and moved to California. It was January 1980, the middle of eighth grade, and my father had gotten a job in San Francisco as a computer programmer; he’d gone straight. We settled in a house in the suburbs, where my parents would stay for many years, and I finished middle school in a daze, helped along by the beer and marijuana I began to pilfer from my dad’s supply. I did well in high school — the experimental school I went to let me graduate at the end of my junior year — but by then I had discovered a taste for LSD and cocaine. I swore I wouldn’t repeat what I saw as the mistakes of my father, but in fact I was already humming the same tuneless song I’d been raised on, though it hadn’t yet swelled to drown out the other musics in my life.

¤

Melody has not been entirely discarded in the Webern Concerto, but there is no real tune to be heard there. Instead, there are small figures that arise and recede, that connect into almost-melodies, or combine to make longer unfoldments. As we listened, Scott traced the course of the performance, pointing out the measures as they passed. That the music seemed to trip across the page exactly as it tripped from the speakers should have come as no surprise, I suppose, but it’s likely I had never seen an orchestral score before. We listened to the concerto’s three movements — not even seven minutes from beginning to end — without speaking. The voices danced around each other, never quite colliding, never quite disentangling themselves. They seemed to pass ideas from one to another, and soon I realized there was but one idea at the center of those sounds, one idea with just as much gravitational pull as the ideas at the center of a piece like a Mozart sonata. The center of the Webern piece was harder to describe; I could sense its presence but I couldn’t feel its shape. The three-note figures that are the building blocks of the piece looked like birds or spiders; they skittered across the page and seemed to leave it almost as soon as they’d appeared. But the score brought them quite literally within reach; with the score in hand, I knew I could find them again, that I too could step into the world from which they’d come. It was not just the music on the page that took on three dimensions as I sat and watched the score, it was music itself. If I could reach such a place, I thought, great things might be possible. To do that, I would need my own copy of the flimsy, weighty artifact that was the Webern score.

Scott gave me an address, and as soon as I could manage — on that summer Tuesday marked in my score — I took the bus into the city, to a block of 10th Street south of Market that seemed too boring and industrial to house such treasures. There I found a place called Byron Hoyt, an enormous retail warehouse of sheet music, orchestral parts, and study scores, all tidily filed in wooden bins, partitioned by stiff dividers of gray-green cardboard, and overseen by a gruff but helpful staff of mostly men and just a few women, all of them older than I could then imagine I would ever become. I would haunt the aisles of this place, and its several subsequent incarnations, for the next decade.

I no longer recall whether I wandered the floor on that first visit or went straight to the study scores. But I know that in the “W” bin, behind the “Webern” divider, I found it: Philharmonia No. 434, published by Universal Edition. I ran my fingers over its textured gray cardstock cover and the glossy frontispiece that gives a facsimile of the first page of Webern’s manuscript, flipped past the introductory remarks in English and German and French (including a musical diagram I did not yet understand), and gazed at the opening motif: a descending interval in the oboe just a bit wider than an octave — B-natural falling 13 semitones to B-flat — followed by an ascending major third. In that figure, tumbling so slightly forward, is the germ of the entire piece, a startling economy of material that manages to inform every moment of the composition. I stared at the notes and marveled, half expecting the bird-like forms to take flight before I could turn the page.

The cashiers, in turn, kept one eye on me, or I imagined they did, as if I might suddenly fly off as well. You couldn’t blame them: no one else in the place was outfitted as I was, in heavy black boots and cheap leather jacket, a spiky short haircut and holes in my jeans. I had discovered punk rock that year, in time for the tail end of its Bay Area heyday, and I was dressed, as often as not, in some variation of the uniform I had on that day.

Punk might have been a fashion choice by then, but it was also still a social statement. For me and many of my friends, punk’s chaotic urgency helped us buck what we saw as the conformist society that surrounded us. Wearing the badge of punk’s circled A we could kick against the pricks of Reagan’s America, those stifling monochrome suits and pantsuits that tried to draw lines around our experiences and behaviors and desires. Punk tore down popular music so that we could tear down — or try to — what we were being told about how we should live our lives. This is every generation’s song, of course, but my generation had punk’s own rejection of “tune” to accompany it.

The Webern Concerto, when it was composed, was part of a similarly violent break with the past. Instead of the scales and leading tones and chord structures that classical composers had leveraged for more than 250 years, Webern used a technique developed by his teacher, Arnold Schoenberg, that tosses all those relationships out the window. Like most music theory, Schoenberg’s “12-tone technique” is relatively simple, though it can be used to produce music of great variety and complexity. And it produces music that does not hew to hundreds of years of prior practice, but rather rethinks ideas of musical beauty from the ground up. Schoenberg’s music and that of the “Second Viennese School” (a group that included Webern and Alban Berg, another of Schoenberg’s students) relies on its own internal consistency to create a central gravitational pull. It turns its back on commonly accepted ideas of tension and resolution in favor of “atonal” music that can be jarring to those raised on the Western harmonies of the 19th century and before. For Schoenberg and his students, “dissonant” intervals like the minor second (an E and an F played together, for example), could be just as stable and pleasing as the major third that can more or less define a diatonic key (the C and E of C Major, say). Their music was met with outrage when it first appeared (one New York Times critic labeled Schoenberg a “musical anarchist” as early as 1913), but came to be considered a deep and legitimate musical language of its own. For those able to listen to it on its own terms, it can be as engaging as a Bach prelude, as thrilling as a Beethoven symphony, as poignant as a Chopin nocturne.

The Webern Concerto was all these things to me, when I first heard it. And, because it was so different from anything I’d heard before, it transported me immediately into a wildly more brilliant musical realm. (Enlightenment is often just that: things dawn on us and the world becomes brighter.) I could hear the control in it, the intriguing systematization. But I could also hear Webern’s expressive choices, the things that made this more than just a clever exercise in musical geometry: the six-note chord at the end of the first movement that is as dense a harmony as we’ve heard till that point in the piece; the slow and steady lilt of the second movement; the music pushing ahead sometimes and slowing almost to a stop at others; the contrast between the strings pizzicato and bowed. All this struck a chord that had first been sounded in me long ago. It married the kind of rigor I’d found in classical music with the kind of riot I appreciated in punk rock — an alchemy I hadn’t even considered before. In the Webern concerto, I heard chaos transformed — not denied, not assuaged, but raised up, integrated into something bigger than itself. The seeming anarchy of atonality made sense to me in a way that classical music did not.

This was a different kind of music, and it seemed to come from a place I had never really known before, a place I had not even known existed. It was a place without anchor, a location adrift, but one that seemed so familiar. There was something strong and settled to the music, but also something quick, as if it were built of ideas that were in motion and at rest at the same time — just as I was — the sound of perpetual motion mixed with the sound of home. Could I too find some way to bring these ideas together? Could I bring them together in my music, in a way that would let them stand peacefully side by side? Could I bring them together in my life? If writing music had been a diversion up to that point, now I began to sense a distant goal. So much was hidden in the place this music came from, if only I could reach it.

The score cost me probably seven or eight dollars, saved from an allowance or earned mowing lawns and raking leaves for one of our suburban neighbors; I was punk rock, but I was still 16, still living at home. I would soon go off to college — not far, just to Berkeley, across the bay — and there I would start to more actively question, and more actively reject, the paths and patterns I felt were being thrust at me by the parents and bosses and educators of the world. But back then I was still just a high school kid trying to find stable ground. The Webern score, light in the hand as it was, felt deeply substantial, my purchase of it like some kind of rite of passage. I wrote my name and the date and the city into it, as I had seen written in Scott’s copy of the score, and with this brilliant music playing in my head I stepped from the dim, cavernous store out onto 10th Street, a street far enough from the summer fog of San Francisco to be bright.

¤

Mark Wallace lives and writes in San Francisco, where he is a member of the SF Writers’ Grotto. His work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Salon, GQ, and many others. He is a music-school dropout, and co-author of The Second Life Herald: The Virtual Newspaper that Witnessed the Dawn of the Metaverse (MIT Press). When not composing, he can be found on Twitter at @markwallace.

The post Finding the Tune appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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[amaradjohnson]

An Introduction to the E Major Scale

Ever watched the BBC, Masterpiece Theater, or pretty much any cartoon?

Then odds are, even if you don’t recognize it by name, you’ve probably heard Antonio Vivaldi��s famous movement, “Spring,” from his world-renowned piece, The Four Seasons.

This piece and many other famous compositions are written in none other than the key of E.

Essentially, what this means is that the composers of these pieces derived the notes for their music from the E major scale.

What is the E major scale? We’ve made it simple for you:

What is a Major Scale?

Major scales are made up of 7 notes. The eighth note in a scale is the same note as the first in the scale, but an octave higher. This means if you are playing the E major scale, you will begin and end with an E note.

Major scales are common in Western music and are most often considered optimistic and bright, as opposed to minor scales that are usually used to create music with a more dark or foreboding tone.

Because of this, major scales typically contain one or several sharps.

The E Major Scale

This being understood, (and at the risk of stating the obvious), the E major scale begins with E and continues with the following notes in order:

E, F#, G#, A, B, C#, and D#.

Typically when playing this scale as a musician or performer, you would again end with the next highest E, eight notes above the original.

If you are concerned with scale degrees, the notes of the E major scale are as follows:

E- 1st degree, Tonic

F#- 2nd degree, Supertonic

G#- 3rd degree, Mediant

A- 4th degree, Subdominant

B- 5th degree, Dominant

C#- 6th degree, Submediant

D#- 7th degree, Leading Tone

Scales typically also have a parallel minor or major scale. Therefore, the parallel scale to the E major would be the E minor.

Enharmonic Equivalent of E Major

The enharmonic equivalent of the E major scale is the F flat. This basically means that the F flat scale and music written in the key of F flat, contain the same tones but written differently, i.e. in a different key.

Confused yet?

Don’t be.

Many enharmonic equivalents, especially that of the E major scale, are often rarely used. As long as you can nail the E major scale, odds are you’ll be set for anything written in the key of F flat.

What is a “diatonic”?

The E major scale is what you would call a “diatonic,” scale.

This just means that the intervals, or “spaces,” between the notes in the E major scale occur in the following way:

whole, whole, half, whole, whole, whole, half

The “whole” indicates a whole step up in tone from one note to the next. A “half” is only a half a tone, or what is called a “semitone,” up from the previous note.

Another interesting aspect about the structure of the E major scale is that it is what is called in the musical world, “maximally even.”

Sounds exciting, eh?

In layman’s terms, all this means is that the tones or notes in the E major scale are as spread out as they can possibly be from each other.

How E Major Looks on Paper

If you were to write the E major scale out, it would look like two even tetrachords separated by one whole note.

Each of these tetrachords are made up of two whole tones, (or steps), followed by a semitone, (half step).

Famous Music Written in E Major

Ludwig van Beethoven seemed to enjoy the E major scale, he wrote two piano sonatas in E major: Op. 14, Number 1 and Op. 109.

While Beethoven composed his Piano Concerto Number 3 in the key of C minor, he did include a slower movement in the key of E major. Other composers followed suit and did the same, including:

Johannes Brahms when he wrote his First Symphony

Johannes Brahms and his Piano Quartet No. 3

Sergei Rachmaninoff and his Piano Concerto No. 2

The list of famous pieces written in the key of E major (or in other words, derived from the E major scale), could go on endlessly. So to simplify things, here are just a few other composers who have written very well known pieces in E major:

Frederic Chopin

Felix Mendelssohn

Alexander Scriabin

Joseph Haydn

Johann Sebastian Bach

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

You know… just a few minor composers… (See what we did there?)

To be fair, however, many of the pieces written by these men were written in a kay other than E major, but had certain movements in E major.

It was also a common practice when writing a song in the key of E minor (or coming from the scale of E minor), to write in a key change for the grand finale and switch the song from E minor to E major.

Thus, the masterful piece was brought to a triumphant end with the exultant key of E major.

Fun E Major Fact

Next time you want to impress someone with a random and useless piece of musical trivia, you can tell them in your snootiest tone that, “Even the clock chime in the tower of London’s Palace of Westminster is tuned to the key of E major.”

Annnnd…mic drop.

When You Might Use E Major

Whether you play the piano, violin, flute, etc. the E major scale is one you will find yourself needing to master and likely practicing again and again as it is common in modern music.

With 4 sharps in its key signature, it may seem a wee daunting to new violinists, or other performers working on their range.

Don’t let the sharps scare you.

The practice of scales like E major is essential for any truly serious musician or performer. Scales, including that of E major, are the building blocks of music, they set the pattern for what your music will follow.

For more musical tips and information for beginners, check out our blog.

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