April 3rd 2009
This orchestral show-piece is as explicit as film music, though its pictures are entirely in the mind. Respighi obligingly provides a detailed programme. He took four fountains, and set out to ‘express the feelings and visions they evoked, choosing for each the time of day when it was most in harmony with the surrounding landscape, or appeared most beautiful to the observer’. Continue Reading »
February 23rd 2009
By the time Vivaldi composed The Four Seasons in 1725 he was already enjoying a considerable reputation throughout Europe as a popular composer. The concertos that make up The Four Seasons were originally published as the first four of a set of eight violin concertos under the title “I’l Cimento dell’Armonia e dell’Invenzione” (The Contest of Harmony and Invention). Continue Reading »
February 20th 2009
Following the success of Schubert’s song “Die Forelle” (The Trout), the composer agreed to write a set of variations on the melody at the request of an enthusiastic amateur musician and friend, Sylvester Paumgartner. He started composing the piece while he was on holiday in Upper Austria during April 1819, and the final result was his five-movement Trout Quintet. Continue Reading »
February 17th 2009
The word “baroque” did not originally have a very positive connotation: it was used to mean “irregularly shaped,” “grotesque,” or “odd” (perhaps from the Spanish word berruga, meaning a wart). Whatever its origins, today the word is used to define a florid period of European art. In music, the period spanned from the early 1600s (the time of Monteverdi) to the mid-1800s with the richer, more decorative styles of Handel, Bach, Scarlatti and Vivaldi. Continue Reading »
October 24th 2008
This picture shows a beautiful example of one of the largest of all wind instruments. It is an organ. Just imagine how much air is needed to make all these organ pipes sound!
Of course, people don’t blow into organ pipes. Mechanical gadgets such as bellows and electric motors are used. In the very first organs, made in Ancient Greece and Rome over 2,000 years ago, water was used to force air through the pipes. The first organ was called a hydraulic, from the Greek words for `water’ and ‘pipe’. According to writers of the time, the sound was so powerful it could be heard many miles away and the players had to plug their ears! Continue Reading »
October 10th 2008
Folk music is music of the common people. Created by someone who has a story to tell rather than composed by a trained musician, it is simple and easy to understand. Folk songs have easy, singable melodies, use simple harmonies, and (unless the song tells a sad story) have rhythms that are fun for dancing. The instruments of folk music are the instruments people happened to have around at the time. Sometimes inventive people built their own instruments if no others were available. Continue Reading »
October 7th 2008
In addition to the notes of the four “open” strings, the players make many other notes by stopping the string with the fingers of their left hands. When a string is pressed against the fingerboard, its length is shortened, and a higher sound is produced. The closer to the sound box the finger is pressed, the higher the note. There is nothing on the fingerboard to tell a player exactly where to place his fingers (that is, unlike a guitar, a violin has no frets); he must listen very carefully and practise hard to learn where the right spots are for each note. Continue Reading »
October 7th 2008
Starting with a design that is nearly four hundred years old, the violin maker selects just the right pieces of wood from his storeroom. Each part of the instrument will be made from a special kind of wood, and he chooses pieces of spruce, maple, pine, ebony, or Pernambuco wood with which to work.
For the next three or four months the instrument maker will carve, shape, and fit these pieces of wood together like a puzzle. As he finishes each of the nearly seventy different parts, it will be fitted in the proper place. Some parts will be glued, others will be held in the proper position by being fitted just right, Continue Reading »
October 1st 2008
All the instruments of the flute family are very similar. Their sound is produced by a vibrating air column, they are all fingered the same way, and they are made from metal. Although it is a small family and the instruments can’t play very loudly, the flute family has an important place in both our musical heritage and the music of today.
Instruments of the clarinet family are perhaps the most versatile and useful of the woodwinds. Descendants of a family of seventeenth-century instruments called shawms, shalmeys, or chalumeaux, their sounds are produced by blowing air across a single reed. Continue Reading »
August 14th 2008
The bass drum stands vertically, the rim of the shallow wooden shell facing the audience. This was originally known as the Turkish drum. Sometimes it has two heads, sometimes only one, the former model producing somewhat greater clarity. It is beaten with upward — or downward — glancing blows with a soft stick, and sometimes brushed simultaneously on the other side with a switch of sorts. Continue Reading »
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