Near the beginning of Act 3 of Smetana’s Bartered Bride the circus comes to town. And, after a lengthy and tongue-twisting preamble by the ringmaster featuring Esmeralda, an exotic Spanish dancer; a (fake) Red Indian and a very inebriate (and consequently also fake) dancing bear; the performers show off their acrobatic skills in the fast […]
Habanera? Of course you know what it is! A very famous example — The dance originates from Havana, hence Habanera; its provenance being more obvious, perhaps, from its other title, the Havanaise. As a popular rhythm it certainly caught on with French composers during the latter half of the nineteenth and early twentieth century; here’s another version, […]
In the last act of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, after performance of the ‘tedious brief scene of young Pyramus and his love Thisby’, Bottom offers the Duke a choice between an epilogue ‘or to hear a Bergomask dance between two of our company’; the Duke – wisely – chooses the dance. The transposition of the popular rhythms […]
I thought, before I started in on this topic, that it would be a good thing to have some sort of idea of what was and what wasn’t folk music, since – not unusually, I’m afraid – my notions on the subject were woolly, vague and lacking in definition. So, firstly, I turned to that fount […]
The twentieth century, as it progressed, presented serious challenges for the listener. But not only audiences were tested by this complex ‘new music’; the job of conducting these scores demanded a whole new raft of techniques. There were complicated cross-rhythms: strange new time signatures: There were aleatoric scores with their chance elements, graphic scores that sometimes […]
The way we listen to music these days would shock (maybe even horrify) a music lover from 1870 or earlier. For them, unless, like Nikolaus Esterházy, they were rich enough to hire their own performers, it was either attendance at church or at a rare public concert – though the notion of the ‘public concert’ only really […]
At first glance Stravinsky seems to have got it pretty much covered – it’s the first dance, the Danse des Adolescents, of the Rite of Spring we’re talking about here – the precision of a metronome mark… () … a clear dynamic ( f for the strings and sf for the eight horns), articulation marks (. = […]
