At their best, conductors are like magicians. With a wave of a wand they can entrance and enchant audiences of thousands and stir profound emotions in even the most po-faced of listeners. Unfortunately the personality cult prevalent among the jet-setting conducting fraternity – though it’s now (very!) slowly also becoming a sorority – has led to […]
A fanfare for the major triad: It’s everywhere. Apart from being the principal building block of most music, its (sometimes) dulcet tones are used in shops, stations, airports and elsewhere to alert us to announcements of impending joy or (more frequently) gloom. It has a sibling but, unlike the bright, stable major, minor is darker […]
In a league table of composers who have made a career out of exquisite misery (several names come to mind!), John Dowland must, surely, come somewhere near the top. w Flow, my tears, fall from your springs! Exiled for ever, let me mourn; Where night’s black bird her sad infamy sings, There let me live […]
If you’ve ever heard or sung in Thomas Morley’s madrigal Now is the month of maying, you may well have wondered –see the last verse – what on earth a ‘barley break’ is. The lyric tells us you play it, so that, I suppose, limits it to either a musical instrument or a game; and, given […]
Goe Nightly Cares: Fretwork, Michael Chance, Christopher Wilson, Elizabeth Liddle …Tallis is dead, and Music dies… This is part of Byrd’s Ye Sacred Muses, a lament on the death of his mentor, friend, colleague and the godfather of his son Thomas (no doubt called after his illustrious namesake). Many of the details of Tallis’s life are obscure. He seems to […]
Sir Toby Belch: What is thy excellence in a galliard, knight? Sir Andrew Aguecheek: Faith, I can cut a caper. (Shakespeare: Twelfth Night) In this painting […]
Stockhausen? Cage?? No, the first(?) composer to employ eight separate sound sources (octophonics) did it somewhere around 1570! In his 40 part motet Spem in alium Thomas Tallis divides the voices into eight choirs of five singers each (soprano, alto, tenor, baritone and bass); his writing – the passing of material from chorus to chorus –would […]
