Synaesthesia – in this case a crossover between seeing and hearing, light and music. There are many of examples of this, at least on the music side, Scriabin’s Poem of Fire (its score includes a colour organ) and Messiaen’s Couleurs de la Cité Céleste are among the famous examples. — “I’ve tried to get into my work the […]
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 […]
Spectral analysis: no, not something from a Ghostbusters’ film, but a computer gizmo used by composers from the late(ish) twentieth century onwards. Every pitch we hear normally comes with its own entourage of other ghostly sounds variously called partials, overtones or harmonics. It’s mainly the predominance of a particular gang of these (let’s stick with) partials […]
Euphony, cacophony, monophony, homophony, polyphony, heterophony — musical sound has many guises. But let’s start with the basic building block: noise. Mostly it’s nasty: A sound of any kind, esp. a loud, harsh, or unpleasant one. (Oxford English Dictionary) Though it has had its good side, too: It ceas’d: yet still the sails made on A […]
When, early in 1847, the Schumanns returned home to Dresden from a concert tour, Robert found himself all fired up with the idea of writing an opera. He chose (surprise! surprise!) a romantic tale of crusades, knights and damsels in distress (with a bit of magic thrown in for good measure). The story centres on […]
Schumann’s Requiem für Mignon, as its title might suggest, isn’t a setting of the standard liturgical text of the mass for the dead. The words come from Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meister and Mignon is the strange young girl whose poem (much set by composers) Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blühn (Do you know the land where […]
Pablo Casals speaking of the Schumann Cello Concerto: It is one of the finest works one can hear – from beginning to end the music is sublime. This, the first of the great romantic cello concertos, gives us a chance to compare the playing/interpretive skills of an older generation of cellists (Gendron, Piatigorsky, Fournier, etc.) – […]
