The final bars (in short score) of Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra; notice the key signature 5 sharps – B major. Now, while the top, treble clef, end of the orchestra is dutifully reiterating a few quiet chords in the home key (a respectable, if rather downmarket, way to end a piece), you’ll notice that, at […]
Category Archives: Orchestral
w Tricksters – nearly every culture has one (or more) lurking in the darker, mythic recesses of their skeleton cupboards: from the Monkey King to Gwydion; from Coyote and Br’er Rabbit to Loki. They are the law-challengers, the lords of unrule, the irreverent revealers of hypocrisy, the clowns and jesters. Such a one is the […]
w This five note motif appears towards the end of the last of Strauss’ Four Last Songs, his setting of Eichendorff’s poem Im Abendrot (At Sunset). It’s played at the moment – the final line of the poem – when the singer asks ‘Ist dies etwa der Tod?’ (Is this perhaps death?) The motif is […]
Of all the works in the standard orchestral repertoire, the opening that you see above – it’s Strauss’ Don Juan – must rank very high on a list entitled ‘Beginnings that Make Conductors Wake at Dead of Night in a Cold Sweat’. As you can see, it’s marked Allegro molto con brio (very fast and energetic) […]
The German Tondichtung has several names in English. There’s the literal translation of ‘tone-poem’; there’s the slightly more musical ‘symphonic poem’ and finally there’s ‘programme music’. It’s music that tells a story; and, while composers have from time immemorial been attracted to ventures into the mundane by imitating the sounds of the natural world (birds, […]
Sticking with the Rhapsody on a theme of Paganini (see last week), people often wonder how what is undoubtedly the most famous bit of the piece, the 18th variation, is derived from Paganini’s theme. How, in other words, do we get: w from w The technical name for what happens is ‘inversion’ and it’s to do […]
w This is the piano part of variation 7 of Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a theme of Paganini. As you can hear, the music has little to do with Paganini’s famous melody; in fact it’s a entirely new element in the work, but one that Rachmaninoff had used previously and was to use again in the […]
