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 […]
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 […]
From the Slav Khorovod through to Ring a Ring o’ Roses, the round dance has been part of countless cultures since – it would seem – the famous dawn of civilisation (sorry about my clichés!). For terpsichorially inclined Elizabethans one of the more popular numbers in this line seems to have been called Sellenger’s Round (who or […]
Schumann’s 4th Symphony, as you might guess from the title of this post, has a rather checkered history. It’s one of the composer’s most original works – which might go some way toward explaining the rather chilly reception it got when first performed in 1841. The score languished on Schumann’s work desk for ten years; then, […]
Waldszenen, (Forest Scenes) Op. 82 is one of Schumann’s last piano works. It consists of nine short pieces all with (sometimes enigmatic) titles. This is no ordinary leaf-mold-under-foot, dappled-sunlight sort of forest but a magical one out of the fairy stories of Grimm and Perrault and; while many of the pieces are jolly evocations of […]
Liederjahr = the Year of Song. Two years prior to 1842’s splurge of chamber music, Schumann, with the same monomania/single-mindedness that he was to lavish on the string quartet and piano quartet and quintet, spent most of 1840 writing songs. He managed in that one year to produce a grand total of 138 of them! Amongst […]
