Moonlight. Verlaine’s poetry translated by Fauré & Debussy …Au calme clair de lune triste et beau, Qui fait rêver les oiseaux dans les arbres Et sangloter d’extase les jets d’eau, Les grands jets d’eau sveltes parmi les marbres. Paul Verlaine: Clair de lune from Fêtes galantes […In the calm moonbeams, sad and beautiful, Which make […]
Music for children: French composers have provided some of the most famous. There’s Bizet’s Jeux d’enfants, Debussy’s Children’s Corner, Ravel’s Ma Mère l’Oye and, of course, Fauré’s Dolly Suite. Some were written for children to listen to, and some for – albeit pretty musically gifted – children to play. Judging from the photo above (Fauré […]
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, […]
