For centuries, Renaissance composer Alessandro Striggio's
"Missa sopra Ecco sì beato giorno", an enormous setting of the Mass for 40 and 60 voices, was thought to be lost to the ages. A few years ago, UC Berkeley musicologist Davitt Moroney discovered that a copy of the work, attributed to a non-existent composer, was hiding right under our noses, in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. In an hour-long lecture titled
"The Pope, the Emperor and the Grand Duke", Professor Moroney recounts the story of the Mass's disappearance and rediscovery, describes the historical significance of the music, and unravels the intriguing geopolitical landscape of 16th century Italy.
posted by archagon
on Sep 28, 2011 -
7 comments
Showing Off is a series of videos, audio clips and articles in which noted music journalist and Frankie Goes to Hollywood mastermind Paul Morley explores various facets of music. Each month has a theme,
[warning: most links have autoplaying video] Michael Jackson,
Kraftwerk,
classical music,
disco,
The Beatles,
folk music,
The X Factor,
the Noughties,
the next big thing,
UK hip hop,
jazz, and
dance. Here is some of what's on offer:
MeFi faves Dan Le Sac and Scroobius Pip on hip hop,
These New Puritans' Jack Barnett, Johnny Marr on folk (parts
1,
2), but isn't all just interviews, there are also a lot of performances, e.g.
Michael Nyman and David McAlmont,
Badly Drawn Boy,
Susanna Wallumrød covers Thin Lizzy's Jailbreak, and
Cornershop cover Norwegian Wood.
posted by Kattullus
on Apr 26, 2010 -
8 comments
Over the past few years,
Eric Whitacre has been taking the composition world by storm. And now
he's all over the web. (Most links silent, personal website has an autoplay rainstorm going on.) His choral works range from the mysterious and brooding
Water Night to the rambunctious modern madrigal,
With a Lily In Your Hand, to the wonderfully lush
Sleep (formerly a setting of Robert Frost's "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening" - tragically halted by copyright infringement, but still
available thanks to the magic of YouTube). While his instrumental compositions run the spectrum from silly musical parody (
Godzilla Eats Las Vegas) to poignant melancholy (
October) with some delicate crossover between vocal and instrumental (
Lux Aurumque - first choral, then instrumental!). If you are or think you may be even remotely interested in contemporary classical music, you owe it to yourself to become familiar with the work of Eric Whitacre.
posted by greekphilosophy
on Jun 8, 2009 -
36 comments
Music Journalist
David Stubbs has
a new book exploring why when the audience for modern art is huge, that for new music is tiny. The BBC, has
an article about this with an interview with the author and some sound samples.
posted by ob
on Apr 30, 2009 -
34 comments
Beethoven's Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 9 in A, Op. 47 (
audio) was
originally dedicated to the black violin virtuoso
George Bridgetower after he gave such a brilliant rendering of the piece that prompted Beethoven to jump from his seat and embrace him. Bridgetower was a musical child prodigy and composer who, despite rampant racial prejudice, reached "unusual heights in the music world of his day". Having lived and performed in major European cities such as London, Paris, and Vienna, he would later die forgotten and in poverty.
A personal disagreement with Bridgetower led Beethoven to dedicate the sonata to the famous violinist Rodolphe Kreutzer instead who, incidentally, never played it in public deeming it “outrageously unintelligible”.
[more inside]
posted by lucia__is__dada
on Mar 27, 2009 -
10 comments
Classical Music at the European Archive. Free and legal lossless downloads of out-of-copyright recordings. Formats include WAV, FLAC, MP3 & Ogg.
posted by Gyan
on Mar 9, 2009 -
36 comments
Rejoice, classical music lovers! After closing in October 2007 due to copyright issues, the
International Music Score Library Project (previously) has reopened! (In June, but there's no FPP about it.) From a quick overview, it seems the site has most of every major (pre-20th-century?) composer's opus - far more than any other "free sheet music" website.
posted by archagon
on Oct 20, 2008 -
10 comments
Why are classical music concerts so serious? A fascinating history of how and why classic music concerts evolved to become so stuffy: silent formal audience, ridged schedule, and a canonical play-list of the same dead artists over and over - they used to be more fun and spontaneous, until the gatecrashers showed up..
posted by stbalbach
on Sep 8, 2008 -
84 comments
The Bang on a Can Marathon is currently in progress at the
World Financial Center in Manhattan. This annual Marathon has taken various forms over the years, with a range of lengths, locations and admission prices; this year's features 26 straight hours of music from around the world, with free admission. Bang on a Can is the
20-year-old new music presenting, producing and recording group co-founded by composers Julia Wolfe, David Lang and Michael Gordon.
posted by allterrainbrain
on Jun 3, 2007 -
12 comments
music files is a neat site I found while looking for information on a classical piece I'm learning on guitar. It seems to predominantly cover classical music but also covers other genres. It has biographies, mp3s, sheet music and so on.
posted by substrate
on Feb 21, 2007 -
4 comments
The Hatto Hoax. Joyce Hatto has been described as "the greatest living pianist that almost no one has ever heard of." Her performances of piano works by Liszt, Schubert, and Rachmaninov were
praised by classical afficionados for their "addictively beautiful sonority, cultured musicianship, and total instrumental mastery."
Since she died in June 2006, however, Hatto has been at the center of one of the stranger scandals to hit classical music in years. It's starting to look like some or all of her treasured, hard-to-find recordings made since 1990
are not her playing at all. [Via]
posted by gottabefunky
on Feb 16, 2007 -
52 comments
Partituras - Hundreds of perfectly scanned "classical" music scores (and parts) in PDF. Chose a composer from the pop-up menu in the middle of the page to browse the available works by that composer.
posted by persona non grata
on Sep 21, 2006 -
19 comments
"The sound was not of this world, it hovered in space like some celestial blessing". He could play the piano ”before he had learned to smile”, his mother said, and he gave his first concert at the age of six. He studied under
Alfred Cortot,
Charles Munch,
Paul Dukas, and
Nadia Boulanger. He was an esteemed teacher and critic at 19, an international phenomenon at 24. He escaped from his native Rumania to Switzerland in 1943 with his fiancée, a joint capital of five Swiss francs in their pockets. After the war, just as he had arrived in the pantheon of great performing artists,
Dinu Lipatti was diagnosed with leukemia. In September 1950, near death, despite the urgings of his doctors Lipatti insisted upon
one last recital at Besançon. As his wife recalled,
this was the only way Lipatti could bear to take his leave of the world. Lipatti was
so weak he could barely walk to the piano. But once he began playing, he became transformed.
After performing 13 waltzes, he could no longer muster the strength necessary to perform the final selection. So he substituted
Myra Hess's piano arrangement of Bach's 'Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring".
(page with sound). Three months later,
Lipatti died at the age of 33. After Lipatti's funeral, his old mentor Cortot wrote: "There was nothing to teach you. One could, in fact, only learn from you."
posted by matteo
on May 20, 2006 -
15 comments
Douglas Hofstadter
says, "
What troubles me is the notion that things that touch me at my deepest core -- pieces of music most of all, which I have always taken as direct soul-to-soul messages -- might be effectively produced by mechanisms thousands if not millions of times simpler than the intricate biological machinery that gives rise to a human soul.". That was prompted by his reception to the
output of David Cope's project
Experiments in Musical Intelligence.
posted by Gyan
on Apr 11, 2006 -
22 comments
After a
Noel Mewton-Wood performance of
Hindemith's (.pdf) Ludus Tonalis, Dame
Myra Hess exclaimed: ‘The boy is truly remarkable, and
what shall he be like at 40-odd?’.
Glowing testimonials to his ‘genius’ (Sir Malcolm Sargent) from Beecham, Schnabel, Bliss, Hindemith and Britten were countered by indifference from the major record labels and concert managements. In 1953,
at the age of 31, the pianist, a shy young man susceptible to depression, committed suicide. Now, the
Lesbian and Gay Newsmedia Archive of Middlesex University offers
a scan of the The London Evening News page with the report of Mewton-Wood's death. And here is
a mp3 page with some of his out-of-print work.
posted by matteo
on Mar 24, 2006 -
11 comments
The Riot of Spring. Théâtre
Champs-Elysées, Paris, May 29, 1913. Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau, Marcel Proust, Maurice Ravel and Claude Debussy are among those present at the premiere of
The Rite of Spring (the score is
here), written by
Igor Stravinsky and choreographed by the great Russian dancer
Vaslav Nijinsky.
The music and the choreography shocked the audience with its daring modernism, ripping up the rulebook of classical ballet with its heavy, savage movements. Many in the audience promptly booed, then yelled, insulting the performers and each other. Then fistfights broke out. The police was summoned, but was unable to stop an
all-out riot.
Now
the BBC has made a TV movie about that night. More inside.
posted by matteo
on Mar 11, 2006 -
27 comments
