MetaFilter posts tagged with classicalmusic and music

It's a concerto with a cat. So it's a CATcerto.

jbickers — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 09:15:25 -0800

Mindaugas Piečaitis has performed his "CATcerto," an original score written to accompany Nora The Piano Cat's piano improvisation. Here's the video of kitty with orchestra. Please don't show it to Uter the weiner dog. It'd make him feel terrible.

Eric Whitacre

greekphilosophy — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 13:23:36 -0800

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.

Connecting Western Classical Music to The West Bank.

grapefruitmoon — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 17:28:52 -0800

Crescendo in the West Bank : NYT video on the rise of classical music programs in The West Bank.

Downloads in All Major

Gyan — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 11:17:37 -0800

Classical Music at the European Archive. Free and legal lossless downloads of out-of-copyright recordings. Formats include WAV, FLAC, MP3 & Ogg.

Gramophone Archives

Gyan — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 08:55:54 -0800

The Gramophone Archive is a (free) searchable database containing every issue of Gramophone from April 1923 to the latest issue.

International Music Score Library Project has reopened!

archagon — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 11:14:56 -0800

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.

Classic music too serious

stbalbach — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 22:25:36 -0800

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..

Conducting an orchestra. How hard could it be?

rongorongo — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 04:14:21 -0800

The theory is one thing - but if you have ever dreamed of having the chance to conduct a full, professional orchestra at a major concert then you are almost certainly (*) out of luck. Sorry. Unless you are a celebrity in which case the BBC might fix it for you (full program trailer on YT). Giving it their first go are actors Jane Asher and David Soul, Drum and Bass star Goldie, Blur bassist Alex James, broadcasters Katie Derham and Peter Snow, and comedians Sue Perkins and Bradley Walsh as they compete to be the "Maestro" [i-player link for UK only unfortunately]

Dead Western Christian white males galore!

Aloysius Bear — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 00:50:25 -0800

Explore a thousand years of classical music in 30 fifteen-minute programmes on BBC Radio 4.

2007 Bang on a Can Marathon

allterrainbrain — Sun, 03 Jun 2007 03:49:55 -0800

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.

The International Music Score Library Project

chrismear — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 18:34:48 -0800

The International Music Score Library Project. PDF downloads of public domain classical music scores. From solo piano to full symphony orchestra. 2,762 works and counting.

Peabody Conservatory Concert Recordings

algreer — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 01:34:44 -0800

The Peabody Symphony Orchestra and the Peabody Concert Orchestra have a wealth of classical recordings freely available for download - Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Haydn, Mahler, Borodin, Schumann, Stravinksy...

Free music files and notes

substrate — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 19:12:41 -0800

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.

Mozartmania

ubiquity — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 18:21:23 -0800

Search the complete works (including 8000 pages of critical commentary) of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, a gift by the Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum on the occasion of his 250th birthday. (German links are also available).

The Beethoven piano sonatas

Gyan — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 18:30:10 -0800

Andras Schiff's lecture-recitals on Beethoven's piano sonatas

Thomas Quasthoff -- Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels

matteo — Mon, 02 Oct 2006 08:17:17 -0800

“The leader of the jury looked at his papers and said in the first round: ‘I know a disabled person is coming. I want the jury to close their eyes. I don’t want them to be touched in any way.’ ”
As if, of course, one needed to know about Thomas Quasthoff's Thalidomide-related severe physical handicaps to be moved by the sound of his voice. He goes seamlessly from pianissimo to fortissimo, in his recitals a single Lied becomes "a major, stunning drama playing out in a few minutes". He sang jazz to support himself in university and it remains a passion (he likes to sing Paul Robeson or even Frank Sinatra encores), but he's famously leery of crossover artists like Andrea Bocelli. Just don't cough during his recitals -- "because I love this music so much". He doesn't like to talk much about his nightmarish childhood and teenage years, plagued by surgeries and body casts -- "I have in my past time had very difficult years, very difficult years" is all he'll usually say -- so please try not to consider him a victim, because he doesn't see himself as such: "I don't think people are moved because I am disabled. I think it's because I have something to say." More inside.

Hundreds of perfectly scanned "classical" music scores in PDF

persona non grata — Thu, 21 Sep 2006 22:52:04 -0800

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.

Takeshi Terauchi and The Bunnys do Beethoven

BuddhaInABucket — Mon, 11 Sep 2006 18:04:38 -0800

Japanese Surf Versions of Classical Themes

Louis Gottschalk

Gyan — Sat, 09 Sep 2006 17:22:54 -0800

Louis Moreau Gottschalk - an unjustly forgotten American composer of classical music

"I felt that something unusual was happening, that I had never heard the piano played like this."

matteo — Sat, 20 May 2006 11:14:05 -0800

"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."

Aria database

Gyan — Thu, 04 May 2006 23:12:39 -0800

The Aria Database is a diverse collection of information on over 1000 operatic arias.

Would the Algorithm of Fugue end with A B C?

Gyan — Tue, 11 Apr 2006 04:35:45 -0800

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.

Full Fathom Nine

matteo — Mon, 10 Apr 2006 09:09:22 -0800

Mahler performances were rare in Vienna in those days because Mahler's city had already been contaminated by the acolytes of Adolf Hitler. By their reckoning, Mahler's music was loathsome — a product of "Jewish decadence." To put Mahler's music on the program was therefore a political act. It was to protest and deny the hateful faith that blazed across the border from Germany. That much I understood quite clearly, even as a boy.
The New Yorker's Alex Ross reprints Hans Fantel's New York Times 1989 essay on Bruno Walter's 1938 performance of Mahler's Ninth Symphony -- the last performance of the Vienna Philharmonic before Hitler invaded Austria.

For the well-tempered pianist

Gyan — Mon, 10 Apr 2006 02:26:10 -0800

An interactive Shockwave-based look at Bach's Well-tempered Clavier. Go one level up and explore the entire coverage of Bach.

Noel Mewton-Wood (1922-53)

matteo — Fri, 24 Mar 2006 10:53:40 -0800

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.