This open-access resource includes a biography and an appreciation; a list of his compositions; bibliographies of his correspondence and writings about him; lists of concerts, lectures, and exhibitions held in his honor; and numerous photographs of him and facsimiles of his manuscripts and editions.
Below, Mitropoulos’s Greek sonata, performed by Charis Dimaras.
The prevalent air regimes dominating Venice include the regional sirocco (scirocco) wind and the strong and gusty local bora (borea, a föhn wind, from the Latin ventus favonius). The bora blows in from either the north (the Alps) or from the west (the Balkans), raising temperatures and lowering humidity; it is typically accompanied by low clouds and reduced visibility.
Vivaldi’s instrumental compositions, especially those with programmatic implications, abound with musical illustrations of winds and their rhetorical satellites. Three out of his four solo violin concertos that make up Le quattro stagioni (1725) feature winds as protagonists controlling the imagery, the attached sonnets, and the music itself.
Vivaldi’s operatic librettos are especially abundant in such allegorical keywords and rhetorical interplay. Winds and breezes, along with other stereotypical concetti—symbolic representations of animals (lion, hind, snake), various birds (goldfinch, nightingale, swallow), and butterflies—abound in his operatic arias.
Often the direct verbal use of “wind” is substituted with its rhetorical alternatives such as tempest (tempesta), thunder (tuono), storm (borasca), air vortices (vortici), flashes and lightings (lampi), high sea waves (onde), clouds (nouvole), and others. The fact that most of Vivaldi’s operatic librettos were provided or adapted by local writers suggests that the wind was a symbol common to the entire Venetian tradition.
This according to “Sirocco, borea, e tutti i venti: Wind allegory in Venetian music” by Bella Brover-Lubovsky, an essay included in Musik—Raum—Akkord—Bild: Festschrift zum 65. Geburtstag von Dorothea Baumann (Bern: Peter Lang, 2012, pp. 149–162).
Above, a detail from Giorgione’s La tempesta, a depiction of Venetian weather from the early 16th century. Below, Vivaldi’s celebrated depiction from Le quattro stagioni.
An assistant editor at RILM just accessed our 750,000th record, bringing our database to (and now beyond) three-quarters of a million bibliographic entries!
The milestone record is “Pierre Boulez: ‘One cannot refer to the biography to explain the music’”, an interview included in Gustav Mahler: The conductors’ interviews (Wien: Universal Edition, 2013, pp. 38–47).
In a 1993 interview, Marilyn Horne discussed her study of the few examples of Rossini’s written-out vocal ornaments.
“I knew that if I ornamented that much I would be highly criticized for it. And so I did just a little bit—and was highly criticized for that!”
“Oh yes, we couldn’t win. In the beginning, I fought those ‘ornament fights’. I had terrible battles about it, especially with Italian conductors, because they are still very much under the influence of Toscanini, who ‘cleaned up’ everything.”
“I remember one particular conductor, his name was Argeo Quadri, and he talked like this: ‘Ah, signora, non si puo cantarlo così.’ Finally I said to him ‘Maestro, I went to a medium last night’—his eyes got bigger and bigger—and I said ‘I talked to Rossini stesso, and he said “Vai, Marilyna, vai!”’ Quadri laughed. He didn’t know whether to take me seriously or not, but he said okay, you can do your ornaments.”
This according to “La Rossiniana: A conversation with Marilyn Horne” by Jeannie Williams (The opera quarterly IX/4 [summer 1993] pp. 64–91).
Today is Marilyn Horne’s 80th birthday! Below, the diva demonstrates.
Thailand’s National Elephant Institute is the first government-sponsored organization dedicated to the long-term future of the domesticated elephant; but it also requires funds from tourism for its upkeep.
To establish an orchestra that could raise financial support from tourists, instruments were designed that could be operable with elephants’ trunks, and that were large and strong enough to stand up to very powerful animals and monsoons. The Thai Elephant Orchestra was soon a reality.
To teach them, a mahout demonstrates an instrument and the elephant begins to play almost immediately. The animals learn through experimentation how to make their instruments sound the best.
Once the group is assembled, the mahouts cue the elephants to begin and stop playing. They now perform daily concerts, and often refuse to stop when they are told to do so.
This according to “Eine kleine naughtmusik: How nefarious nonartists cleverly imitate music” by David Soldier (Leonardo music journal XII [2002] pp. 53–58). Above and below, the orchestra in action.
The work draws on both long-standing symbols of African American cultural identity and more immediate historical context. It is a modernist work as well, as Roach (1924–2007) and his musicians strove to make use of African and African American legacies in new ways.
Decades after the recording, We insist! still sounds fresh, modern, and haunting, reminding us that jazz tradition has always been in dialogue with the social and cultural movements going on around it, and has often been at its most inspired when engaged in social commentary.
This according to “Revisited! The Freedom now suite” by Ingrid Monson (JazzTimes XXXI/7 [September 2001] pp. 54–59,135; available online here).
Today is Roach’s 90th birthday! Below, a recording of the work.
BONUS: Roach was the first jazz musician to receive a MacArthur Fellowship! You can read about it here.
In The music of the Temporalists by Andrei Covaciu-Pogorilowski (Charleston: Create space, 2011), a Parisian drugstore owner and amateur pianist experiences a two-year mental trip as an avatar in a parallel (Temporalist) world in which music is cultivated as the art of time rather than the art of sound.
There he meets a musicologist called Jean-Philippe and an old psychologist, Herr Sch…; they teach him all they can about their musical theory and its cognitive aspects so he can transmit what he has learned to his own music culture.
Although the genre was yet to be named, the addition of Earl Scruggs (1924–2012) to Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys provided the crowning moment in the definition of bluegrass.
Scruggs astounded everyone. His extraordinary banjo style allowed him to roll out a rapid barrage of notes that nevertheless sounded out the melody as clearly as the fiddle.
What is now known as “Scruggs-style” banjo playing became the final critical component of Bill Monroe’s undeniably distinctive sound that would eventually be called bluegrass.
This according to Homegrown music: Discovering bluegrass by Stephanie P. Ledgin (Westport: Praeger, 2004).
Today is Scrugg’s 90th birthday! Above, Monroe, Lester Flatt, and Scruggs at the Grand Ole Opry in 1945; below, Scruggs and friends on David Letterman’s show in 2001.
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2013 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 60,000 times in 2013. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 22 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.
This series presents cutting-edge upper-level scholarly studies and edited collections covering topics in popular music. Offerings include innovative studies on emerging topics and dramatic interventions into established subjects considering performance, theory, and culture, and engaging topics such as gender, race, celebrity, fandom, tourism, fashion, and technology.
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Seven strings/Сім струн (dedicated to Uncle Michael)* For thee, O Ukraine, O our mother unfortunate, bound, The first string I touch is for thee. The string will vibrate with a quiet yet deep solemn sound, The song from my heart … Continue reading →
Introduction: Dr. Philip Ewell, Associate Professor of Music at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, posted a series of daily tweets during Black History Month (February 2021) providing information on some under-researched Black … Continue reading →
For it [the Walkman] permits the possibility…of imposing your soundscape on the surrounding aural environment and thereby domesticating the external world: for a moment, it can all be brought under the STOP/START, FAST FOWARD, PAUSE and REWIND buttons. –Iain Chambers, “The … Continue reading →
