Category: Uncategorized
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“The lights are going out”: Serkin, Busch Quartet, Brahms
It must have been a Thursday in 1977 or 78. After school, my father drove me to my clarinet lesson with my new teacher – John Melvin, who was Head of Music at Oxford High School. He was a warm and encouraging mentor and taught music as an expressive language, not overly concerned with the…
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Light refreshment: the piano singles (ISCM 1922/23)
As an antidote to my previous two posts, and to show that modern music wasn’t all about serious soul-searching, here is a playlist of 14 minutes of pure delight: five short piano pieces, chosen for performance at the first festivals of the International Society of Contemporary Music in 1922 and 1923.
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Air from another planet: seriously modern string quartets (ISCM 1922/23)
Unless you have three and a half hours to spare and a particularly robust constitution, I would not recommend listening to this playlist in one go. A dozen pieces for string quartet performed at the two earliest festivals of the International Society of Contemporary Music in Salzburg (year 0 in 1922, year 1 in 1923)…
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Six of the best: violin sonatas for a new age (ISCM 1922/23)
In the early years of the twentieth century, the violin achieved iconic status in European culture in an almost literal sense. Whereas Renaissance painters looked to the Madonna and Child as worthy subjects for art, modernist artists – putting their faith in more secular imagery – often turned to the violin to represent one of…
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Mahler steals a march… or maybe not
Massed high woodwinds, a barrage of brass in lockstep, batteries of snare-drum-heavy percussion: the soundscapes of Mahler’s symphonies are pervaded by the specific sound-world of the Austro-Hungarian military wind band, and dominated by the rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic tropes of the military march in particular. There is hardly a Mahler symphony – and first movement…
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