Tag: string quartet
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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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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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String quartets, poetry, and cups of tea: Frank Bridge and Ivor Gurney
British classical music in the early twentieth century was dominated by the teaching of an Irishman: Charles Villiers Stanford (1852 – 1924), Professor of Composition at the Royal College of Music since its founding in 1883, and Professor of Music at Cambridge University since 1887, where he established Music as an academic subject requiring a…
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Beethoven and Rilke – “existence is still enchanted”
By 1922 the 10-inch 78 rpm disc was pretty much established as the norm for commercial recording. The 3 minutes or so that could fit on one side set the template for pop songs that continues to this day. Classical recordings were often released on 12-inch discs, which allowed for an extra minute or two,…
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