Idiomatic

(Source: pierrot--lunaire, via mahleriana)

http://kalvos.org/ganness1.html

imaginarydances:

“New music poses a threat to corporations. On the one hand, it doesn’t offer any immediate financial return, because it takes time to build up an audience. On the other hand, it offers audiences a true alternative to the lukewarm claptrap that the corporations peddle, and thus it threatens to siphon away money from the corporations…

Think about it: who were the last interesting composers to gain national attention? Steve Reich, Philip Glass, John Adams. When did they become famous? In the late 1970s. When did the corporations gain enough power to control the flow of cultural information? During the Reagan years, in the early 1980s. Isn’t it an interesting coincidence that the handing over of free rein to corporate America occurred simultaneously with the apparent end of our cultural history? It just so happens that no composers born after 1940 are good enough to become well-known. Or is that just what we’ve been led to believe?”

sonateharder:

Things I love about this:

1. Video footage of Richter

2. He’s playing French music!

3. These old TV sets for piano music always seem crazy in one weird way or another. What’s with the chandeliers? 

cmlegends:

Maurice Ravel
Jeux d’eau

Sviatoslav Richter, piano

(via mahleriana)

“A fight with a piano that came near proving disastrous to the greatest of pianists, occurred on shipboard while Paderewski was on his way to New York a short time ago. Paderewski in his state room had a small upright piano on which to practice. It was fastened to the floor by means of bolts. On the opposite side of the room was the bed. In a heavy storm the piano was loosened by the rolling of the vessel. Straight it made for the pianist and crashed into his bed, nearly pinning him to the wall. Paderewski on reaching the floor rushed to the opposite side of the room. Instantly the piano followed, coming at him with great force. He dodged it, but it came at him again, being hurled about in the room by the rolling of the boat. The pianist tried to get out the door, but could not loosen the bolt and he was thus hemmed in with the tumbling piano which threatened to crush him to death at every second. There was nothing to do but wrestle with the instrument. He grasped it as it came toward him again and after lengthy struggle in which he was nearly exhausted, succeeded in binding it to the wall.”
—   – Popular Mechanics, 1902 (via futility closet)

(Source: 90scup90sbusseat, via sonateharder)

theodoramartin:

piano-soprano:

Radu Lupu plays Brahms Rhapsody in b minor

No words. 

(via sonateharder)

“We don’t need drugs, we’ve got Brahms.”
—   Andrew Manze during the second half of his charming and witty lecture “Bach To The Future”, where he discussed the current state of music and the orchestra in today’s society and economy (via theangryviolinist)

(via hashtagbachswag)

sonateharder:

Maria João Pires plays Chopin (by deutschegrammophon1)

She has such a distinctive ringing tone. Lovely.

nprmusic: smithsonianmag: The Evolution of the Treble Clef The curving flourishes of music notation have always been something a mystery to me, although every day I, like many people, use other arcane symbols without thinking twice about it. The at (@) sign, the dollar sign ($) and the ampersand (&), for example, all function like ligatures or some sort of shorthand. They’ve been demystified by popular use in email, clues on “Wheel of Fortune,” and their inclusion on computer keyboards. But music notation is a semantic system that is entirely different from the written word; a non-spoken alphabet of pitch and rhythm. So, with apologies to the more musically inclined reader, I looked into the origin of the treble clef and the answer was quite simple. The treble clef, the top symbol you see in the photo above, is also known as the G-clef, which gives you the first clue to its origin. So for my own edification, if nothing else, let’s start with the basics. A clef is a sign placed on a music staff that indicates what pitch is represented by each line and space on the staff. The history of Western musical notation describes an effort toward the development a simple, symbolic representations of pitch and rhythm. It begins near the end of the 9th century when notation for the Plainsong of the Western Church, better known as Gregorian Chant, was first recorded with “neumes”. These were simple dashes or dots above lyrics that indicated a relative change in pitch. At the end of the 10th century, musical scribes increased the precision of his early notation by introducing a horizontal line to indicate a base pitch (see above image). The pitch of this line was indicated by a letter at its start – typically  F or C and, as higher range songs become more common, G. Neumes were no longer relative only to one another, but to a standard. This was the beginning of the musical staff. Continue reading at Smithsonian.com This is really cool. —Lars

nprmusic:

smithsonianmag:

The Evolution of the Treble Clef

The curving flourishes of music notation have always been something a mystery to me, although every day I, like many people, use other arcane symbols without thinking twice about it. The at (@) sign, the dollar sign ($) and the ampersand (&), for example, all function like ligatures or some sort of shorthand. They’ve been demystified by popular use in email, clues on “Wheel of Fortune,” and their inclusion on computer keyboards. But music notation is a semantic system that is entirely different from the written word; a non-spoken alphabet of pitch and rhythm. So, with apologies to the more musically inclined reader, I looked into the origin of the treble clef and the answer was quite simple. The treble clef, the top symbol you see in the photo above, is also known as the G-clef, which gives you the first clue to its origin.

So for my own edification, if nothing else, let’s start with the basics. A clef is a sign placed on a music staff that indicates what pitch is represented by each line and space on the staff. The history of Western musical notation describes an effort toward the development a simple, symbolic representations of pitch and rhythm. It begins near the end of the 9th century when notation for the Plainsong of the Western Church, better known as Gregorian Chant, was first recorded with “neumes”. These were simple dashes or dots above lyrics that indicated a relative change in pitch. At the end of the 10th century, musical scribes increased the precision of his early notation by introducing a horizontal line to indicate a base pitch (see above image). The pitch of this line was indicated by a letter at its start – typically  F or C and, as higher range songs become more common, G. Neumes were no longer relative only to one another, but to a standard. This was the beginning of the musical staff.

Continue reading at Smithsonian.com

This is really cool. —Lars

(via hashtagbachswag)

“What is a poet? An unhappy man who hides deep anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when the sigh and cry pass through them, it sounds like lovely music…. And people flock around the poet and say: ‘Sing again soon’ - that is, ‘May new sufferings torment your soul but your lips be fashioned as before, for the cry would only frighten us, but the music, that is blissful.”
—   Søren Kierkegaard (via thischarmlessgirl)

(via mahleriana)

“Sometimes you have the idea of the work, “I want that.” Sometimes you discover the work when you are doing it. You have this approach of the labyrinth, I say. Either you construct a big perspective and then you are sure of what you are doing, so that you organize that, or you are organizing labyrinths. You are also discovering, possibly, according to this labyrinth, what you encounter also, say, in the resistance of the material. Then the kind of possibilities you see suddenly — you know, possibilities (that you discover at the stage where it is possible to discover something) also have a big impact on you and the work. So, you have always to be very alert and sensitive to what you are doing. Another way is that sometimes when you are composing a piece, the idea of the piece is constantly there — which is closer to what you are talking about, but which is not quite the same thing as saying the music has always already existed. Therefore for instance, you will find (not only in yourself but in this encounter with other people) that suddenly something will click and it will give you an idea. And after that maybe a couple of years later, you are surprised by it yourself, but by then you have drawn some conclusions that you will not have had again when you looked at the work after that.”
—   

—Pierre Boulez on composition

Dialogues with Pierre Boulez (2000), Di Rocco Pietro.

Source

(via imaginarydances)