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The Great Conductors

Wednesday
Dec032008

Boston Symphony Offers Digital Music

Today the BSO became the latest musical institution to put historical performances online.

Starting with two pages of “broadcast archives” and other compilations, the initial digital library centers on a 12-album series dedicated BSO conductors from Koussevitsky to Ozawa, plus several prominent guest conductors.

Music is available in two quality levels (i.e. mp3 file sizes) and can be purchased by the album ($8.99 each), work, or track.

Browse the BSO Didital Music Catalog.

Thursday
Oct302008

John Adams Interview In Salon - Video

Kevin Berger of Salon has an interesting interview with John Adams in conjunction with the release of the composer’s autobiography, “Hallelujah Junction: Composing an American Life.” Read the transcript or watch the video (about 10 minutes).

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Tuesday
Oct282008

Met Player - Enjoy Archival Performances Online

Last Wednesday, the Metropolitan Opera unveiled its latest new media strategy: the Met Player. Over 150 operas from the past 71 years are available for listening or viewing on your computer. The oldest is a 1937 Carmen with Rosa Ponselle, the newest are from the 2007-2008 high definition move theater broadcasts, including definitive performances of La Fille du Regiment (Dessay, Flores) and Eugene Onegin (Fleming, Hvorostovsky), and the Tristan und Isolde featuring Deborah Voight and Robert Dean Smith.

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Wednesday
Oct222008

Composition: John Hodgman Offers A Non-Musical Example

John Gibbons recently opined that the genius of the truly great composers can be found not in the individual musical elements they employ but in what they make of them. In other words, what matters is the composition of those elements. It’s not this playful snippet of melody or that inventive chord progression. It’s how they’re put together. It’s the narrative they create. This poignant, geeky talk by humorist John Hodgman (best known as “PC” in Apple Computer’s commercials) isn’t music, but it’s a wonderful example of composition in this sense.

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Monday
Oct202008

Bach's Financial Crisis Soundtrack

I just had to share this little gem from The Guardian, in which Paul Lay reviews Bach’s Cantata No. 168 as a commentary on today’s financial crisis. This cantata chastises the unjust steward from Corinthians and the Gospel of Luke, with a nod to what Lay refers to as “the monied men of 1720s Weimar.”

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Monday
Oct132008

News Flash: Great Music is Hard to Write

I wonder if the whole Anna Magdalena Bach controversy doesn’t reveal a “sees the trees but not the forest” sort of outlook fostered by the inculcation of a limited academic perspective in analysis, fostered by the problemmatical absorption of music into limited and doctrinaire academic frameworks.

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Friday
Oct102008

Blogs Are Abuzz for Anna Magdalena Bach - Did She Compose the Cello Suites?

Close-up of title page to the first volume of Singende Müse an der Pleisse, a collection of strophic songs published in Leipzig in 1736, by “Sperontes”, Johann Sigismund Scholze. JS and Anna Magdalena Bach may be the couple pictured.Martin Jarvis decided, as a 19-year-old violist, that the famed cello suites didn’t sound like J.S. Bach.

“Certainly in the first suite, the movements are short and very simple, in comparison with the first movement of the violin works. And I couldn’t understand why,” he said. 

After years of forensic study, the conductor and professor at Darwin University finally discovered this alleged slam-dunk: a manuscript with the notation “Ecrite par Madame Bachen Son Epouse” which says “written by the wife of Bach” rather than “copied.”

We already knew of Anna Magdalena’s role as a copyist. Obviously neither that word, nor the recognizable handwriting of Anna Magdalena would cut it as proof given her known role as a copyist — but in news reports Dr. Jarvis mentions “18 reasons why they weren’t written by Bach.” (Specifics would be great.)

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Thursday
Sep112008

Twenty Comments on Prokofiev's Piano Sonatas, Part 2

Read Part 1

11.  The electrifying nature of the principal subject of the first movement of the Sixth Sonata is not founded on its dissonance but on its consonance. In fact, the primary dissonant elements, the alteration between A major and a minor and the leading tone to the dominant, d#, serve to enhance the stability of A as the tonic, they create a stasis, a stability, not chromatic flux, which gives the music its massive bulldozer effect. Paradoxically, it is typical of Prokofieven dissonance that his “wrong notes” and mercurial modulatory schemes achieve centrality rather than tonal diffusion. Consider also Peter’s principal theme in “Peter and the Wolf”…what could be more C-majorish, despite the theme’s flattened mediant excursions? 

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Friday
Sep052008

Twenty Comments on Prokofiev's Piano Sonatas, Part 1

John Gibbons offers “Twenty Comments on the Prokofiev Piano Sonatas.” This article is the first in a two-part series. John will be teaching a related course on Rachmaninov and Prokofiev in downtown Chicago beginning September 23. more…

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Friday
Aug082008

Friday Links: Let the Conductors Do the Talking

In the links below, two conductors, David Robertson, offer their thoughts on music and audiences.

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