In Taking Sides (1995) he offered a surprisingly sympathetic view of Wilhelm Furtwangler, who remained as conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic during the Third Reich. In the even better Collaboration (2008), Harwood showed how Richard Strauss, while working on Die Schweigsame Frau with Stefan Zweig, was forced into an accommodation with the Nazis to protect his Jewish daughter-in-law and her children.
Showing posts with label Music. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Music. Show all posts
2023/09/20
2023/06/03
Kaija Saariaho, the composer who explored color and light, has died at age 70
"I think that sound and color are not completely detached from each other," the composer told NPR last year. "That's maybe how it is in our brain. And I think that certain sounds, or certain kinds of music, can have even a specific smell. So I feel that all the senses are somehow present when I compose."
By the early 90s she had followed French spectralists such as Gérard Grisey and Tristan Murail, who used the experience of electronics, and especially the computer’s then new facility in analysing sound, to write music mainly for instruments and voices
2022/06/09
Music in the brain
“the existence of music-selective responses in the brain does not imply that the responses reflect an innate brain system. An important question for the future will be how this system arises in development: How early it is found in infancy or childhood, and how dependent it is on experience?”
2021/11/01
Celebrated Brazilian classical pianist Nelson Freire has died
Freire, who is remembered as one of the greatest pianists of the second half of the 20th century, passed away during the night on Sunday 31 October, in Rio de Janeiro
2021/04/12
2021/03/22
A guide to Iannis Xenakis's music
A Greek man in his early 20s fights for his homeland as part of the Communist resistance at the end of the second world war. Shrapnel from a blast from a British tank causes a horrendous facial injury that means the permanent loss of sight in one eye. He is sentenced to death after his exile to Paris (a sentence that was later commuted to a prison term, with his conviction finally quashed with the end of the junta in 1974). By the time he returns, he has become one of the leading creative figures of the century: an architect who trained, worked, and often transcended the inspiration of his mentor and boss, Le Corbusier; an intellectual whose physical and mathematical understanding of the way individual particles interact with each other and create a larger mass - atoms, birds, people, and musical notes
2021/01/27
Conversations About Art and Performance by Charles Rosen and Catherine Temerson
True howlers and misinformation of course abound in all dictionaries, and the Harvard Dictionary of Music is no exception, but they are to be expected and even welcomed; they complement the more serious parts of a work of reference as the satyr-play sets off the tragedy. I am as delighted as the next reader to find Ravel’s Jeux d’eau defined as Water-games, as if it were not the play of fountains but a form of water-polo. To read again that Beethoven introduced the trombone into symphonic music (to say nothing of the triangle and the big drum) should excite more sympathy than censure, and the idea that Schoenberg actually intended his Music for a film sequence as part of the repertoire for silent films, like the pieces labeled “Help, Help,” is too ludicrous to mislead, and too engaging to wish corrected. Charles Rosen, 1970
2020/12/28
Nadia Boulanger
Boulanger’s family had been associated for two generations with the Paris Conservatory, where her father and first instructor, Ernest Boulanger, was a teacher of voice. She received her formal training there in 1897–1904, studying composition with Gabriel Fauré and organ with Charles-Marie Widor. She later taught composition at the conservatory and privately. She also published a few short works and in 1908 won second place in the Prix de Rome competition with her cantata La Sirène. She ceased composing, rating her works “useless,” after the death in 1918 of her talented sister Lili Boulanger
2020/11/21
Music has the capacity to elicit strong positive feelings in humans by activating the brain’s reward system
we identified two specific patterns of chills: a decreased theta activity in the right central region, which could reflect supplementary motor area activation during chills and may be related to rhythmic anticipation processing, and a decreased theta activity in the right temporal region, which may be related to musical appreciation and could reflect the right superior temporal gyrus activity. The alpha frontal/prefrontal asymmetry did not reflect the felt emotional pleasure, but the increased frontal beta to alpha ratio (measure of arousal) corresponded to increased emotional ratings.
One end-of-life study suggests the brain still registers the last sounds a person will ever hear
Traveling into the ear, the vibrations we hear get converted into electrical signals. Then it’s off to the brain, where scientists are still unraveling what happens next.
2020/10/26
Beethoven: String Quartet No.15 in A minor op. 132
Assai sostenuto - Allegro Allegro ma non tanto Molto adagio Alla marcia Allegro appassionato
2020/10/24
Xenakis: Jonchaies
Xenakis magnifies and extrapolates each textural idea until the aural surface of Jonchaies is a teeming collage of exaggerated sounds and timbres.
2020/10/11
2020/10/10
Bach: Musical Offering in C minor, BWV 1079
Barthold Kuijken - transverse flute
Sigiswald Kuijken - violin
Wieland Kuijken - viola da gamba
Robert Kohnen - harpsichord
2020/10/09
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