Jan van Eyck

In the past, I want to firstly address that I personally have attended some music concerts on Sacramento State’s campus. However, I had never before attended to a symphonic wind ensemble concert. Before the concert began, I had noticed a large amount of chairs on stage as I found this quite interesting. As it was about to begin, a large amount of musicians wearing black appeared on the stage and were performing a small warmup. As performers, they were a guest group. Once the lights were turned…

The famous story of Dracula by Bram Stroker shows several interactions between the living and the undead. Dracula is a century old vampire who wants to come to London to create more of his own. His powers have no limits when it comes to humans, seducing them ad ordering them to do anything the vampire wishes. His powers are the main way of interacting between humans since any normal human without duress would see that he is evil. Dracula imprisons Jonathon Harker without him even realizing, he…

Vincent Van Gogh: The Portrait of Dr.Gachet The Portrait of Dr. Gachet by Vincent Van Gogh is sorrowful, but alluring. Iam drawn to this piece because of the heavy brush strokes and the usage of dark colors, and because of this I automatically knew there was more to the story as I analyzed-- from the subject's facial expression to the purple flower lying on the table. I began to know more about this painting’s story as I investigated Vincent’s past and other works. The greatest dutch painter…

Peter and the Wolf was written in 1936 by Sergei Prokofiev as a children's story. This work includes both music and text. The symphony is the accompaniment to the narrator, who reads the spoken parts during the work. Prokofiev was born in Sochovka, Russia on April 23, 1891. The music Prokofiev is most famous for, is the music he composed for Peter and the Wolf. Prokofiev’s composing days began during his youth, eventually leading him to study music at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. In 1918,…

Over the summer I listened to the music used in two ballets shown during the Here/Now Festival, and which will also be performed during the 2017-18 season. As a non-musician, I perceive two thematic strands in the first of the four pieces from Dan Deacon’s America to be utilized in The Times Are Racing. Let’s call them A and B. The pattern in this section is ABA. However, the same music is used in the fourth and final section of the album (and ballet); but the pattern there is BA. This A strand…

Concert Report: Mivos Quartet The Mivos Quartet performed at the Conrad Prebys Concert Hall on the campus of UC San Diego on the evening of October 12, 2016. The four-membered string ensemble - consisting of Olivia de Prato and Lauren Cauley on the violin, Victor Lowrie on the viola, and Mariel Roberts on the cello - played three modern composition in a concert that lasted about one hour. The quartet opened their performance with a piece titled Serashi Fragments composed by Lei Liang in 2005.…

There are three main types of orchestral programme music, symphonic poem also, known as the tone poem, the concert overture, and the programme symphony. The symphonic poem is musical piece written for symphonic orchestra, usually as a single long movement. Richard Strauss is one of the well-known composers who wrote many descriptive symphonic poems. One of these is Til Eulenspiegel Op. 28 (1894 - 1895) which tells of a mischievous character of German legend. Strauss uses a musical theme to…

beginning that she was a troubled housewife that later committed suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning. IN which, If you know anything about Van Gogh (The artist of the painting Sexton writes about) her death is similar to how he also committed suicide. This poem is both simple and complex due to how it relates back to religion, death, and the kinship between Sexton and Van Gogh. To start off let’s talk about how this poem relates back to religion. You’ll see from the very first line “That does…

Already hearing holiday and Christmas songs everywhere? No doubt Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas is You” is heard in a lot of malls, stores and establishments. It is considered to be one of the Christmas songs in the past two decades that has reached a height of popularity. According to Adam Ragusea, a journalism professor at Mercer University, Mariah Carey’s song is a classic because of the chords, as reported by Vox. Ragusea said there are 13 distinct chords that makes Mariah…

The first piando was invented in approximated in 1700 by Bartolomeo Cristifion in Italy. Bartolome Cristofion Italian instrument inventor, he invented the piano and two other keyboard instruments, the spinettone and the oval spinet. The piano is fouded on the earlier technological innovation. The 14th and 15th centuries was the development of different kinds of keyboard stringed instrument. At the time that Bartolomeo Cristofion invented the piano, the most popular keyboard instruments were the…