Positional notation

Later, Aibne elected to play a Celestial Violin Concerto known as the “Pillars of Creation” at the conclusion of a harrowing interment of two children in London. Only the canorous melody seemed to articulate the inexpressible grief of the bereaved family. In fact, with the help of the music, the mourners’ souls grew wings to soar across the solar system and into the interstellar space to seek refuge among the stardust. After all, they were made of stardust too and would one day return to…

The one quote that summarizes this whole book completely, comes pretty late during the analysis. “Music may be the activity that prepared our pre-human ancestors for speech communication and for the very cognitive, representational flexibility necessary to become humans.” (Daniel J. Levitin, 260.) This quote pretty much expresses the full meaning of this book, which is to explain the innate importance and development of music. This quote is received when the argument about how music has evolved…

Throughout the Adagio movement of Brahms’ Piano Trio No. 1 in B Major, we are presented with several different juxtaposing textures, each offering a new perspective with its experience. The dialectic forces of this movement could also be found within layers of Image A. The antiphony at the onset and again in later references can be heard as soft (in a texture sense), open, and even vague in its harmonic and rhythmic structure. The instructed una corda gives an airy and empty quality to the…

Sometimes, people have a lot more to tell than they do to say. Wait, what? When you compose music, you tell a story, not just say it. There’s meaning. That’s why I think composing music would be the perfect career for me. It’s diverse, satisfying, and worry free. Composing music is like making art; anyone who wants to, can accomplish it. The music industry is based all around the world so location is never a problem. That’s what makes composing music so diverse. Anyone can do it! Even the…

On Friday, February 6th, 2015, I was sitting in class listening to a Music History lecture, when my teacher, Dr. Jamie Weaver, played a recording of “La Quarte Estampie Royal”, from Le Manuscrit Du Roi, an instrumental piece from the 14th century France. I was intrigued. As a fiddler throughout my high school year, studying a variety of genres, I recognized much of the ornamentation as similar to Celtic tradition, namely Cape Breton tradition. The first things I noticed about the recording…

1. What ideas or points did I identify with this week? Some ideas/points I identified this week are the pros/cons of being a freelance musician and challenges ones is faced with as a musician. A freelance musician is an independent worker who performs for a living. This musician may perform at parties, clubs, studio recordings, hotels, formal concerts, etc. One must also take in count how much expenses are when one is a freelancer. Some may even need a second job. 2. What ideas or points…

Composers have been coming up with new and inventive ways to expand the realm of choral music for centuries. New instruments and techniques are constantly being developed, but many of these techniques fail to secure a lasting foothold and gain traction. Many techniques of the twentieth and twenty-first century incorporate additional dissonances to compose chord resolutions, chord successions, and chord progressions that are atypical of classical music before 1910. Composers continue to push the…

The piece that I have chosen is “Country Gardens”, written by Percy Grainger. This piece was his first piano arrangement of the English Morris dance tune “Country Gardens.” It became extremely popular and his greatest commercial success, later this piece became one of his least favorite pieces as he was asked to play it so often. A remark that was included in the early publication was: “Rough sketched for 2 whistlers and a few instruments about 1908.” In another edition he writes: “In some…

The chosen Sound Box from Sumerian Lyre, from Ur.Ca. 2685 BCE; Mesopotamia structure was dated back to the third millennium B.C. found in the tomb of Queen Puabi from the Royal Cemetery of Ur in southern Iraq by an archaeologist Leonard Woolley and his men between 1922 and 1934 called “The Great Lyre” in PG789 (Clark, 2014). The Sound Box of Lyre had disintegrated, leaving only an impression in the soil, which Woolly called them death pits known as “Kings’ Graves” (Penn Museum, n. d.).…

Analysis of Excerpts of Representative Composers As mentioned earlier in this chapter, polymodality can be traced back to the baroque period. Figure 1.3 shows an excerpt of J. S. Bach’s Four Duets No. 2 BWV 303, measures 43-46. This is an example of contrapuntal writing, where Bach creates a canon a perfect fourth lower from the top voice. The upper melody is composed in a D melodic minor scale, and the lower voice is written in A melodic minor. Mosco Carner states that “Bach in contrast to…