Posts Related to: Classical Music

I sold off most of my goat herd yesterday. Ostensibly it’s because things are so busy, but in reality it was retribution! A whole mess of teenaged-goats (last spring’s kids) broke out of the fencing and devoured the landscaping around our house. Imagine sticks where blossom-laidened crape myrtles used to be. There goes that photo-shoot for Better Homes and Gardens.
Then …

For weeks I’ve been driving to conferences spread as widely as Santa Clara to Birmingham. Returning to Texas, I jumped into events surrounding the Fort Worth Opera Company’s world premiere of a controversial opera “Before Night Falls” by Cuban-American composer Jorge Martín. 
Coincidentally, the very day of the premiere, May 29, a reader of Music After 50 …

When I trained as a musicologist in the mid 1970s, a shift was in the air. Our professors had been scholarly pioneers shaped by WWII (and, in many cases, refugees from that war). The destruction they’d witnessed led them to focus on preserving musical and artistic treasures. 
They tirelessly unearthed, microfilmed (a new technology!), and catalogued everything of …

Sometimes called lyrics, or simply “the words,” text is the sixth element used to analyze music. Let’s say you’re a composer. You want to write a “love” song and are searching for a text. How do you decide what words to use? Let’s look at two well-known texts that express a lover’s admiration. The first starts with the famous line: …

Timbre. It rhymes with “amber,” not “limber.” So, if you cut down a tree, don’t yell “timbre!” (or don’t yell it too loudly…). Timbre is actually a critical element of music, so let’s look at it. Timbre is the French term for tone quality or tone color. The word goes back to a Middle Greek word for kettledrum called tymbanon. To …

Texture. It applies to music as well as fabrics! Actually, texture is one of five parameters used to describe style in Western music. These five dimensions are taught in music appreciation courses, so perhaps you’ve encountered them already. They’re: Melody, Harmony, Rhythm, Texture, Timbre, and the sixth one, if there are words, Text.
Melody, harmony, and rhythm are more …

The nylon string guitar offers an entirely different sound and touch than the acoustic or the electric guitar. There is an entire methodology of technique for the instrument.
Although the nylon-string guitar is most associated with the classical guitar technique as championed by Andres Segovia, it has been used successfully in Brazilian bossa nova and in jazz …

At the end of my last post, I referred to recent compositions that strike the “right tension” between composer and listener. Let’s pick up that theme.
 
Tension. We tend to think of tension as negative: a tension headache, or too much tension at work. Quite the contrary. Tension is a positive element in life. Think of the chick pecking open its …

Frequently, and justifiably, thoughtful people bemoan the way “classical music” left its audience behind in the 20th century. This post was, in fact, spurred by just such a comment on one of my previous posts.
This person and others with similar complaints are referring to the gulf between composer and listener caused by waves of abstract and dissonant …

Classical Music. Ah, hah! There’s a label that causes trouble. What does it mean?  Most people would answer “the music of Mozart and Beethoven, Bach and Brahms…those ‘classical’ guys.” But what does that mean?
 
Those guys wouldn’t know what to do with the label “Classical Music.” They couldn’t have envisioned their music still being around centuries into the future.
Immortality? That was …