French composer and pianist Francis Poulenc is widely regarded as the greatest mélodie composer of his time. A prolific composer in many genres, Poulenc produced mélodie throughout his career, reaching his artistic peak in the 1930s and 40s. Poulenc’s songs derive all of their musical attributes from the texts themselves. Each phrase, harmony, and nuance is meant to add meaning to the text at hand. For this reason, he was notoriously picky with the poetry he would set. Though he set a variety of poets, he had a particular fondness for the poetry of surrealist poets Guillaume Appollinaire and Paul Eluard. Poulenc developed a deeply collaborative professional relationship with the baritone Pierre Bernac, which dominated the majority
I would say that the mood in John Prine's music is basically depressing. The two songs that I could relate to were Sam Stone and Grandpa was a Carpenter. The first song on the Prime Prine album, which is called Sam Stone, would make people very depressed and think of some instance in their own life when something similar has happened. The music seems to remind me of people who live in poverty and need to turn to drugs to ease their failure. When you think of the lyrics in the song you think about how this happened in so many different cases. It wasn't just this one guy and his family. This song relates to many different families at the time.
For almost half a century, the musical world was defined by order and esteemed the form of music more highly than the emotion that lay behind it. However, at the turn of the 19th century, romantic music began to rise in popularity. Lasting nearly a century, romantic music rejected the ideas of the classical era and instead encouraged composers to embrace the idea of emotionally driven music. Music was centered around extreme emotions and fantastical stories that rejected the idea of reason. This was the world that Clara Wieck (who would later marry the famous composer, Robert Schumann) was born into. Most well known for being a famous concert pianist, and secondly for being a romantic composer, Clara intimately knew the workings of romantic music which would not only influence Clara but would later become influenced by her progressive compositions and performances, as asserted by Bertita Harding, author of Concerto: The Glowing Story of Clara Schumann (Harding, 14). Clara’s musical career is an excellent example of how romantic music changed from virtuosic pieces composed to inspire awe at a performer’s talent, to more serious and nuanced pieces of music that valued the emotion of the listener above all else.
Throughout time, love has been a steady theme in music, literature, and film. Love is perhaps one of the most obvious emotions to portray and it can often be described as be sensual, sexual, spiritual or mystic, and divine. The tradition of courtly love began in the twelfth- century with the traveling songs of the performing troubadours and trouvères throughout Europe. Their songs of love were the source of all Western vernacular poetry and through the evolution of time developed into the popular chanson of the fifteenth and sixteenth- centuries. Perhaps the most common themes in Burgundian, Parisian and international chansons is that of fine amour or refined love. Due to the influence of culture and the progression of time, the subject matter and compositional style of the chanson changed as it moved through Burgundy, Paris and eventually spread internationally.
John Philip Sousa, “The March King,” helped musicians gain rights to music, and made American history with the march “The Stars and Stripes Forever.” Sousa isn’t thought about by most modern people, however musicians think of Sousa as a hero. Musicians can create a piece and not have to worry about the piece getting stolen, or misused by other people. Sousa also requested an instrument that changed the marching band field. Sousa was a great band leader, a great musician, and an important part of music history.
Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812 is a beautiful, intimate, and striking production that was unfortunately overshadowed by other Broadway shows when it was nominated for several Tony awards, but only won a couple of them. With that, the show won the Tony Award for Best Lighting Design in a Musical thanks to the musical’s brilliant designer and his techniques. Bradley King is the fortunate winner of this award due to his integration of beautiful, bold choices in lighting effects along with his ability in keeping the space intimate and magical.
Schubert's instrumental works show development over a long period of time, but some of his greatest songs were composed before he was 20 years old. In Schubert's songs the literary and musical elements are perfectly balanced, composed on the same intellectual and emotional level. Although Schubert composed strophic songs throughout his career, he did not follow set patterns but exploited bold and free forms when the text demanded it. Except for his early training as a child, Schubert the composer, was largely untrained and self-taught. His gift of being able to create melodies that contained both easy naturalness and sophisticated twists at the same time was unprecedented for his time. On this quality rests the reputation that music history finally gave Schubert.
It is clear that Beethoven’s stands as being significant in development of the string quartet to a massive extent in creativity and innovation. His early quartets show great influence of those from the Classical period and with his own, has influenced his contemporaries and later composers. The quartets published later in his life show even greater imagination and use of expression. It is also through similar uses of texture, harmony, rhythm and counterpoint that composers of the Romantic period and the 20th century wrote their own string quartets. Beethoven’s however prove a huge advancement in how string quartets are written and the intensity of emotions that they portray.
The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock, a poem created by the late T.S. Eliot who was a poet in the 20th Century (when Europe was its peak of industrialisation) and this is considered to be one of his highly regarded pieces alongside (The Wasteland). This poem is a monologue of the persona of J. Alfred Prufrock, (the speaker of the poem) a middle aged man, intellectual and described with little self-confidence with himself who has problems in dealing with self-image and anxiety. He’s a solitary man who is achingly shy and little courage, when being isolated, he isn’t subjected to a lifestyle of a social life and this halts him when it comes to speaking with a female. The title to me is ironic, Eliot titled it a ‘Lovesong’, therefore, the language
Patrie is said to have fallen in love with the tune after hearing it played by an expert harpist5. It is not difficult to understand how Patrie would fall so in love with “Londonderry Air” that he would wish to write the music down for others to enjoy. The beauty with this tune lies in its ...
There are two pieces in our Renaissance Era musical feature this evening, the first by Pierre Phalèse called Passamezzo d'Italye - Reprise – Gaillarde. Phalèse began as a bookseller in 1545 and not long after he set up a publishing house. By 1575 he had around 189 music books. Much of his work was devoted to sacred music but there was a small amount of Flemish songs and instrumental works. Phalèse borrowed work from many composers and did not hesitate to include other composer’s music in his works. The sec...
The troubadours enjoyed sharing stories about fin’amor, or courtly love. The trobairitz were no different when it came to talking about untouchable love. Many of these poems began as an exchange of letters from one party to the next, finally resulting in a song. Many of these letters were collected in a manuscript and the credits of the songs are given solely to the man who initiated the exchange. It is difficult to distinguish the gender of the author without knowing more about the song because most of the songs were written about women, and they could have been written by a woman speaking as a man or by a man speaking as a woman. Both men and women also wrote songs from their own perspective. Most of the information found on the author
Paul Poiret was born on April 20th, 1879 in Paris, France. His contributions to twentieth-century fashion has earned him the title in many people’s eyes as the “King of Fashion”, because he established the principle of modern dress and created the blueprint of the modern fashion industry. Poiret’s designs and ideas led the direction of modern design history. He was born into a working class family and his natural charisma eventually gained him entry into some of the most exclusive ateliers of the Belle Époque. Jacques Doucet, one of the capital’s most prominent couturiers, hired him after seeing promising sketches he had sold to other dressmakers. Furthermore, he was hired by the House of Worth and was put to work to create less glamorous and more practical, simple items because his out of the ordinary designs were not welcomed in open arms by opulent clientele. Despite this experience he was still confident in his ideas and ventured out on his own with money barrowed from his parents and opened a storefront. Moreover, he wanted to promote of the concept of a "total lifestyle” was seen as the first couturier to merge fashion with interior design. His independent work broke the normal conventions of dressmaking, and overturned their underlying presumptions. He liberated the woman’s body from the petticoat and the corset to allow clothing to follow woman’s natural form. Poiret also radically revolutionized dressmaking to switch from the emphasis surrounding the skills of tailoring towards those based on the skills of draping and began to use bright colors. Furthermore, Poiret was apart of the art deco movement, which was surrounded by a period of immense social upheaval, particularly for women, and emergence of technol...
Claude Debussy is one of my favorite composers of all time. Claude Debussy’s music has had the ability to alter how I perceive music and, has made me gain a greater appreciation for all types of music. Growing up playing piano my entire life it was always hard for me as a child to follow all of the “rules” of what traditional classic music was interpreted as. Sheet music seemed so dull and boring to me, because I would be playing the piece but certain parts just did not sound appealing to my ear. My instructor always frowned upon me for this because it was different from what every other person was doing at the time. I recognized that Debussy’s style of music was also criticized much in the same way as mine was one day while I was listening to my favorite piece Clair De Lune. The song in my mind is simply perfection, the harmonies all flow beautifully but, according to others it is not what they want to hear because it is considered to be vague and lacks image. My struggle at being restricted to these so called rules of piano made me like Debussy more and more.
Ludwig van Beethoven, the famous German born composer and pianist, composed the Romance in F major in 1798. It was likely first performed in that year, but was not published until 1805 in Vienna. It was originally written for violin and orchestra but the edition being performed today was transcribed and edited for saxophone and piano by Peter Saiano. During this period of his life, Beethoven was still known as perhaps the greatest pianist in existence and he was busy touring Europe as a performer. He had not yet achieved the status he now holds as a composer, and during this period he was also working on his first set of string quartets.
Roughly from 1815 to 1910, this period of time is called the romantic period. At this period, all arts are transforming from classic arts by having greater emphasis on the qualities of remoteness and strangeness in essence. The influence of romanticism in music particularly, has shown that romantic composers value the freedom of expression, movement, passion, and endless pursuit of the unattainable fantasy and imagination. The composers of the romantic period are in search of new subject matters, more emotional and are more expressive of their feelings as they are not bounded by structural rules in classical music where order, equilibrium, control and perfection are deemed important (Dorak, 2000).