Articles

What’s All This About Keys?

By Robert Aubry Davis The Circle of Fifths 1 Let’s begin with Francesco Geminiani’s “The Art of Playing on the Violin,” published late in the story (1751) by a composer who studied with Corelli and could summarize what his era was about musically: The Intention of Musick is not only to please the Ear, […]

Liner Notes: Keyboard Partitas by Bach

There have been composers who absorbed everything they could find of their predecessors and contemporaries, often making diverse and unique rearrangements of the originals. Some composers when young visited aged mentors at some sacrifice and risk. Some were born of musical families and passed that knowledge and inspiration to their offspring. More than a few took older forms and retranslated them into something new. Some looked at instrumentation and the tonal nature of audio representation and made an evolutionary step in how we express music. Some were prolific in a vast variety of genres. A handful has produced tunes many can whistle, as well as universally acclaimed titanic masterpieces. A couple has had their music shot into space as a calling card for other civilizations that there may be in the vastness of the universe. But only one person is all of those things, and so much more, and that is Johann Sebastian Bach.

Fairy Tales Set To Music

Fairy Tales Set To MusicIn the summer of 1795, while on holiday with his friend Schiller, Goethe decided to try his hand at something entirely new and challenging. Having mastered epic poetry and lyric verse, novels and plays, essays and even watercolors-not to mention new theories on botany and optics-he was going to tackle a […]

Gioia Antiqua, Schwann 1999

Schwann 1999A small, loosely-affiliated group of entities with mutual interests and a common challenge before them unite to pool their resources and vision, in order to form a more perfect union… eek, it sounds like the American Way! It is, therefore, both gratifying and a bit amusing to see a bunch of mostly-European labels with […]