Music Education Portal
Everything about the competition sounded like fun! The year was 2011. The sponsor was a performance group in Hanover, Germany, who was giving their third annual Composers Competition. The Plathner Eleven chamber group certainly had a sense of humor and creativity. The rules for the competition were similar to other competitions, except for the theme […]
One of my gifted piano students writes about learning to “play horizontally” on the piano and “live horizontally” in her everyday life. Article by Emma Armstrong-Carter, originally published on our previous site, March 9, 2011. Reprinted with permission of the author. My piano teacher teaches me music theory and technique, but the most memorable […]
One way to listen to classical music is listening for shape. All pieces of music have a shape, and this shape informs the listening experience. We sometimes use the word “shape” when describing the form of a piece, but at the most elemental level, shape is merely the rise and fall of the music. The […]
The first film score of independent artistic merit and dominant coloration of the dramatic action was not Duke Ellington’s famous score to Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder (1959), but Miles Davis’ score to Louis Malle’s Elevator to the Gallows (1958), a lesser known film that is nonetheless a paragon of French film noir. Evidently, […]
Last month the Ciompi Quartet generously and expertly performed Caroline Shaw’s “Entre’Acte” for the students and parents of the Mallarmé Youth Chamber Orchestra at the University of North Carolina. I have no preference for contemporary classical music, and indeed I’ve argued in these pages that jazz is the genuine classical music of the American twentieth […]
I’ve often applauded the Blue Note album covers of the 1950s and 60s as the greatest achievement in the history of American commercial design. Nearly all of these album covers, about five hundred of them, were designed by a single man named Reid Miles, as were many of Prestige’s equally arresting album covers. As Giotto […]
Brendan Toller’s documentary I Need That Record! The Death (or Possible Survival) of the Independent Record Store (2008) tells the story of the demise of the independent record store, though it might just as well tell the story of the demise of the independent video or book store, all of which were victims of box […]
I first heard Bach’s choral prelude Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ (“I call to thee, Lord Jesus Christ”) in Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972). It seems to me one of the most beautiful compositions, and Tarkovsky’s scene, in which the piece harmonizes with the camera as it plays over Brueghel’s Hunters in the Snow (1565), […]
Here’s an easy way to remember the order of flats and sharps: The word “FLAT” has four letters – the order of flats moves up by 4ths:B C D E F G A B C D E F G A B C D E F The order of flats is B E A D G […]
The Circle of Fifths is a wonderful tool for beginners in theory as well as for the most advanced composers! Here are some of the many things you can learn from the Circle of Fifths: Key Signatures Relative minor and major keys Chord Progressions I – IV – V in any key Dominant Substitutions Advanced […]
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