Events

This morning, my Blogging A-to-Z challenge post will discuss a composer whose music I absolutely loathe because of its insipid, simplistic, earwormy pabulum, Johann Pachelbel (1653-1706). You have, no doubt, heard his Canon in D, which, thanks to its inclusion in an otherwise forgettable film 51 years ago, continues to besmirch weddings and other cultural events with its demonstration of what happens when you strip music down to the essentials and add nothing back. In a way, the Canon in D resembles a...

This morning's Blogging A-to-Z challenge entry will take a quick turn and possibly trill your heart with a brief overview of ornaments. You got a glimpse of two of the most common Baroque ornaments on Saturday as the Bach snippet I posted contained a grace note and a mordent: The grace note tells the performer to add the note within the duration of the main note. For example, the grace note in the first measure would be played out as shown in the second measure: A mordent tells the performer to do a...

Yesterday's devastating fire in the Cathédral de Notre-Dame de Paris fortunately left the walls and bell towers intact. But the destruction of the fire and roof could take 10-15 years to fix, according to Le Monde. So far, corporations and other European governments have pledged over €700m ($790m, £605m) towards rebuilding it: La famille Arnault a la première annoncé un "don" de 200 millions d'euros par le groupe de luxe LVMH et a proposé que l'entreprise mette à disposition ses "équipes créatives...

Today's Blogging A-to-Z challenge post will, like yesterday's, take us back in time. Almost every day I've shown samples of music using modern notation. Any contemporary musician should have no trouble reading them. Almost a thousand years ago, in 1025, the monk Guido d'Arezzo decided to record music on paper in a way that would enable people to read it even if they'd never encountered it before. He used blocks on lines with stems indicating how the notes were connected, and it looked like this: The...

Today's Blogging A-to-Z challenge entry goes back in time a little bit. Before there were keys, there were modes: the original scales used in Ancient Greece that still pertain today. Our C-major scale roughly corresponds with the Ionian mode. (I say "roughly" because while the fifth, octave, and probably fourth notes would have sounded the same back then as they do now, the rest of them probably would have sounded slightly out of tune to modern ears. This is a topic for next week.) If you start on D...

Now that Apollo After Hours is behind us, I can start plugging our Spring Concerts: Tickets are $35 in advance. It's going to be a really cool concert.