Events

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.

I don't always have time to write Blogging A-to-Z challenge posts ahead of time. This week I've had almost no free time until just now. Today I'm going to slide into the topic of  markings. Music involves more than just the notes on the page; it's an artistic expression. Composers use a whole palette of markings and (usually Italian) words to convey to performers how to express the music. Take this snippet of Bach's Invention #1 in C: First, I should point out that Bach famously almost never added...