Mikhail Glinka (b. Novospasskoye 1805 - 1857) is known as the founder of Russian classical music. The son of a landowner, he developed an early interest in folk songs. He took lessons in piano, violin and harmony, and sang, but worked in the Civil Service until 1828 when he decided to study music seriously.

He travelled to Italy for musical instruction and in a fit of home-sickness decided he would write in a Russian style. Shortly after he returned home in 1836, he wrote A Life for the Tsar. This work helped usher in an epoch of Russian classical music.

The whole opera can be found on youtube, it is about 3 hours long. (Жизнь за царя)

Here is a short selection of some of the dances.
https://youtu.be/OIAeg4D8Wns

The tragedy of the first world war can never be understated. It stole some of the brightest and strongest minds of Europe and cast them into the depths of muddy trenches, hopelessness, and despair at a crumbling world. Some might say that even still, the world has not recovered from this 100 year old wound, as it has festered over the years.

One of the casualties was a vivacious Yorkshire lad, George Butterworth, who died at the Battle of the Somme at the age of 31. His body was never found, like countless others.

"George Butterworth is probably the best-known of the ‘war composers’, held up as emblematic of the lost talent of his generation. A keen folk dancer and cricketer, Butterworth and his music seem the very model of a particular type of Englishman.

Relentlessly self critical, Butterworth regrettably destroyed the majority of his early compositions in 1915 before leaving for the Front, leaving four completed orchestral works, plus a tantalising fragment of a longer orchestral fantasia, his eleven song settings of A.E. Housman, a still unrecorded string quartet and a handful of other songs and choral pieces, all dating from the period 1910-14.

Several of his works remain in the repertoire. The justly famous orchestral pastorale ‘The Banks of Green Willow’ of 1913 is a staple of the English music canon. With genuine mass appeal, a century after its premiere the public voted it 80th in the Classic FM Hall of Fame.

Gerald Finzi wrote in 1922 that Butterworth’s music 'sums up our countryside as very little else has ever done'. Indeed the silver thread of the first English folksong revival is woven throughout his music, the clarity of his melodies and folksong modality still sounding fresh to the ear; no composer since has made a solo clarinet seem so redolent of an Arcadian English summer of oversaturated green and golden sunlight. Later works such as his rhapsody A Shropshire Lad display a darker, more uncertain tone and the fragments of an unfinished Fantasia for Orchestra give hints that this is the direction his music would have taken."

Read more about him here https://www.warcomposers.co.uk/butterworthbio

Just a quick post for today, very busy tonight. https://youtu.be/VIWQwUIDl1w

"Granados was one of the great pianists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Virtually all his music relies heavily on the Catalan and Spanish folk idiom (e.g. Twelve Spanish Pieces, or Six Pieces on Spanish Popular Songs), which, along with fellow Spaniard Isaac Albéniz, Granados was instrumental in bringing to the attention of the contemporary European musical establishment. Goyescas, begun in 1902 but not finished until 1911, is perhaps his mightiest achievement. (Granados also produced an opera by the same name -- both the pianistic and operatic incarnations of the work take the striking visuals of Goya as their inspiration.)
In 1916, while returning from the U.S.A. (where the opera Goyescas had received a New York premiere on January 26, 1916, and where Granados had performed in the White House for President Wilson), the liner Sussex was torpedoed by a German U-boat. Among the casualties were Granados and his wife of 24 years."

If you're a musician, this video will make your ego as big as your enormous brain.

https://youtu.be/R0JKCYZ8hng



Teach your child to play an instrument, no matter what you want them to do in the future. Practicing an instrument is one of the best possible workouts a brain can get and will help them in almost every aspect of life.

- long-term goal setting
- delayed gratification
- memory
- hand-eye coordination
- reflexes
- concentration and discipline
- imagination
- big brains
- attention span
- language skills
- teamwork with other musicians
- dealing with stress and anxiety in performances

And much more.

They might not like it at first and it is a difficult road, but the road to happiness is often rocky and rough, it is not padded with pleasure and fluff.

Edward MacDowell (1860-1908) was one of the first American composers to be recognized on the same level as European ones.

Woodland Sketches takes scenes from old New England and paints them with sound. MacDowell's unique style of composition feels American. Not the America we know now, but a place lost to time, gone from our world though somehow still lingering in our hearts. A slow moving rural sentiment, of mulberry trees, maple syrup, and large families full of bright-eyed children.

https://youtu.be/zFfz5K3W4dc

Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" is dark, dense and highly enigmatic, like most of Poe's work. If you know Poe, you know what you're in for; a highly symbolic and detailed work of horror that says a lot with just a few pages. It stands out as one of his best short stories and I highly recommend reading it.

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/932

Alternatively, you can read a short synopsis on sparknotes or wikipedia or something if you don't have the time.

Nikita Koshkin (b.1956), a Russian modern classical composer, wrote one of the most interesting pieces in the classical guitar repertoire: Usher Waltz. Koshkin wrote this after Poe's story, and it stands out as a brilliant example of storytelling with music.

Koshkin is well known for his unorthodox and inventive use of guitar technique, including using prepared guitar. One interesting technique he uses here is the Bartok pizzicato, a pulling out and releasing of the string with the right hand to slam into the frets, creating a jarring tone.
His use of modern harmonic choices includes strong and persistingly dissonant lines, which serve him well in evoking the spirit of Poe's work.

https://youtu.be/w3ulenPf_II

In light of the catastophic situation in Lebanon at the moment, I'd like to highlight Wadia Sabra (1876-1952) a Lebanese composer and founder of the Conservatoire Libanais.

From Wikipedia:

"Wadia Sabra was born in Ain el Jdideh and died in Beirut. He married Miss Adèle Misk in 1921 but had no children. He's buried in the Evangelical Cemetery in Sodeco Beirut.

As a composer, his music is characterized as a blend of Western and Eastern musical languages, incorporating the strengths and charms of both traditions. He is best known today as the composer of the Lebanese National Anthem, popularly known as Kulluna lil Watan (words by Rashid Nakhle), which was officially adopted by the Lebanese Government through a presidential decree on 12 July 1927.
He's considered the founding father of classical music in Lebanon.

After studying at the American University of Beirut, he left for Paris in 1892, with a scholarship from the French Embassy to study at the Conservatoire de Paris. He stayed for 7 years where he studied with the musicologist Albert Lavignac. He took a job as the principal organist of the Evangelical Church of the Holy Spirit. He then returned to Beirut, where he founded, in 1910, the first School of Music (Dar ul Musica). Despite having a great interest in the study of Western disciplines, Wadia Sabra was, during his first stay in Paris, the initiator of a new style in oriental music, particularly Lebanese. His conspicuous taste for research made him return to Paris, where he worked with the Pleyel studios to develop a "new unit of measurement", the "universal range", which he was going to present to the specialists in music during a Congress planned in Beirut, when death came by surprise on April 11, 1952.

Sabra who was the founder-administrator of "Dar ul Musica" had the satisfaction of seeing this School become “National"on 31 October 1925, which, in 1929, also grew to became the "National Conservatory ", which he was called to direct. Not only does his legacy include a keyboard with quarter-tone intervals, but also an appreciated - and discussed - work on "Arab music, basis of Western art", as well as a certain number of various works, including the Lebanese National Anthem. The National School of Music has been endowed with a Monthly Review, a sort of permanent link between this Institution, its students, and the first music lovers of Lebanon.

Most of Sabra's music was considered lost, and only a few examples of his work remained in the performance repertoire; however, since 2016, all his works have been found and archived at the Centre du patrimoine musical libanais [fr] (CMPL).

Wadia Sabra was in ruins after spending all his money on his work; hence, after many unsuccessful requests of grants and retirement pension to the Lebanese government, his wife, Mrs. Adèle Misk, went to live with her nephew Dr. Robert Misk. Moreover, the atmosphere between Adèle and their adoptive daughter Miss Badiha Ashkar had arrived to a point of no return, she decided to hide all her husband's works in a big blue trunk, La Malle Bleue. They remained there until 2016, when the Misk family gave it to the CPML for safe keeping.
Thanks to these precious archives, Mrs Zeina Saleh Kayali was able to write his full biography in 2018 in the collection "Figures musicales du Liban [archive]". éditions Geuthner  (ISBN 978-2-7053-4002-5)

Quick post for today, at a wedding.


https://youtu.be/mpgyTl8yqbw

"Based on his Bußlied, Tannhäuser became the subject of a legendary account. It makes Tannhäuser a knight and poet who found the Venusberg, the subterranean home of Venus, and spent a year there worshipping the goddess. After leaving the Venusberg, Tannhäuser is filled with remorse, and travels to Rome to ask Pope Urban IV (reigned 1261–1264) if it is possible to be absolved of his sins. Urban replies that forgiveness is impossible, as much as it would be for his papal staff to blossom. Three days after Tannhäuser's departure, Urban's staff bloomed with flowers; messengers are sent to retrieve the knight, but he has already returned to Venusberg, never to be seen again."

"The Venusberg legend has been interpreted in terms of a Christianised version of the well-known folk-tale type of a mortal visiting the Otherworld: A human being seduced by an elf or fairy experiences the delights of the enchanted realm but later the longing for his earthly home is overwhelming. His desire is granted, but he is not happy (often noting that many years have passed in the world during his absence) and in the end returns to fairy-land."

Some of the information in these pictures is technical, aimed at the musicians in this chat, and some is general.

The text I'm posting is a very interesting excerpt from "A Geometry of Music" by Dmitri Tymoczko. While this isn't specifically related to classical music or history, it is generally related to the perspective we have toward music and, therefore, our way of listening to all music.

It should be a quick read, just a few minutes, but it could change the way you see music, especially since it is so common to teach music as a type of language. An inadequate tl;dr -- "What is important is not that you understand the magic trick, but that you feel the force of the illusion"