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Listening Quest November 2016: Graphical Scores of R. Murray Schafer

Tuesday, November 1, 2016 by Vicki Martin | Listening Quest

November 20 – 26 is Canada Music Week, so to celebrate, I’d like to introduce you to some contemporary Canadian music! By that, I also mean contemporary art music, not contemporary pop music, so like much contemporary art, it is admittedly slightly strange sometimes and completely and utterly strange at other times. While there may be moments of beauty, it’s about expressing and exploring all kinds of sounds and emotions, so you might love it or hate it or find that you can’t stop thinking about it.

I’d like you to hear a piece by R. Murray Schafer, who is one of Canada’s best known living composers. He was born in 1933 and has lived most of his life in Ontario. He was very interested in “acoustic ecology” -  the study of how humans are affected by natural and artificial sounds. He wanted to preserve the soundscape through anti-noise legislation. After a trip to Greenland and studying the snow from his farmhouse window, he was inspired by seeing the shapes of the snow to write the piece we are about to hear, Snowforms. Schafer uses what is called graphical notation, which doesn’t look very much like the music that we are used to seeing on the staff and more like pictures of what he wants to happen with the sound. For this piece, he started with a series of sketches of the snow and then created the music out of that. It is written just for female voices and incorporates several Inuit words for snow as text within a lot of humming, meant to convey the stillness and peacefulness of snow.

Take a listen, and remember as you follow along that the double slashes // on the left side indicate another line of music:

Extra Exploring: If you liked that, you will probably also like his piece called Miniwanka, or The Moments of Water, which explores water as rain, streams, lakes, rivers, and the ocean through sound, again using North American Indian languages with an even more interesting graphical score to follow!

Listening Quest October 2016: The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra

Saturday, October 1, 2016 by Vicki Martin | Listening Quest

Even though we are focused on learning music through learning to play the piano, I would like to you to be at least somewhat familiar with other instruments! Back in 1946, the composer Benjamin Britten was commissioned to write a piece for orchestra that would highlight different sections of the orchestra for an educational video. The piece he wrote is called The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra. He took a theme (a main idea) from another composer, Henry Purcell, and used that for a set of variations and a fugue. Each variation is played by different instruments or by different sections of the orchestra (woodwinds, brass, strings, and percussion) to demonstrate how each section has its own kind of sound. Some variations are very similar to the theme, while others only have hints of the main idea included in them. To finish the piece off, he composes a fugue (“Fewg”) where instead of having a clear melody with harmony, instead the melody is played by three or four voices or instruments slightly later (a little like singing Row Row Row Your Boat as a round) or sometimes at different intervals, upside-down, or with other changes so that harmony is created by how the melodies intertwine.

You’ll be able to listen to The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra with an interactive score that shows you which instruments are being played here: http://www.britten100.org/new-to-britten/learning/score. Get comfy – it takes 17 minutes to listen to it all!

Extra Exploring: If you’re interested, there are also a few musical games based on this piece that you can play on the right hand side of the screen. 

Listening Quest #17: Yuja Wang

Monday, June 13, 2016 by Vicki Martin | Listening Quest

Last Listening Quest for the 2015-2016 school year! I hope you've gotten to know some new composers and performers. Since I've focused a little more on composers than performers, to finish off I'd like to introduce you to a contemporary concert pianist that you really ought to know.

Her name is Yuja Wang, (you-jah) and she's young (28) and loves to wear high fashion, including short skirts and stilettos, which unfortunately often gets more attention than her playing. She has said, "I can wear long skirts when I'm 40." Her playing certainly deserves attention, though! She has been signed on by Deutsche Grammophon, one of the leading classical music recording labels since 2009 when she was only 21 and has 8 CD releases with them including the Complete Orchestral Works of Maurice Ravel, which is actually 4 CD's all on its own. Here are two fast and furious performances just to show you what she can do!

The first is Mozart's Turkish March, although this has been transcribed by ArcadiVolodos, so it's even faster and more furious than the original:

And who can resist The Flight of the Bumblebee by Rimsky-Korsakov?

Extra Exploring: Want more of Yuja? Try listening to her play Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2: