at the end of the Baroque era, J. S. Bach represents another. Bach’s fugues are the most obvious examples of his contrapuntal skill, but equally skilful is the counterpoint between voice and accompaniment in the arias of his vocal works, or the illusion of contrapuntal lines in his works for solo instruments, particularly in the suites for ...
Composed in 1787 and triumphantly premiered in Prague on 29 October that year, Don Giovanni reworks the old legend of the serial seducer, drawing on the Spanish play by Tirso de Molina (1630) and Molière’s Don Juan (1665). The opera revolves around the tensions of class and sex that were so central to Figaro. Ensembles and propulsive ‘chain’ finales ...
Composed between 1917 and 1922 and first performed in Berlin on 14 December 1925, this work features Berg’s own libretto, based on the Georg Büchner play Woyzeck. Written a century earlier, the play recounts the true story of a soldier, barber and drifter who is executed for murder. Büchner may have read about Johann Christian Woyzeck as ...
a vital part of his musical make-up and he produced 10 stage works during his life. His musical education was traditional: at the Prague Organ School he studied harmony, counterpoint, fugue and chorales. On graduating, he joined the Provisional Theatre orchestra as a violist. Over the following nine years, he performed a catholic mix of repertoire from ...
many major works were not heard until after his death. ‘Country Band’ March Encouraged by his remarkable father, Ives soon began to question the established ‘rules’ of harmony, counterpoint and form which, he felt, merely imprisoned the imagination within outworn conventions. The most withering term of contempt in his vocabulary, for music that obeyed all the ...
in Calvinist psalters from the 1530s. He set them in a variety of styles ranging from strict homophony, where the tune appears in the top line, to motet-like counterpoint with the melody providing material for all voices. After spending some years in Metz, a Huguenot stronghold, Goudimel moved to Lyons. He was murdered, along with hundreds ...
But when the eastern Tennesseean started his own band, Doyle Lawson And Quicksilver, in 1979, he took bluegrass in a new direction. Lawson applied the moving, counterpoint harmonies of his favourite gospel quartets to Quicksilver’s bluegrass songs and he made their second album, 1981’s Rock My Soul, the first of many all-gospel projects. Styles & ...
the Duke of Saxe-Weissenfels persuaded Handel’s unsympathetic father to allow the boy to study music with the organist Friedrich Wilhelm Zachow. The young Handel presumably gained a thorough education in counterpoint and theory, but it is likely he yearned to escape Halle’s devoutly Pietist atmosphere. In 1703 he arrived in Hamburg, where a chance meeting with Johann Mattheson (1681–1764) ...
until shortly before his death in January 1996. ‘Mulligan’s main contribution was to bring jazz dynamics down to the dynamic range of a string bass – and then to use counterpoint in a natural, unschooled way.’ John Graas Classic Recordings 1949–50 ‘Jeru’, ‘Venus De Milo’ 1952–53 Gerry Mulligan Quartet: ‘My Funny Valentine’, ‘The Lady Is A Tramp’ 1954 California ...
first of a number of books that remain central to the canon of music theory. In its third part, he set out an exposition of the rules of classical counterpoint that would form the core of the prima pratica for future generations. His work as a theorist far outweighed his compositions and few recordings of his work exist. Introduction | ...
(Jo-van’-e Per-loo-e’-je da Pa-les-tre’-na) 1525/6–94 Italian composer Palestrina is named after a small town near Rome, where he is thought to have been born. He was educated in Rome; in 1537 he was a choirboy at the basilica of S Maria Maggiore, one of the city’s principal churches and an important musical establishment. By 1544 he was back in Palestrina ...
and fuelled them with the huge power of his wholly original rhythmic language. The result denied all the rules of the composition text-books, but liberated melody, harmony, counterpoint and rhythm from those rules with its sheer expressive force and urgency. No piece of twentieth-century music has been more influential. The Premiere It was predictable that Stravinsky’s score, ...
the end of her career. Pass used an amazing jazz vocabulary and a command of dynamics and tempo, combined with a sophisticated harmonic sense and a knack for creating counterpoint between improvised lead lines. Pass played a Gibson ES-175 guitar and later a guitar made for him by master crafter Jimmy D’Aquisto. Personalities | Charley Patton | Delta Blues Pioneer ...
Prague at the coronation of Emperor Charles VI as king of Bohemia. Concentus musico-instrumentalis (‘Instrumental Collection’, 1701) contains some of his most ambitious orchestral suites (partite). His Latin treatise on counterpoint, Gradus ad Parnassum (‘Steps to Parnassus’, 1725), was studied by all the great composers of the following era, including Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, and remained influential ...
to ill health, Fux’s able assistant Caldara conducted the performances. However, Fux is most remembered for his scholarly book Gradus ad Parnassum (1725), which was a treatise on counterpoint that influenced the greatest Viennese choral composers of the late eighteenth century, including Mozart and Joseph Haydn (1732–1809). Fux was a respected teacher who trained Gottlieb Muffat and Jan ...
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