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Tag: Music
Is klezmer music a dying tradition?
One of its prominent proponents is on record as saying so: http://www.jewishpress.com/news/… Andy Statman, one of the foremost Klezmer musicians in the world, knows that the time of Klezmer has passed. “Each music has its point,” He explained over the phone while working at a Mandolin camp in California. “[Klezmer] is still alive, but in […]
Vamvakaris: The flood
In the previous post, I wrote about the 1933 recording A raid on the hashish den, a comedy sketch with music, featuring one of the earliest recordings of Markos Vamvakaris. In the process, I got the bug for GoAnimate, and so I created an animated music video for the song. (Now with subtitles.) My second […]
A raid on the hashish den
Among Markos Vamvakaris’ 1933 recordings—among his very earliest, that is—is Έφοδος στον τεκέ, “A raid on the hashish den”. This was a musical revue number by Giannis Kamvysis and Petros Kyriakos. Kyriakos was a musical theatre actor, and the underworld that gave rise to rebetiko music was part of what he documented in song. With […]
Markos Vamvakaris: Είσαι μελαχρινό και νόστιμο
Rebetiko music was a fusion of styles, and the fusion can be seen in progress through the ’30s. The antecedents of rebetiko are murky, but the most visible antecedent is Smyrneika, the music of Anatolian cafés, which came with the Anatolian refugees to Greece in the ’20s, and was taken up as the emblem of […]
Solage: Le basile
Le basile, like Pluseurs gens voy, counts as Ars Nova rather than Ars Subtilior, and there aren’t the rhythmic games hallowed in Subtilior. The rhythms are still wackier than Pluseurs gens: there is enough syncopation across barlines to justify the Mensurstich notation, and there is confusion about whether voices are off by half a bar […]
Solage: Pluseurs gens voy
With Pluseurs gens voy, we’re backing away from the crazy of Ars Subtilior, going back to what the Ars Subtilior was a mutant offshoot of: the Ars Nova of Machaut. Accordingly, there is less weirdness about the notation in this ballade; the one exception is in the middle section, where the Cantus, and possibly the […]
Solage: S’aincy estoit
This is the third of the Solage ballades, and the tricks of notation get worse and worse. We have one voice in a different metre than the other two (6/8 vs. 9/8, 3/4 vs. 2/2)—and not with the same measure length either; so the bars in the three voices coincide only every three or four […]
Solage: Corps femininin
Calextone has some polyrhythm going on, but the disruptions are localised—they resync after a couple of bars, and the metres are displaced by a beat or a third of a beat, which makes for some very pleasant syncopation. Calextone also has some interrupted half bars, but blink and you’ll miss ’em: there’s only a couple. […]
Solage: Calextone qui fut dame terrouse
The Ars Subtilior was a brief period in the end of the 14th century, when composers went nuts. The Ars Subtilior composers wrote music that was more complex that anything heard before—and often anything heard centuries since in Western music: more modulations, more polyrhythms, more music scores shaped as eye music. It was a short-lived […]
Bach/Göncz, completion of BWV 562.2 and Contrapunctus 14
Amazing what you find in the googles. I googled idly at work to see if any of the completions of Bach’s Contrapunctus 14, from the Art of Fugue, are online. If you don’t already know about it, you may not care to find out, but the final fugue in the Art of Fugue is incomplete, […]