Thursday, December 14, 2017

Finding Gruber and Origin of Silent Night (Link)


Silent Night: The Origin of the Song
By RTO.org
http://www.returntoorder.org/2016/12/origin-song-silent-night/


Two comments:

  • by some glitch, probably spell check, one suspect having been Michael Haydn, his name was, when I accessed, spelled as "Hadyn", I signalled the glitch and hope they have changed it;
  • one commenter says the story is "apocryphal" : that is the kind of suspicion in historiography I don't like. I am accepting it, until I see a better underpinned one.

Thursday, October 5, 2017

I looked for Johann Sebastian Bach on ancestry.com


Some of you may know my little fad of selecting as large a number of persons as manageable and per case within that possible, from the past, as known by internet profiles.

This is why I looked him up, and on ancestry. Funny enough, I found lots of him on US School records from 1880 to 2013.



Could this explain the phenomena of prodigal productivity and of ... polyphony?/HGL

Thursday, September 14, 2017

Music Theory : I or i, IV (or iv, or ii or II), V (quora)


Q
What is the difference between tonic, subdominant and dominant in music?
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-difference-between-tonic-subdominant-and-dominant-in-music/answer/Hans-Georg-Lundahl


Hans-Georg Lundahl
Self Employed at Writer and Composer
Answered just now
  • The tonic is the home chord of a composition (the one a Schenkerian analysis will reduce it to), which is stated or implied at the end - same applies to any phrase in it, since these are minor compositions too, it is also its base note;
  • The dominant is one fifth above the tonic, is a major chord, and is the usual chord just before the home chord at the end of a phrase or composition : the reason for its usually being major is that the major third of the dominant is a leading note, leading up to the tonic note;
  • The subdominant does not have a set function, but can replace the dominant in the cadence, thus making it a plagal one, its base note being a leading note to the major third (if such) of the tonic, it can also prepare the dominant, but can also in both capacities be replaced by a major or minor double dominant. It is, essentially, an intermediate.


You can end a composition on tonic in full cadence, or just before tonic, on dominant, in half cadence (meaning you imply, but refuse to actually state the tonic), but you can not very well end it on either subdominant or double dominant, these feeling a bit too intermediate. Transposing a whole phrase that way is another matter, in that case the original subdominant or double dominant of the composition has become the new tonic of the final part of it.

[I am, like some of the other answers, assuming the questioner already can find these on a scale. I am however also more treating them as conventional functions in musical composition rather than as just places in the scale.]

Wednesday, April 5, 2017

England is Still Musical!


Back in the days that the Pen and Pension blog writes about, the English were among the nations most eager to play music at home.

Pen and Pension : Music at Home
Posted on April 5, 2017
https://penandpension.com/2017/04/05/music-at-home/


Georgian England is the England under Kings (or Usurpers) George I to George IV - 1 August 1714 to 26 June 1830 (at the broadest definition, the Pen and Pension blogger might have a narrower one).

This is some time ago, so it is interesting if Englans is still musical.

Judging by this Oxford girl, that is the case:

Why music should be beautiful... Alma's message for Carinthian Summer Press Conference
AlmaDeutscher
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yf_pbVvIWk


She is not just a musician, but also a composer./HGL

Friday, February 24, 2017