This morning I saw this tweet: Lonely Woman but it's Gregorian chant — wayne&wax (@wayneandwax) October 30, 2020 I read it and thought, huh, that’s interesting. So I opened an Ableton session and put “Lonely Woman” by Ornette Coleman on a track. I have a few Hildegard von Bingen pieces in my iTunes, and I …
Tag Archives: classical remixes
Jazzy harmony and crazy tuplets in Chopin’s Nocturne Op 9 No 1
Aside from Bach, Chopin is my favorite dead white European male composer. He isn’t as overtly “jazzy” as Debussy or Ravel, but his music shares many of the qualities of jazz that I like: miniature-scale forms densely packed with rhythmic and harmonic excitement, in the service of organic-sounding melodies. Chopin’s Nocture Op 9 No 1 …
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Beethoven’s Pathétique Sonata
Beethoven is famous for writing huge epic structures. But he could write memorable tunes, too, and the second movement of the “Pathétique Sonata” contains a particularly good one. It’s best to known to my age cohort from Schroder’s performance: Here’s my Ableton Live visualization:
What does it mean to remix the classical canon
Here’s an exciting thing that happened recently. https://twitter.com/olabscott/status/1270192351215005697 I didn’t have an explicitly anti-racist motivation when I started making the remixes, but if they’re being received that way, I’m delighted. In this post, I’m going to do some thinking out loud about what it all means.
Chopin’s “Raindrop” Prelude
Let’s get the name out of the way first. Chopin didn’t title the piece “Raindrop,” nor did he give catchy nicknames to any of his other preludes. The names were given later by a fan named Hans von Bülow. Chopin’s actual title of this piece is “12 Préludes, Opus 28 Number 15 in D-Flat Major.” …
Remixing Bartók’s Mikrokosmos No 133 – Syncopation
Béla Bartók’s Mikrokosmos (not the BTS song) is a six-volume collection of short pedagogical piano pieces. The early volumes are beginner-level exercises, and the later ones are professional-level challenges. They’re all pretty strange. My favorite is number 86, “Two Major Pentachords,” a counterpoint exercise where the right hand plays in C major and the left …
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Perpetual motion in the Presto from Bach’s G minor Violin Sonata
Struggling to comprehend Bach has been a reliable treatment for my quarantine blues. I’m guiding my listening with scholarly articles about his use of rhythm. Joseph Brumbeloe wrote a good one: “Patterns and Performance Choices in Selected Perpetual-Motion Movements by J. S. Bach.” By “perpetual motion,” Brumbeloe means unbroken streams of uniform note values. In …
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Clair de Lune
I struggle with the rhythms of rubato-heavy classical pieces, and no one loves rubato more than the Impressionists. When I started listening in earnest to recordings of Debussy’s “Clair de Lune,” I couldn’t even guess the time signature, much less place notes in the bar. This piece is therefore an excellent use case for aural …
Perpetual motion in Bach’s E major Violin Partita Prelude
In this crazy time, learning and analyzing Bach is an obsessive-compulsive activity that feels like an anchor of mental stability. In that spirit, I’m finding it therapeutic to dig into the famous prelude from the E major violin partita. It’s an example of “perpetual motion,” uniform note values played without interruption. Aside from measures 1, …
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Metrical dissonance in the Gigue from Bach’s E minor English Suite
I’m continuing my journey through rhythmic analyses of canonical classical works with Metrical Displacement and Metrically Dissonant Hemiolas by Channan Willner. One of the pieces that Willner analyzes is the Gigue from Bach’s English Suite No. 5 in E minor, played here by Glenn Gould.