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YOU know that a new year has truly arrived when critics stop issuing all those lists of the best films, books, plays, recordings and whatever of the year gone by. These lists seem to be popular with readers, and they stir up lively reactions. Like other critics I enjoy recalling the pieces and performances that struck me as exceptionally good, or exceptionally bad, during the year in classical music. Read more…
Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849), whose 200th anniversary it is this year, is the overwhelming favorite composer for the piano. He possessed the most subtle intuitions and fathomed the mysteries of the world. Oscar Wilde once said of him, "After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed and mourning over tragedies that were not my own." Read more…
We are ready to launch our next batch of Simply Charly sites this Fall and we'd like you to give us your feedback on some of the sketches we're considering.
We'd love to hear your opinions. Please add your comments below.
Plato: ancient Greek philosopher's 'secret music code' cracked by British scientists
Researchers claimed they cracked “The Plato Code”, the long disputed secret messages hidden in some of Ancient World’s most influential and celebrated writings. Read more…
Mozart. The name conjures up various images: a child prodigy playing blindfolded on the keyboard; a moody composer writing music on a billiard table; a man-child throwing his head back in high-pitch giggles. Probably thanks to the unforgettable, Academy Award winning film Amadeus, these are the images that flash through our minds. The movie, however, is a mixture of facts and fiction and in a world where genius is an extremely rare quality we're left with many questions. Almost 300 years after his death, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart continues to capture our imaginations as no other composer has. Read more…
Anyone who has made it to grade four or five on the piano will, almost certainly, have encountered a piece by Chopin. Certainly, no compilation of “classics for beginners” is complete without his E minor Prelude. It’s got everything the fledgling pianist needs to feel good about their technique: it’s short, it’s in a gratifyingly slow speed and it has a superficially straightforward left-hand part, with a sad, singing melody line in the right. Read more…
Imagine this: you drop onto the sofa on a Sunday afternoon, switch on the TV and see a dapper young man with a baton standing before an orchestra and demonstrating the patterns conductors use to lead music in different meters — two, three, four and five beats to the bar. He directs his players in a few examples, bits of Beethoven’s Ninth and Schubert’s Eighth Symphonies, Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf,” Waldteufel’s “Skater’s Waltz.” Then he ups the ante, showing how these simple gestures, with subtle modification, are used to coax a fluid, lyrical performance; a playful reading; or an urgently dramatic interpretation from an orchestra. Read more…
Louis Armstrong, a k a Satchmo, a k a Pops, was to music what Picasso was to painting, what Joyce was to fiction: an innovator who changed the face of his art form, a fecund and endlessly inventive pioneer whose discovery of his own voice helped remake 20th-century culture. http://bit.ly/6ptQc9
Les Paul had been the quintessential “Guitar Man” long before the rock group Bread recorded a song of the same name.
The 1972 hit wasn’t about Les, but it could have been. Besides being a virtuoso musician who performed with some of early pop’s biggest stars, Lester William Polsfuss, who died August 13 at 94, was also an ingenious pioneer and a trailblazer who changed the face of the 20th century music scene. In fact, it is likely that neither Bread nor other bands that preceded or followed it could have made their mark if it weren’t for Les.
He brought a lot of clever innovations and improvements to the music world, including multi track and echo effects, which have been adapted and used not only by himself in his early recordings with wife Mary Ford, but by many other renowned musicians as well.
But Les’s best-known invention is arguably the solid-body electric guitar, which he originally designed for the Gibson music company in the early 1950s. That instrument had become one of the most widely used in the music industry and has been at the heart of the rock’n’roll revolution. Many rock and pop legends, including the Beatles’s Paul McCartney and George Harrison, The Who’s Pete Townshend, Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page, Rolling Stones’ Keith Richard, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Marley, Eric Clapton, Eddie van Halen, and many others, too numerous to mention here, used Les’s guitar.
That’s a huge accomplishment for a man who once reportedly said that his first guitar came from Sears & Roebuck and cost $3.95. As he related to AARP Magazine in 2003, the whiz kid (he was 13 at the time) went on to rig up a microphone from telephone parts to get a better sound out of that guitar. Then he took the needle from his family phonograph, put it under the guitar strings and wired the contraption into two carefully spaced radio speakers, thus getting not only amplification but also a crude stereo effect.
This electronic breakthrough paved the way to many more. Today, as the world pays tribute to Les’s life and work, let’s remember that behind every great invention is a great person – in this case, a true Guitar Man.
