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Don’t Be Scared, It’s Only Music
If you don’t live in a museum and you love music, you may have heard of the music of Danish composer Hans Abrahamsen – born 1952. If you do live in Bach’s time and only ever expose your ears to
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Gaspard De La Nuit: Ravel’s Dark Fantasy
“Gaspard has been a devil in coming, but that is only logical since it was he who is the author of the poems.” – Maurice Ravel Considered to be one of the most fearsomely difficult pieces in the pianist’s repertoire
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Is Playing in an Ensemble Your Dream? 12 Pointers for the Novice
Some of the greatest gems of music are written for small ensemble. But in chamber music you don’t have a conductor to tell you what to do, nor are you entirely on your own to make musical decisions. How does
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Could Music Disappear One Day?
This is the Italian composer Giovanni Sollima playing one of his creations. What is it about music that moves us so? Where else can you see a person react to anything like this, except through music? Look at how this
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Schumann’s Final Piece: The ‘Ghost’ Variations
There’s a special poignancy to Schumann’s Geistervariationen (“Ghost Variations”). Dedicated to his beloved wife Clara, they were written just a few weeks before he was committed to a lunatic asylum at Endenich, and were the last piece of music he
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My Two Encounters with Pianist Jörg Demus
It was on a day in April—it was actually the 17th of April—when someone told me that Jörg Demus had passed away. In the Internet era, news spreads like wildfire. But the source of all this commotion came from Wikipedia,
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Pianists Behaving Badly
‘From the outset all manner of unacceptable behaviour, whether manifesting itself emotionally in false rapture or facial grimace, the stamping of feet to mark the rhythm, accompanied by an all-embracing unsightly body movement, the shaking and nodding of the head
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Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno (1903-1969)
“Behind Every Work of Art Lies an Uncommitted Crime”
Some consider him one of the most important philosophers and social critics in Germany after World War II, while others declare him to be “preposterously over-rated.” Whatever the case may be, Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno (1903-1969) was a leading member of
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