Notes about Music: Blow, Blow, Thou Winter Wynde (for female duet and string trio)

Friday 21 March 2014

Blow, Blow, Thou Winter Wynde
(for female duet and string trio)

A house once owned by one of my great-great-grandfathers in the chilly

'hill-station' of Nainital, Uttarakhand State, in northern India.

Freezing storms frequently blow down from the nearby Himalayas, even in April.

Feeling chilly? Connect your device to a decent sound system or enclosed headphones and listen to my arrangement of Blow, Blow, Thou Winter Wynde. Click the orange PLAY button...

Alternatively (in particular if you are on a not-so-smartphone), you can access my recording at its original SoundCloud URL by clicking here. Either way, my mp3 file is downloadable and free.

My recording was synthesized using Sibelius 6.2 software which, unfortunately, cannot yet be persuaded to pronounce lyrics. The two voice parts are therefore only in 'vocalize' style, but you may prefer to follow the words on the score, available here on Scribd, free, downloadable, and copyright-free in the public domain. This link should open in a new window, enabling you to scroll through the music while listening.

All I ask of intending performers is that you acknowledge Peter Gore-Symes as the arranger.

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Quotations about Music...

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

- Leo Tolstoy

I consider that music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all.

- Igor Stravinsky

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

- Noel Coward

All music is folk music; I ain't never heard no horse sing a song.

- Louis Armstrong

Every mistake is a new style.

- Alhaji Ibrahim Abdulai

Give me a laundry list and I'll set it to music.

- Rossini

Anything that is too stupid to be spoken is sung.

- Voltaire

Composition is notation of distortion of what composers think they've heard before. Masterpieces are marvellous misquotations.

- Ned Rorem

The flute is not an instrument with a good moral effect. It is too exciting.

- Aristotle

Where words leave off, music begins.

- Heine

I would like to play for audiences who are not using my music to stimulate their sex organs.

- Ornette Coleman

Guitarists spend half their life tuning and the other half playing out of tune.

- Anonymous Music Historian, Chiangmai

An oboe is an ill wind that nobody blows good.

- Bennett Cerf

Only sick music makes money today.

- Friedrich Nietzche, in 1888.

The amount of money one needs is terrifying...

- Ludwig van Beethoven

Conductors must give unmistakeable and suggestive signals to the orchestra, not choreography to the audience.

- George Szell

He uses music as an accompaniment to conducting.

- Oscar Levant, on Leonard Bernstein

If anyone has conducted a Beethoven performance , and then doesn't have to go to an osteopath, then there's something wrong.

- Simon Rattle

I occasionally play works by contemporary composers, and for two reasons. First, to discourage the composer from writing any more, and secondly to remind myself how much I appreciate Beethoven.

- Jascha Heifetz

Rock is really about dick and testosterone.

- Courtney Love

The Detroit String Quartet played Brahms last night. Brahms lost.

- Bennett Cerf

I worry that the person who thought up Muzak might be thinking up something else.

- Lily Tomlin

I love Wagner, but the music I prefer is that of a cat hung up by its tail outside a window and trying to stick to the panes of glass with its claws.

- Charles Beaudelaire

Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end.

- Igor Stravinsky

Too many pieces of music finish too soon before the end.

- Peter Gore-Symes

Music rearranges your molecular structure.

- Carlos Santana

Is it not strange that sheep's guts should hale souls out of men's bodies?

- William Shakespeare

There is delight in singing, though none hear it beside the singer.

- Walter Savage Landor

The guitar's alright as a hobby, but it won't earn you any money.

- John Lennon's Aunt Mimi, who bought him his first guitar.

Interviewer: What do you think of Beethoven?

Ringo Starr: Great. Especially his poems.

I never wanted to be famous, I only wanted to be great.

- Ray Charles

Art is the signature of civilisation.

- Beverley Sills

Musical innovation is full of danger to the state, for when modes of music change, the laws of the state always change with them.

- Plato

The rhythm of jazz is against the normal psychological needs of man.

- The Peoples Music Press, Peking, China.

Critics can't even make music by rubbing their back legs together.

- Mel Brooks

Learning music by reading about it is like making love by mail.

- Isaac Stern

A musicologist is a man who can read music but can't hear it.

- Thomas Beecham

Mine was the kind of piece in which nobody knew what was going on, including the composer, the conductor, and the critics. Consequently I got pretty good reviews.

- Oscar Levant

The sign of a mature musician is knowing what not to play.

- Dizzy Gillespie

The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes - ah - that is where the art resides.

- Artur Schnabel

And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.

- Friedrich Nietzsche

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.

- Scott Adams

Classical music is the kind we keep thinking will turn into a tune.

- Kin Hubbard

An intellectual snob is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture and not think of The Lone Ranger.

- Dan Rather

Listening to a recording is like going to bed with a photograph of Marilyn Monroe.

- Otto Klemperer

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

- Edgar Wilson Nye

My music is best understood by children and animals.

- Igor Stravinsky

I hate music, especially when it's played.

- Jimmy Durante

For discords make the sweetest airs.

- Samuel Butler

I don't know anything about music. In my line you don't have to.

- Elvis Presley

There's nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself.

- Johann Sebastian Bach

Composers shouldn't think too much - it interferes with their plagiarism.

- Howard Dietz

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

- Aldous Huxley

There's no bad day that can't be overcome by listening to a barbershop quartet; this is just truth, plain and simple.

- Chuck Sigars

Never look at the trombones. You'll only encourage them.

- Richard Strauss

Opera in English is, in the main, about as sensible as baseball in Italian.

- Henry Louis Mencken

Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.

- Gilbert Keith Chesterton

Opera is when a guy gets stabbed in the back and, instead of bleeding, he sings.

- Ed Gardner

Most rock journalism is people who can't write interviewing people who can't talk for people who can't read.

- Frank Zappa

I'm saddest when I sing.

- Thomas Haynes Bayly

I haven't understood a bar of music in my life, but I have felt it.

- Igor Stravinsky

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

- Igor Stravinsky

Hurry! I never hurry. I have no time to hurry.

- Igor Stravinsky

Art is making something better without knowing what better is until you make it.

- Darby Bannard

Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.

- Laurie Anderson

Piano, /n./ A parlor utensil for subduing the impenitent visitor. It is operated by pressing the keys of the machine and the spirits of the audience.

- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

Singing is a trick to get people to listen to music for longer than they would ordinarily.

- David Byrne

People who don't like classical music just don't listen to it loud enough.

- Mark Hahn

For people who live their lives in classical music the Three Tenors is a kind of benign tumor: unsightly but not life threatening.

- Bernard Holland

Never compose anything, unless the not composing of it becomes a positive nuisance to you.

- Gustav Holst

Why is it that whenever I hear a piece of music I don't like, it's always by Villa-Lobos?

- Igor Stravinsky

Young man: Excuse me sir, how do I get to Carnegie Hall?

Pedestrian: Years of practice, my boy. Years of practice.

The majority of people who keel over dead at concerts are killed by a long trumpet passage.

- Garrison Keillor

What is best in music is not to be found in the notes.

- Gustav Mahler

Music is the sole art which evokes nostalgia for the future.

- Ned Rorem

Directions on some of Erik Satie's piano pieces...

* To be played with both hands in the pocket

* Like a nightingale with a toothache

* Light as an egg

My freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles. Whatever diminishes constraint diminishes strength. The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self of the chains that shackle the spirit.

- Igor Stravinsky, Poetics of Music.

Fun music exam answers

The lead singer in nineteenth century opera was known as a pre-Madonna.

Gregorian chant has no music, just singers singing the same lines.

Sherbet composed the Unfinished Symphony.

All female parts were sung by Castrati. We don't know exactly what they sounded like because there are no known descendants.

Young scholars have expressed their rapture for the Bronze Lullaby, the Taco Bell Cannon, Beethoven's Erotica, Tchaikovsky Cracknutter Suite, and Gershwin's Rap City in Blue.

Music sung by two people at the same time is called a duel; if they sing without music it is called Acapulco.

A virtuoso is a musician with real high morals.

Contralto is music that only low ladies sing.

Probably the most marvelous fugue was the one between the Hatfields and the McCoys.

I know what a sextet is but I'd rather not say.

Johann Sebastian Bach wrote a great many musical compositions and had a large number of children. In between he practiced on an old spinster which he kept up in his attic.

Rock Monanoff was a famous post-romantic composer of piano concerti.

Musical Terminology 101

Aformmagio: To play in a slow and cheesy manner.
AnDante: A musical composition that is infernally slow.
Angus Dei: To play with a divine beefy tone.
Antiphonal: Referring to the
prohibition of cell phones in the concert hall.
A Patella: Unaccompanied knee-slapping.
Appologgiatura: A composition, solo or instrument you regret playing.
Approximatura: A series of notes played by a performer, not intended by the composer.
Approximento: A musical entrance that is somewhere in the vicinity of the correct pitch.
Bar Line: What musicians form after a concert.
Concerto Grossissimo: A really bad performance.
Coral Symphony: (See Beethoven’s Caribbean period)
Fermantra: A note that is held over repeatedly.
Frugalhorn: A sensible, inexpensive brass instrument.
Gaul Blatter: A French horn player.
Gregorian Champ: Monk who can hold a note the longest.
Kvetchendo: Gradually getting annoyingly louder.
Mallade: A romantic song that's pretty awful.
Molto bolto : Head straight for the ending.
Opera buffa: Musical stage production in the nude.
Pre-Classical Conservatism: "If it ain't baroque,don't fix it.
Sackbutt: rear view of the 300 lb. tuba player.
Spritzicato: Plucking of a stringed instrument to produce a bright, bubbly sound.
Tempo Tantrumo: When a young band refuses to keep time with the conductor.
Tincanabulation: The irritating sounds made by extremely cheap bells.
Vesuvioso: A gradual buildup to a fiery conclusion.

Friday 21 March 2014

Blow, Blow, Thou Winter Wynde
(for female duet and string trio)

No comments:

Post a Comment

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