Archive for the ‘Music’ Category

The Steamboat, the Nutcracker and Cher Dumollet: Bon voyage and Happy Christmas

Sunday, December 25th, 2011

On Christmas day of all days, I’ve had possibly the most interesting comment ever posted on my blog with regard to the score of the Nutcracker. Jesse Kleinman has pointed out the similarity between what is normally cited as the source for the contredanse in Act 1 of Nutcracker  (Bon Voyage, Cher Dumollet) and the New England song The Steamboat Quickstep. Both songs are nominally about boats, so is the New England song a borrowing from the French song via The Nutcracker? Maybe. But as Jesse points out, “It’s possible that Steamboat originated in Scotland and went to both France and New England”.

 

 

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Trolololo sheet music for piano

Wednesday, December 21st, 2011

Before you get excited, I haven’t got it, but I have found the first page of it here.  I tried searching for the original title “я очень рад ведь я наконец возвращаюсь домой” and ноты (sheet music). The page I found came from a Russian sheet music site called true-notki.ru which has now closed.

Surely someone has published this? To any Russian music publishers out there, you must be crazy not to just get off your butts and publish this. Someone gets to my site by searching for  ’trolololo sheet music’ nearly every day.

Update on Christmas day (25/12/11): 

Just in time for Christmas, someone has put a link to the file in the comments below. There’s also, I’ve discovered, another link to the sheet music for the Trolololo song here. All not really above board, so my question remains: why doesn’t a mainstream publisher publish it on the mainstream as a digital download?  I reckon it could have made them millionaires by now.

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At last: a picture of a mirliton

Wednesday, December 21st, 2011

I can’t tell you how pleased I am about this: Here, on a site dedicated to the iconography of the bagpipe, are two pictures of mirlitons (scroll down to see them), placed as I have always suspected within the general category of kazoo-like instruments, in French termed “flûte eunuque, kazoo, mirliton ou bigophone”. ‘Danse des Bigophones’ has a certain ring, n’est-ce pas?  The pictures clearly show the the swirling stripes as they are seen in the mirliton costumes of some productions.

in case you didn’t know, I’ve been perplexed and annoyed by the term ‘Mirliton’ in The Nutcracker for years – how does this thing turn from marzipan, to reed pipes, to shepherdesses. What is a mirliton? Why do people talk about them as if we’ve all seen one (I never have). I’ve posted on mirlitons as cakes before, but I still have never seen evidence of the supposed mirliton-as-reed-pipe. My mind is finally at peace on this issue and I shall have a happier Christmas.

Update on 27th May, 2012: Here’s another  picture of a mirliton from a site about traditional instruments of the Iberian peninsula. There’s also a sound clip if you want to know what Tchaikovsky may have had in mind. Though I’m still rather convinced that the piece is a pun on Mirlitons de Pont-Audemer, as I wrote in a previous post, with a double pun lurking in the background, since pastushka (Russian for shepherdess) and pastiche (French for pastry) are so close in sound.

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IT tips #14: Use Delicious to store and access web links anywhere

Wednesday, December 14th, 2011

You might think that having a website is all about self-promotion, but the reason I got a website in the first place was to solve a particular problem: I wanted to access my favourites or ‘bookmarks’ from any computer, not just my personal one. I created a page of useful links related to my work (it’s still there, though it’s not as useful any more) so that wherever I was working, I’d just browse to that page on the web, and could feel instantly at home.

I don’t use it any more because Delicious does it much better. You create a free account, and then whenever you come across a page that you like, you store it in Delicious. You can tag the links in multiple links, search them, make notes on them, and share them, as well as seeing who else in the world has saved the same link. This is a great way to find out about more sites in your field of interest.

Delicious is just one of many ‘social bookmarking‘ sites, but I like it because it’s clean, useful,  relatively free of advertising and geared towards people who take bookmarking and research seriously.  One of the things it’s been most useful for is collecting up sites that offer free sheet music. If I didn’t occasionally return to Delicious to look at my own links, I’d forget about all the places I’ve found over the years.

 

 

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Petrushka shrovetide fair on the accordeon

Wednesday, September 7th, 2011

It’s well known that the Shrovetide Fair bit of Petrushka has many imitations of accordeon sounds and techniques in it, but this amazing performance on the accordeon  by Boban Bjelić demonstrates just how much.

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Polonaise and mazurka: the ultimate internet resource page

Friday, June 24th, 2011

This is probably the most wonderful site I’ve ever come across in the very specialised world of music for dance: a page of links to the the content of Polish Dances, the complete written works of Raymond Cwieka. Hundreds and hundreds of pages of detailed research on the mazurka and polonaise.  I can pretty much promise you that you will never, ever find another resource so large and comprehensive and informative on the topic.

The route by which I found it is interesting. I don’t know how long it’s been up there, but I’m shocked at myself for not having discovered it before, considering that I spend a lot of my life researching this subject.  I found it because I was trying to find a the original German version of Paul Nettl’s The Story of Dance Music, given that the translation is poor in parts. I searched for <”the story of dance music” german title>, and one of the links that appeared was Cwieka’s book on the polonaise (all 410 pages of it) linked to by Jason Chuang. There’s a moral here: if you want to find good resources on the net, it helps if you put in another good source as your search term, because a well-researched page will have references. If you don’t know about a subject, then it stands to reason that you’re not going to know the kinds of terms that will bring up the best sources. References are a good place to start.

The generosity of Cwieka is overwhelming. It’s all up there for you and me to read and enjoy and learn from. I’m oscillating between joy and despair, though – it’s such a great resource, but it just shows that  I don’t know shit about the polonaise really, and I know just how many hundreds of pages I am away from being well-informed.

 

 

 

 

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Music, technology & the body

Saturday, June 11th, 2011

I was intrigued by a reference to Mrs Bagot Stack’s Women’s League of Health & Beauty in a review of Michael Clark’s piece at the Tate Modern by Clement Crisp yesterday. As recondite as it sounds, the league, albeit after several changed names until the current Fitness League, is still going.  The figures are extraordinary – in 1936, the league had 166,000 members in the UK alone. This is well over ten times the current worldwide membership of the organization I work for.

As I’m currently writing a PhD proposal, and my topic is broadly speaking the way that dance teachers and dance teacher educationalists use music in dance teaching, I was fascinated by a comment by Prunella Stack in an interview in 2005 on the 75th anniversary of the league:

She cites music’s role in appealing to the “higher senses”. “Aerobics is rather mechanical and is not influenced by music, unlike our system where it is terribly important,” she says. “This artistic element is what really releases people.” [In a league of their own, The Times, 2005]

As philosophical statements about music go, that’s pretty straight-down-the-line and clear. I’d love to read that in a brochure for a ballet school, but in so much dance training, music is used as a tool for attaining technique, or to distract from effort. It’s just another technology. The more I read about The Fitness League, the less I think that Michael Clark should be offended by the comparison.

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