Musical surprises #2: Chopin’s mazurkas aren’t mazurkas
Chopin's "mazurkas" in fact comprise three different kinds of Polish dance in triple meter.
Musical surprises #1: La cumparsita is not a tango
Nope, you heard right. The tango that for most people defines the genre, the dance, the music, the rhythm and everything else about tango, was composed as a little march…
Advent Calendar 2009
It’s become something of a habit for me to do an ‘Advent Calendar’ of posts on music and dance topics, so this year, I’ve decided it’s going to be musical…
Burnt oranges and ballet music
I reached a point in a recipe once where I wondered whether I could really be bothered to dry-fry coriander seeds and then crush them. The person who’d written the…
Podcast: The Mighty Handful and more
In previous blogs (1, 2, 3, I’ve got very enthusiastic about the work of Marina Frolova-Walker who more than any author I know has managed to make sense of Russian…
Cinquillos, tresillos & the tango/habañera question
For all those interested in the tango/habañera question (like Wen Yang and Joni and me pictured here in Clarke Quay after our trip on the Singapore cable car, here’s a…