What Schenker, Nicholas Cook & a food processor taught me about piano fingering
By what turns out to be a happy coincidence, I managed this week to combine reading Nicholas Cook’s Beyond the Score: Music as Performance with an accident in which I…
More on the rareness of the truly triple waltz
In my last post, I said “Truly triple waltzes are an impossibility. They shouldn’t exist, and they don’t”. Less than 48 hours later, while I was playing Ich weiß nicht…
Dancing masters, music and memory
I’m thoroughly enjoying Eric McKee’s book Decorum of the minuet, delirium of the waltz: a study of dance-music relations in 3/4 time. There are books that you grow up with…
The rarity of truly triple metre
If you’ve been following this blog recently, you know that I’m a little obsessed with time signature and metre in the 18th & 19th centuries (see Compound errors and Counting…
The worst ballet class music in the world #1
A long time ago, my friend and colleague Susie Cooper and I had a lot of fun trying to think of the worst possible music for certain exercises in a…
And ANOTHER French song in the Nutcracker
Remember yesterday I said that the middle (6/8) section of Mère Gigogne in The Nutcracker just ‘had to be’ a French song? Well, I’ve found it, thanks to a post…