Musical surprises #4: There’s a cuckoo in the Nutcracker
Well, a toy one anyway. If you look at the instrumentation for The Nutcracker over at www.tchaikovsky-research.org (possibly the best resource about any composer on the web), you’ll see that…
Musical suprises #3: Tico-Tico is not a rumba
If you’re thinking ‘I never thought Tico Tico was a rhumba’, then don’t read on. But in the rather strange world I work in, it’s very common for dance teachers…
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…