Len's Music Blog

Felix (entry for 10/25/240 In the last post we talked about chromaticism and how its presence in music is one of the hallmarks of the Romantic Era. One of the earliest Romantic composers was Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, who was German and non-religious Jewish on his dad’s side, and English on him mom’s. (Bartholdy was his mother’s brother’s last name.) He was born in Germany and spent much of his life there, but was also beloved in England, which he visited only a dozen or so times in his entire life, and for only a total of about two years, if you put all the short visits together, but which was the site where wrote a lot of his most famous musical compositions, including the  Elijah  oratorio, the  Fingal’s Cave  overture, and his  Symphony Number 3 , the ‘Scotch.’ Plus his most famous piece of all: the incidental music to  A Midsummer Night’s Dream , with its played-to-death ‘Wedding March.’ He was a child prodigy, starting piano lessons at age six and h...

‘Color’ in Music (entry for 10/18/2024) Before we leave the Bach family, two members of which we have talked about at some length in the last two posts, we need to talk about one more thing, only in this case it isn’t a person, it’s a  kind  of music. It’s  chromatic ism , and it was invented a long time ago, around the year 1400. What does ‘chromatic’ mean? It’s based on the Greek word  chroma , which means ‘color,’ so ‘chromatic’ simply means ‘colorful.’ But there we’re faced with a problem. How does music become colorful? In art and photography, when we talk about color vs. black-and-white, the meaning is pretty clear. But in writing or in music, it gets a little tricky. (In writing, it means that it’s more about feelings than ideas, but how does music show more feeling?) To figure out what we mean, we need to back up a bit. In an earlier post we talked about the difference between ‘whole steps’ and ‘half steps.’ We also talked about the fact that some intervals c...

Karl (entry for 10/11/24) In the last post we talked a lot about one of the most famous Classical composers of all time: Johann Sebastian Bach. Even non-musicians have heard of Bach, and actual musicians come close to idolizing him at times. But it was not always so. By the time he passed away in 1750, at age 65, he was largely forgotten. Some of his compositions had been published, but more of them, and the most important ones, were buried in a dusty room in the basement of Leipzig Cathedral, completely neglected By the year 1800, if you said the name “Bach” by itself, without specifying a first or middle name, you meant Karl Philipp Emmanuel Bach, known in the English-speaking world as C.P.E. Bach.  Karl was J.S.'s third son, and the second to survive to adulthood. For a time, he was much more famous than his father. In fact, he shared that distinction with three of his brothers and one sister, all of whom had by now eclipsed the musical memory of their dad. In the year 1835, som...

           Sebastian (entry for 10/4/24) When I was a teenager I came across a children’s book about J. S. Bach as a very young man. The story went that his father was a lawyer and expected the young Johann to follow in that same career, and that the boy was interested in music and refused to cooperate in his dad’s plan. Instead, in the daytime, he would pretend to study the subjects a lawyer was expected to know, and then, at night, he would stay up all night studying music, even silently playing the harpsichord keyboard to avoid waking the rest of the household. It made for an interesting story. Only one problem: Not a word of it was true! Baby Sebastian, as he was known, was born into a musical family, and into a huge extended musical family. Of the hundred or so local people named Bach at that time, at least thirty of them were accomplished musicians, and, of those, a dozen or so were well-known composers. Veit Bach, Sebastian’s paternal great-great gra...