Musician's Life @musiclover-16-12-13 - Tumblr Blog

Herbert von Karajan

He’s such a inspiration to me ✨

A portrait I made of him 🎶✨

Music for a lifetime❤️

#herbert von karajan #musician #music #classical music #orchestra #classical musician #classical pianist #pianist #kawai piano #Piano #best conductor #conductor #musicians

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Herbert Von Karajan

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gouldblogger

GLENN GOULD chatting with HERBERT VON KARAJAN on his Berlin Philharmonic debut performance of Beethoven’s Concerto No. 3, May 24, 1957

Note on context, from Karajan's website:

Gould and Karajan seemed to be an unlikely couple for the 1950s public. Gould was seen as an opponent of Karajan’s sound and repertoire but both men admired each other greatly. They met for the first time for three concerts with Beethoven’s 3rd piano concerto in 1957 during Gould’s triumphant Europe tour. In 1982, after Gould's death, Karajan writes of Gould:

When I heard him play, I had a feeling that I was myself playing because his music-making appealed so exactly to my own musical sense.

mikrokosmos

Schoenberg - Verklärte Nacht for string orchestra

Transfigured Night. I’m going to be sappy and personal and say I’ve been going through a bit of a rough time, why I haven’t been posting every day. And in this depression I haven’t been listening to much music, but I did get a bit of a heightened interest for Schoenberg again. I was moved by the passion in his second quartet and so I decided to listen to his earlier chamber work Transfigured Night, since it’s been a while. This piece is basically a tone poem and was written as a string sextet, based off of a poem about a man and a woman, lovers, who are in the woods one night. The woman admits she had an affair with another man and is pregnant, and she is ashamed. But the man forgives her, and admits his love to her and they both commit to each other despite their flaws, and somehow this version of love, this unexpected grace, causes the fetus to become his child. It’s an odd poem, but symbolically it emphasizes a strong love, one of forgiveness and acceptance. That is the kind of love I strive for. The music is basically in two parts, the first part is very anxious and dramatic, the second part reworks the main theme in a major key and is one of reconciliation. I think it is a gorgeous night piece, especially this arrangement for string orchestra. Even when earlier Schoenberg is at his most conventional and Romantic, he STILL faced critics who didn’t like his harmonies. The style is post-Wagnerian chromaticism, and at one point, there is emphasis on an inverted ninth chord. The Vienna Music Society didn’t have such a chord categorized in their writings or whatever so they said it wasn’t allowed. Schoenberg laughed at the idea, and remarked “the work can’t be preformed since one cannot perform that which does not exist”. It’s humorous to see how historically there was so much emphasis on the musicology, what was or wasn’t allowed in writing, instead of letting the music itself pour out its expression through whatever means.

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a little too late for his 9/13 birthday, but listened to this driving back home at midnight, maybe the most glorious music for string orchestra

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Circular song

Medieval music books, with their merry notes jumping off the page, are a pleasure to look at. This sensational page from the 14th century adds to this experience in a most unusual manner. It presents a well-known song, the French ballade titled En la maison Dedalus (In the house of Dedalus), be it that the scribe decided to write both music and lyrics in a circular form. There is reason behind this madness. The maze created by music and words locks up the main character of the song, the mythological figure Ariadne, who is a prisoner in the house of Daedalus - she is represented by the red dot. The book contains treatises on music theory, notation, tuning and chant. In other words, it was meant for experts readers. The beholder likely enjoyed the challenge of singing a circular song (did he or she spin the book around?) and how it held its subject hostage in the merriest of ways.

Pic: Berkeley, Music Library, MS 744 (made in Paris in 1375). More about the manuscript here, including more unusual images. This is a study of the book (the ballade is discussed at p. 14).