Virtual Javanese Gamelan

http://www.wcsmusic.org.uk/modulegamelan.asp

Gamelan music broken down - musical contexts

Backgrounds on composers on the set works for IGCSE

Felix Mendelssohn (1809–1847)

Mendelssohn was an early Romantic composer of works including symphonies, concertos, oratorios, piano and chamber music, in addition to a number of overtures. He was a member of a wealthy German family, with a significant cultural and intellectual background. From a young age Mendelssohn received a thorough grounding in both literature and philosophy. He was not just a composer, but also a pianist, organist and conductor. He was a child prodigy, making his performing début aged just nine and writing 12 string symphonies and his first full symphony between the ages of 12 and 14. His octet, Op. 20, was written in 1825.

Mendelssohn’s Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream was written in 1826, when he was 17. Mendelssohn was familiar with Shakespeare’s plays, through the German translations of Schlegel, and at home these were read and acted by the family. In 1825 Schlegel’s widely acclaimed translations were reissued. In 1826 Mendelssohn told his sister Fanny that he was captivated by A Midsummer Night’s Dream and could not wait to translate it into music. Mendelssohn showed the first draft of the score to his friend Adolf Marx, who suggested slight changes. Mendelssohn was uncertain about the braying donkey effect, thinking it too unsubtle, but Marx persuaded him to keep it.

This overture is an example of a concert overture. Although it was inspired by Shakespeare’s play, it was not designed to be performed with it and from the start was conceived as an independent work. This is in contrast to earlier overtures, which were orchestral pieces played at the start of a performance to get the attention of the audience. Initially the material used in the overture was not related to what followed, but in the late 18th and early 19th centuries it became common for the overture to serve as an introduction to what was to follow. This could be in creating an atmosphere or anticipating specific musical events. Composers writing purely concert overtures were freed from such constraints, as they were self-sufficient orchestral works. In 1826, the concert overture was still a relatively new genre; however, there were numerous examples of overtures for Mendelssohn to look to for inspiration, not least the overtures by Beethoven (particularly Coriolanus).

Concert ove rtures were often programme music, telling a story or describing a scene, as is the case with A Midsummer Night’s Dream . The term was first used by Liszt, but it has since been found extremely useful as a way of categorising music written much earlier, including works such as Vivaldi’s Four Seasons or Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony. It is normally expected that a piece of programme music will have some kind of verbal annotation (a programme) attached to it, to explain the story that it portrays or to define what is being described. Mendelssohn was asked by the publishers Breitkopf and Härtel to supply a programmatic sketch of the overture before performances in February 1833. He was initially reluctant to do this, preferring the music to stand by itself, but outlined the main elements in a letter of 15 February 1833.

The first orchestral performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream did not take place until February 1827 in Stettin (now Szczecin in Poland). However, Mendelssohn originally created the piece as a piano duet, which

he performed with his sister, Fanny, in Berlin on 19 November 1826. The score of A Midsummer Night’s Dream was not published until 1835, as Mendelssohn wished to publish three of his concert overtures together: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage (1832) and The Hebrides (also known as Fingal’s Cave) (1830, revised 1832).

At the age of 33 Mendelssohn was asked to compose incidental music for a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the 1840s. This had been commissioned by the King of Prussia for a production at Potsdam. For his Op. 61 Mendelssohn returned to his earlier overture and many of the themes from the overture can be found in the later pieces.

Joaquin Rodrigo (1901–1999)

Blind from the age of three, Rodrigo was a Spanish composer of works including concertos for guitar, violin, cello, harp and piano, music for theatre and vocal pieces. He began his studies in Spain, but then spent a great deal of time studying in Paris, where he studied with Paul Dukas from 1927 and was encouraged by the Spanish composer Manuel de Falla. Here he also met a number of other composers including Ravel, Stravinsky and Poulenc. Despite writing several widely acclaimed pieces for guitar, Rodrigo was not a guitarist, saying that he could not ‘play four notes in a row’ on the guitar. However, he was an excellent pianist and violinist.

The Concierto de Aranjuez was composed in 1939 when Rodrigo was in exile from Spain, due to the Spanish civil war (1936–1939). It was not his first work for guitar, but the first he had written for guitar and orchestra. Rodrigo and his wife, Victoria Kamhi, met the guitarist Regino Sáinz de la Maza and the Marques de Bolarque (a music aficionado) in Paris and Rodrigo was asked to write a concerto for guitar and orchestra.

It was first performed by Regino Sáinz de la Maza in Barcelona in 1940, once the Rodrigos had returned to Spain. The Concierto de Aranjuez firmly established Rodrigo’s reputation as the leading Spanish composer of his generation and it remains his most successful work. Rodrigo’s lifelong interest in Spanish history is immediately evident in the work. It is named after the royal palace of Aranjuez, 50km south of Madrid, that had been built between the 16th and 18th centuries as the summer residence of the Spanish monarchs. Rodrigo himself said that he wanted to evoke the fragrance of the magnolias, the singing of the birds and the gushing of the fountains, found in the gardens there during the period at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century. This was the time of the reign of Charles IV and Ferdinand VII, when many Spaniards wore traditional dress and bull-fighting was in favour.

The Concierto has a distinctly Spanish flavour as Rodrigo drew on some of the traditional characteristics of Spanish folk music, especially Flamenco and Fandango .

Instruments of the Orchestra

This website is really helpful on the instruments of the orchestra.

http://www.projectgcse.co.uk/gcse_music/instruments_and_their_families

History of Mozart in a Dozen Objects

Follow the Weblink to the audio examples of the documentary. A History of Mozart in a Dozen Objects.

https://www.evernote.com/shard/s205/sh/6c77e3df-475f-4d97-b545-00da6127fdd2/b3229ea262fe1abb09b03a0a76588cd8

Click on the Link to get the whole series.

Musescore

A free composition scoring program

http://musescore.org/

Mozart - Serenade in G major, K. 525 'Eine kleine Nachtmusik' - III. Men...

Come up with a series of open ended questions you could ask about the Eine Kleine Nachtmusik of music by Mozart.