by Jeannette Fang | Apr 9, 2017 | about the music, Composers, GNPQ Blog, Jeannette, spring 2017
The hardest thing to put into words is the feelings you’ve forgotten about that only surface when listening to music. Clouded with the dust of the everyday mechanics, your brain doesn’t compute it when it hits you. So it comes to you with a roil, drifts away in...
by Jeannette Fang | Dec 26, 2016 | about the music, Composers, GNPQ Blog, Jeannette, new music education
Sometimes musical kinship between two vastly different composers isn’t readily apparent until you start practicing for a concert that you’ve programmed them on. One wouldn’t naturally find similarities between the madcap William Albright and...
by Jeannette Fang | Nov 21, 2016 | about the music, Composers, GNPQ Blog, Jeannette
In our first rehearsal yesterday of Dohnanyi’s op.26 Piano Quintet, Juliette, who was unfamiliar with the work, remarked on how nostalgic it seemed. “Was it a late composition?” Meh, more like middle period. He was 37. But I understood what she...
by Jeannette Fang | Oct 17, 2016 | about the music, Composers, GNPQ Blog, Jeannette
Richmond homeboy Edgar Allan Poe will get the spotlight this coming Sunday with a couple of very cool works that you may not know about. More than a few composers have found the visceral horror of Poe’s stories to be a source of powerful and evocative music. In...
by Jeannette Fang | Oct 3, 2016 | about the music, Composers, GNPQ Blog, Jeannette, music history
Okay, so the thing I find super cool about the pictures that inspired Mussorgsky’s composition is that they were mostly related to other works of art. Viktor Hartmann was an architect and designer in addition to being a painter, and many of his works in the...
by Jeannette Fang | Sep 26, 2016 | about the music, Composers, GNPQ Blog, Jeannette, music history
Pictures at an Exhibition is probably Mussorgsky’s most popular work, though he never had the satisfaction of knowing that. Plagued by severe depression, the composer basically drank himself to an early death at age 42, leaving many works unrevised for...
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