Reliable Biography
Posted: 29/04/14 11:36 | 9 Comments
We’re publishing today a final post by Patric Standford, who sadly died last week.
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Patric
Necessary conductors
Posted: 25/02/14 08:13 | 1 Comments
It is too easy to ask if an orchestral conductor is really necessary…
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Musical meanings
Posted: 21/01/14 08:50 | 7 Comments
If music were a language, then surely translation would be possible…
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Balancing new and old
Posted: 05/01/14 02:44 | 6 Comments
It seems both interesting and curious that whilst our classical concert programmes are packed tightly with music written in the 18th and 19th centuries, the popular literary diet is not! We balance the occasional new pieces in our regular concert repertoire with quite an excess of older pieces from that period. Yet our interest in […]
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School songs
Posted: 25/11/13 12:37 | 4 Comments
Among recent CDs sent to me for review was an impressive 3-CD set of recordings by Hungarian children’s choirs of educational choral music written by the great Hungarian composer Zoltán Kodály who died in 1967 at the age of 85. Kodály was convinced that group singing rather than instrumental accomplishments should be at the heart […]
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Writer's Block
Posted: 23/10/13 04:22 | 3 Comments
The inability to move on from the first exciting beginning of a piece of work is generally known as ‘writer’s block’. It is usually the failure even to begin…
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Recorders
Posted: 02/10/13 02:42 | 6 Comments
Until about a decade ago, students enrolling for the OCA musical composition course were sent a course-book, a set of cassette tapes and an inexpensive plastic descant recorder made of bakelite. These instruments – and there were many musicians who had doubts as to whether they were in fact musical instruments – had gained notable […]
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Our Proms Festival
Posted: 03/09/13 11:34 | 0 Comments
This is a post from the weareoca.com archive. Information contained within it may now be out of date. What is now known as the BBC’s ‘Proms’, is not only the UK’s largest concert festival but also the biggest of its kind in the world. It is now just passing the halfway mark. Its unique […]
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Spontaneity
Posted: 23/07/13 10:05 | 2 Comments
This is a post from the weareoca.com archive. Information contained within it may now be out of date. Eddie Braben died in May this year. He was the creator of all the words spoken by Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise in their famous TV shows from 1968 until Morecambe’s death in 1984. And that […]
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Arty Fraudsters
Posted: 19/06/13 02:02 | 0 Comments
This is a post from the weareoca.com archive. Information contained within it may now be out of date. The ‘Great Gatsby’ was a fraud. All his friends and acquaintances knew it and yet their admiration of the environment in which prosperity and high living, jazz, underworld criminality and deception was an essential component remained […]
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