#WeAreOCA
The Open College of the Arts' blog
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Schubert
Music and literature
Posted: 18/03/13 03:51 |
2 Comments
This is a post from the weareoca.com archive. Information contained within it may now be out of date. It is not at all difficult to discover the inspiration of great (and sometimes not so great) literature upon composers past and present, though there are some who for instance may have been more motivated by […]
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Composers and poetry
Posted: 20/11/12 09:11 |
4 Comments
I have a problem with poetry. Unless there is a specific directive or inspired objective, a lot of a composer’s valuable creative time can be lavished on selecting suitable texts for musical settings. Much of that time is unproductive, for in several ways the poems are ‘not fit for purpose’. The primary ‘purpose’ is to […]
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The True Subtlety of Music
Posted: 17/04/12 06:43 |
18 Comments
If, as many history text books direct us to, we believe that tonality lay down and died between the great 20th century wars, then we have to resign ourselves to having lost not only a vital organ in the apparatus of the musical body without which longer term survival is unlikely, but we are also […]
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So what do the listeners make of it?
Posted: 26/02/12 02:13 |
6 Comments
A concert audience is a rather different creature now compared with what it once was, although it can give performers just as hard a time as reputedly in the 18th century. It is not unusual for a singer in an Italian opera house to receive applause and shouts of ‘encore’ which, far from being flattering, […]
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Musical interferences
Posted: 17/08/11 03:43 |
4 Comments
Why I wonder do some musicians feel it is necessary to impose their own identity on the work of the great masters? Last week the Croatian born pianist and composer Dejan Lazić presented to the Proms audience the results of his six years of work translating the violin concerto by Brahms into a piano concerto. […]
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