Le mystère des voix Bulgares

The mystery of Bulgarian voices! Again, the magic of a capella voices -- here a woman's chorus singing "Sableyalo Mi Agontze" -- "The Bleating Lamb", just one of the songs from their album. "Mountain music" is one word that could be used to describing the eery and sometimes harsh voices in this traditional music, so beautifully arranged for chorus.

NOTE: If you hear electronice music in the background, it's from my entry of December 9, Karlheinz Stockhausen. Just scroll down to that player and click on the "Pause" button. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Layers of Memory

Recently, my best friend from high school shared a touching story with me: her elderly mother, who is in her 90's and has advanced Alzheimer's disease, rarely speaks anymore and rarely interacts with people. But, the other day, my friend sat down at the piano and played Christmas carols. Her mother joined in, singing all the words to about ten carols! It seems that Christmas carols must be contained in the earliest layers of our brains. As Alzheimer's rages through the brain, the Christmas carols might be the last thing to go.

Humor in Music!

There are many kinds of humor in music. For a long time I have been interested in finding representations of laughter in music. Even in Mozart, you can find laughter! It goes like this: high, short notes, descending, sometimes cascading up and down.

Then, there are the obvious ones like Victor Borge, Spike Jones, P.D.Q. Bach, and the Hoffnung Festival. Victor Borge is my particular favorite. He had many musical ways of making people laugh: first, by mocking the ways that people play their instruments -- for example, he would fall off the piano bench or he would instruct the singer as she rested her hand in the curve of the grand piano, "Don't touch the piano, please." The second way he used humor was to make new arrangements of familiar music -- changing wildly into a new key all of a sudden or starting with one piano piece and changing into a pop tune suddenly.

Here is a great rendition of Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody.

Karlheinz Stockhausen

The great German composer has died. He was 79 years old. I heard his music in the early 1970's and I loved all the new sounds. I especially liked Gesang der Junglinge. I loved the sound of the German language. I could even understand many of the words. This music created a bleak and mysterious landscape for my mind.

Stockhausen had a great influence on many other composers and even on rock muicians.

Tribute Band?

Hey, you've heard of tribute bands! But, have you heard of a Tribute String Quartet? Yes, there's a whole GENRE of this!! Who knew! Here is one that I loved so much that I bought it from iTunes and I can share it with you. It's the "Vitamin Quartet" playing "Lacryomosa" as a tribute to the band Evanascence. The band, Evanascence got Lacryomosa from Mozart's Requiem! As a member of a string quartet, I found this extremely interesting. I love this sound!

Here is just one source of String Quartet tributes!

Here is a photo of my quartet. I wish I could find this arrangement so we could play it.

Taiko Drumming!

Those who know me know that I am a Japanophile! And, I especially love taiko drumming! I first saw this some years ago at the Ginza Holiday festival at a temple in Chicago and the magnificent sounds and rhythms of the drums blew me away!

It was so very thoughtful of my daughter to take me to the TAO Wadaiko concert for my birthday! We had a great time!