Category Archives: Pianists

September 1: Today in Music History

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• 1653 ~ Johann Pachelbel, German composer and organist
More information about Pachelbel

• 1887 ~ Emile Berliner filed for a patent for his invention of the lateral-cut, flat-disk gramophone. We know it better as the record player. Emile got the patent, but Thomas Edison got the notoriety for making it work and making music with his invention.

• 1854 ~ Engelbert Humperdinck, German opera composer
Read quotes by and about Humperdinck
More information about Humperdinck

• 1931 ~ Boxcar Willie (Lecil Martin), ‘The Singing Hobo’: songwriter, singer

• 1933 ~ Conway Twitty (Harold Lloyd Jenkins), Songwriter, CMA Male Vocalist of the
Year in 1975, Grammy Award-winner with Loretta Lynn, owns booking agency, music publishing company, Twitty Burgers, Twitty City theme park

• 1935 ~ Seiji Ozawa, Japanese conductor
More information about Ozawa

• 1940 ~ Dave White (Tricker), Singer, songwriter with Danny & The Juniors

• 1944 ~ Leonard Slatkin, Grammy Award-winning orchestra director of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and National Symphony Orchestra

• 1946 ~ Barry Gibb, Musician, rhythm guitar, songwriter, singer with The Bee Gees

• 1946 ~ Greg Errico, Drummer with Sly and The Family Stone

• 1955 ~ Bruce Foxton, Guitar with 100 Men and The Jam

• 1957 ~ Gloria Estefan (Gloria Maria Milagrosa Fajardo), ‘Queen of Latin Pop’, Grammy Award-winning singer

• 1960 ~ When Oscar Hammerstein II died, the musical theater lost an outstanding composer. To honor the man and his music, every New York theater turned off its lights on this night in 1960.

• 1972 ~ The O’Jays received a gold record for Back Stabbers. It was the first hit for the group from Canton, OH. The O’Jays would place nine more hits on the pop and R&B charts. Five of them were gold record winners: Love Train, I Love Music, Use ta Be My Girl, For the Love of Money and Put Your Hands Together.

• 1977 ~ Singer Debbie Harry (of Blondie) signed a recording deal with Chrysalis Records. Chrysalis bought the group’s private stock label for $500,000. With the high visibility of the former Playboy Bunny, it was difficult to think of Blondie as a band, and not just Debbie Harry.

• 1982 ~ Clifford M Curzon, England, pianist, died at the age of 75

• 2001 ~ Sil Austin, a jazz artist who recorded more than 30 albums and the Top 40 hits Slow Walk, My Mother’s Eyes, and his signature song, Danny Boy, died of prostate cancer. He was 71. Austin taught himself how to play the tenor saxophone when he was 12. Four years later, he played Danny Boy on the Ted Mack Amateur Hour, a performance that caught the attention of Mercury Records. Austin performed all over Europe and Asia, usually traveling with his wife, the Rev. Vernice Austin.

• 2023 ~ James William Buffett (December 25, 1946 – September 1, 2023) was an American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and businessman. He was best known for his music, which often portrays an “island escapism” lifestyle. Jimmy Buffett was one of the world’s richest musicians, with a net worth of $1 billion as of 2023.

Vivaldi’s Spring ~ From Piano Maestro

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vivaldi

 

Vivaldi, one of the greatest baroque composers, has a very interesting story. He ran an orphanage in the 18th century in Italy that became famous all over the western world for its musically talented children. A lot of his pieces were written for specific children in his school. Vivaldi learned the violin from his father, and was trained as a priest. He was nicknamed “the red priest” for his red hair and was apparently somewhat sure of himself, having claimed once he can compose a concerto faster than it can be copied.

Vivaldi wrote over 500 pieces, most of which are lost today. He is considered one of the greatest musical landmarks in history, having inspired many composers that followed him, including J.S.Bach and others.

Other fun facts about Vivaldi can be found here.

Vivaldi’s Spring is available on Piano Maestro, which is available to my students free of charge.

August 31: Today in Music History

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• 1834 ~ Amilcare Ponchielli, Italian composer
More information about Ponchielli

• 1903 ~ Arthur (Morton) Godfrey, Ukulele playing, TV/radio entertainer

• 1918 ~ Alan Jay Lerner, American lyricist for the musical theater
Read quotes by and about Lerner
More information about Lerner

• 1930 ~ Dudley “Big Tiny” Little Jr, American pianist on the Lawrence Welk Show

• 1939 ~ Jerry Allison, Drummer with The Crickets

• 1939 ~ Frank Sinatra recorded All or Nothing at All with the Harry James Band. The tune failed to become a hit until four years later – after Ol’ Blue Eyes had joined the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra.

• 1945 ~ Itzhak Perlman, Israeli-born American violinist, recorded with André Previn and Scott Joplin

• 1945 ~ Van Morrison, Songwriter, singer with Them

• 1955 ~ Anthony Thistlethwaite, Saxophone with The Waterboys

• 1957 ~ Glenn Tilbrook, Guitar, singer, songwriter with Squeeze

• 1959 ~ Tony DeFranco, Singer with The DeFranco Family

• 1970 ~ Debbie Gibson, Singer

• 1976 ~ A judge ruled that George Harrison was guilty of copying from the songHe’s So Fine (a 1963 Chiffons hit). The judge said that the chorus to Harrison’s My Sweet Lord was identical to He’s So Fine and it eventually (appeals went on for about five years) cost the former Beatle over half a million dollars.

• 1987 ~ This day saw the largest preorder of albums in the history of CBS Records. 2.25 million copies of Michael Jackson’s Bad album were shipped to record stores. The LP followed in the tracks of the Jackson album, Thriller, the biggest Jackson-seller of all time (35 million copies sold). The Bad album was successful but sold only 13 million copies.

• 2002 ~ Lionel Hampton, American Jazz vibraphone player and actor, died at the age of 94

• 2016 ~ Jacques Leduc, Belgian composer, died at the age of 84

August 30: Today in Music History

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today

• 1842 ~ (Victor) Alphonse Duvernoy, French pianist and composer. His works include operas, various pieces for piano and orchestra, chamber music, songs and piano music (including a set of 100 studies).

• 1853 ~ Percy Goetschius, American music teacher and critic

• 1919 ~ Kitty Wells (Muriel Ellen Deason),‘The Queen of Country Music’, Country Music Hall of Fame, married to Johnny Wright

• 1922 ~ Regina Resnik, American mezzo-soprano

• 1922 ~ The New Orleans Rhythm Kings recorded Tiger Rag, one of the most familiar ragtime jazz tunes ever. It was released on the General record label.

• 1935 ~ John Phillips, Singer with The Mamas & The Papas, actress MacKenzie Phillips’ father

• 1941 ~ John McNally, Singer, guitarist with The Searchers

• 1945 ~ Van Morrison, Irish blues-rock singer, songwriter and instrumentalist

• 1968 ~ The Beatles recorded their first songs for their own Apple label. The initial session included the big hits Revolution and Hey Jude.

• 1968 ~ The stars came out for charity as John and Yoko Lennon hosted the One on One concert in New York’s Madison Square Garden. Among the music greats appearing were Stevie Wonder and Roberta Flack. Over $250,000 was raised to aid mentally retarded children.

• 1984 ~ Beatles fans paid $271,180 dollars for memorabilia at an auction in London, England. An unpublished manuscript by John Lennon brought the largest amount – $23,056. A snare drum belonging to Ringo Starr brought $1,440.

What Age Should A Child Begin Music Lessons?

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child-piano

These days, there is much pressure for parents to begin their children in activities from an early age.  We know that children tend to pick up new skills easily and we want for them to have an opportunity to become experts at these new skills.  We also see curiosity, desire and eagerness to learn in our children and want to capitalize on that.

Music lessons are no exception.  We often get calls asking the question, “When is the best time to enroll my child in piano lessons?”  The answer to that is a tricky one, and varies for each child.  The right age for one may not be the right age for another.  Here are a few questions to ask yourself if you are considering enrolling your child in music lessons:

1.   Does my child have an attention span to sit still for chunks of time and listen to instruction?

Many teachers today are very creative in using off-bench activities during lessons and have a plethora of activities to make lessons fun and engaging.  However, the fact remains that your child will need to sit at the piano for some periods of time during the lesson.  It is important that your child have the attention span to do this.

Read more at  How do we know if children are ready to begin music lessons? « Piano Pedagogy @ The New School for Music Study.

August 28: Today in Music History

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• 1826 ~ Walter Cecil Macfarren, English pianist and composer, born in London

• 1850 ~ Wagner’s opera, Lohengrin, was performed for the first time.

• 1894 ~ Karl Böhm, Austrian conductor

• 1913 ~ Richard Tucker, American tenor
More information about Tucker

• 1924 ~ Dinah Washington, American rhythm-and-blues singer. She popularized many, many great songs, including What a Diff’rence a Day Makes, Unforgettable, and several hits with Brook Benton.

• 1925 ~ Billy (William Wayne) Grammer, Singer

• 1925 ~ Donald O’Connor, American dancer, singer and actor.

• 1931 ~ You Rascal You was recorded by Henry Allen, with the Luis Russell Band, for the Victor label.

• 1939 ~ Clem Cattini, Drummer with Tornados

• 1948 ~ Daniel Seraphine, Drummer with Chicago

• 1951 ~ Wayne Osmond, Singer with The Osmond Brothers

• 1964 ~ The Beatles appeared on the cover of LIFE magazine, only 6 months after they were first on the Ed Sullivan Show.

• 1965 ~ Shania Twain (Eilleen Regina Edwards), Grammy Award-winning singer

• 1984 ~ The Jacksons’ Victory Tour broke the record for concert ticket sales. The group surpassed the 1.1 million mark in only two months.

• 2002 ~ Kay Gardner, whose last musical work with the Bangor Symphony Orchestra memorialized the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, died of a heart attack. She was in her early 60s.
On hearing of her death, symphony officials scheduled Gardner’s work, “Lament for Thousand,” for the orchestra’s season-opening concert Oct. 13 at the Maine Center for the Arts in Orono.
Gardner was a pianist, flutist and conductor who performed in 46 states and several countries.
More than 20 years ago, she sued the Bangor Symphony, unsuccessfully, for sex discrimination after she had applied for a conducting position and learned that orchestra members had been asked how they felt about working with a female conductor.
In 2000, she was the guest conductor for a 40-member orchestra of women from the Bangor Symphony, playing a repertoire written by women.
Gardner studied music at the University of Michigan and at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. In 1972, she helped found a feminist and openly lesbian women’s band, Lavender Jane.

What Gives a Piano its Voice?

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Picture a seven-foot grand piano in a studio. The lid’s missing, so you can see all the strings. Researchers suspend a rod embedded with 32 microphones over the piano’s body.

“We played this middle C at a very soft level, a medium level, and a very loud level,” says Agnieszka Roginska, a professor in NYU’s music technology program. She says using a pianist to play middle C over and over wouldn’t be scientific. So they’re using a disklavier, a fancy player piano triggered by electronics. “So we could hit the same note, with the same velocity, thousands of times,” she says.

They’d record the piano in one spot. Then move the microphones eight inches. Record the note. Move the mics again. Record the note. Over and over and over, until they reach the back of the piano. At the end, they get “what is basically a very dense acoustical scan of the radiation pattern of the grand piano,” Roginska says.

Read the entire article here: http://www.pri.org/stories/2014-08-10/science-tries-understand-what-gives-piano-its-voice

Music and Mathematics: The Fibonacci sequence

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fibonacci-numbers

 

Life very often throws some curious coincidences my way. Just as I was preparing a presentation for architecture students at the Goa College of Architecture on ‘Architecture and Music’ and looking at the relationship of the Fibonacci sequence to music, what should appear in my newsfeed but the announcement of the famed piano firm Steinway and Sons unveiling its 600,000th piano, incorporating the iconic Fibonacci spiral in its design.

The veneer of the “Fibonacci” piano features the eponymous spiral made from six individual logs of Macassar Ebony, “creating a fluid design that represents the geometric harmony found in nature.”

In the words of designer Frank Pollaro, who spent over 6000 work-hours over four years in its creation: “Designing Steinway & Sons’ 600,000th piano was an honour and a challenge.  To me, knowing that this piano would become part of history meant that it had to be more than just a beautiful design, but also needed to visually convey a deeper message…as I considered the number 600,000, the Fibonacci spiral came to mind.  The way in which it continues to grow but stay true to its form is very much like Steinway and Sons over these many years. Combining the universal languages of music and mathematics suddenly made perfect sense.”

Mind you, 600,000 is not a number in the Fibonacci sequence; I checked. 600,000 is between the 29th and 30th numbers in the Fibonacci series, which are 514,229 and 832,040 respectively. But Pollaro was nevertheless highlighting an interesting relationship between music and mathematics.

Named after the Italian mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci (c. 1170- c. 1250) who brought the Indian-Arabic numeral system to Europe, the Fibonacci series appear in nature and in music, and finds application in architecture and in instrument design, much before the Fibonacci Steinway.

The basic ideas of the Fibonacci progression are contained in the writings of Indian scholar Pingala (300-200 BC) in his treatise on Sanskrit prosody.

The Fibonacci numbers have the following integer sequence:  0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, 377, 610, 987 and onward. Each added number is the sum of two previous numbers before it.

In nature, the Fibonacci sequence underpins phyllotaxis (arrangement of leaves on a stem), branching in trees, fruit sprouts of a pineapple among many other examples, and even the shape of the human external ear, and the cochlear apparatus of the inner ear.

It can be applied to the western musical scale as well, with the caveat that the  starting note one makes the measurement from (or the ‘root’ note) is designated as 1 and not 0. By this token, there are 13 notes in a scale through its octave. There are 8 notes in a diatonic scale (hence the top note is called an ‘oct’ave).  The 5th and 3rd notes create the basic foundation of musical chords. All these are Fibonacci numbers.

The very notes in the scale are based on natural harmonics created by ratios of frequencies. Ratios found in the first seven numbers of the Fibonacci series (0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8) are related to key frequencies of musical notes. Thus if we take an arbitrary frequency of 440 Hz, the root note has a ratio of 1/1, but the octave above it has a frequency of 880 Hz (2/1 of 440); a fifth above has a frequency of 660 Hz (3/2 of 440), and so on for other notes in the scale.

In last Sunday’s article, I had mentioned the ‘golden proportion’ or phi, which underpins the proportions of the Parthenon temple in the Acropolis in Athens, Greece.  This ‘golden ratio’ (also called the ‘golden section’, ‘golden mean’ or the ‘divine proportion’) of 1:1618 or 0.618 has influenced composition in painting and photography, prompting the notion of dividing a canvas into thirds vertically and horizontally, and to position a subject of interest ‘about one-third’ of the way across instead of in the centre.

This ‘golden ratio’ can be obtained by dividing a Fibonacci number (in the higher reaches, not the first few) by its immediate predecessor. The quotient approximates phi (φ). Thus 987/610= 1.61803, and its inverse is 0.618.

The climax or high point of many songs and other compositions is often found at the ‘phi’ (φ) point (61.8 per cent) of the work. We have seen this to be true in the first movement of

S. Bach’s G minor sonata for solo violin.

In many compositions in sonata form, the addition of a coda causes the recapitulation (the return of the original idea that started the work) to begin at the 61.8 per cent point.

The legendary violin maker Antonio Stradivari seemed to be aware of the ‘golden section’ and used it in the placement of the f-holes on his violins. The proportions of the violin conform to the ratios of ‘phi’ (φ). The spiral of a violin scroll also obeys the Fibonacci progression.

Isn’t it amazing, how the visual and aural world, indeed nature itself can all be unified by the same mathematical sequence?[NT]

From http://www.goacom.com/entertainment/28277-music-and-mathematics-the-fibonacci-sequence

August 26: Today in Music History

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• 1661 ~ Louis Couperin, composer, died

• 1813 ~ Daniel Gottlob Turk, composer, died at the age of 63

• 1873 ~ Lee DeForest, Inventor of the triode vacuum tube, possibly the most significant invention that made radio possible.

• 1894 ~ Arthur Loesser, American pianist and writer

• 1915 ~ Humphrey Searle, British composer and writer

• 1919 ~ Ronny Graham (Ronald Montcrief Stringer), Singer, actor

• 1928 ~ Peter Appleyard, British jazz vibraphonist and drummer

• 1939 ~ The radio program Arch Oboler’s Plays presented the NBC Symphony, for the first time, as the musical backdrop for the drama, This Lonely Heart.

• 1942 ~ Vic Dana, Singer

• 1949 ~ Bob Cowsill, Singer with The Cowsills

• 1957 ~ John O’Neill, Musician, guitar with That Petrol Emotion

• 1958 ~ Ralph Vaughan Williams, Composer, passed away.

• 1960 ~ Branford Marsalis, Musician, saxophone, bandleader with The Tonight Show, toured with Sting
More information about the Marsalis family

• 1967 ~ Brian Epstein passed away

• 1970 ~ Jimi Hendrix opened his recording studio in New York City. Because of its state-of-the-art 36-track recording capability, it attracted many top rock groups.

• 2000 ~ George Edmund Sandell, a noted violin and viola player, teacher and inventor died at the age of 88.
Sandell studied in New York under the viola virtuoso William Primrose and on scholarship at the Royal Swedish Conservatory in Stockholm.

Sandell moved to Los Angeles in 1938, where he played with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Pasadena and Santa Monica Symphonies.

Along with classical music, he performed pop, swing and Latin music, and played with the string sections of big band luminaries Harry James, Jimmy Dorsey and  Xavier Cugat.

Sandell also played on some of Frank Sinatra’s recordings and worked for most of the big Hollywood studios on orchestral soundtracks, including the soundtrack for the movie Citizen Kane.

In 1947, he invented the Gee-Bee, a kitchen sponge with a plastic handle for washing dishes. He sold the company to DuPont in 1953.

• 2001 ~ Alix Williamson, the classical music publicist who suggested to Baroness Maria von Trapp that she write a book about her family’s experiences, died at the age of 85.

Williamson’s suggestion resulted in the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical “The Sound of Music.”

She represented artists such as André Watts and Frederica von Stade and helped the New York Grand Opera get a citation in the Guinness Book of World Records for its performances of a complete cycle of Verdi’s operas in Central Park. Williamson also ghostwrote books.

• 2018 ~ Neil Simon died at the age of 91. He was an American playwright, screenwriter and author. He wrote more than 30 plays and nearly the same number of movie screenplays, mostly adaptations of his plays. He received more combined Oscar and Tony nominations than any other writer.