Anyone who’s ever dozed in the middle of a concerto will appreciate the sweet sound of this news: A composer has created a piece for doing just that.
British artist Max Richter has written an eight-hour “lullaby” called “SLEEP.” The piece is not only meant to facilitate slumber, but the premiere audience is set to listen from the comfort of actual beds. The performance will take place in Berlin this September, and will last from midnight until 8 a.m.
For those who can’t make it to Germany, an eight-hour digital version was released on September 4, 2015. It will be the longest piece of classical music ever recorded and the piece itself is the longest single piece of classical music ever written. An hour-long adaptation will also be released, should someone wish to have a conscious experience engaging with the music.
“SLEEP” is scored for piano, strings, vocals and electronics. While writing it, Richter consulted with American neuroscientist David Eagleman to learn about how the brain functions during sleep.
In a teaser for the piece on YouTube, Richter says, “It’s a piece of nighttime music and I’m hoping people will actually sleep through it.” He goes on to describe it as “an eight hour place to rest.”
Any piano student can tell you that their instrument has a total of 88 keys, but that isn’t always the case. While working on transcriptions of Bach organ works for the piano, composer and pianist Ferruccio Busoni found that the standard keyboard was unsatisfactory.
In order to mimic the sound of the largest organ pipes, Busoni worked with Ludwig Bösendorfer of the eponymous piano factory to create an instrument with an extended the piano’s lower register. The result was the Model 290 Imperial, a 97-keyed piano that encompasses eight full octaves.
The first prototype was built in 1909. Its extraordinary sound inspired major composers, including Bartók, Debussy and Ravel. Several music pieces composed require an Imperial to ensure that they are played true to the original.
Garrick Ohlsson once called it the “Rolls Royce of pianos.”
We just saw – and played with – this piano Saturday at Steinway Hall in New York. Very cool, but most expensive!
Apparently, they make new recordings, if that’s the right word, each week and push them to the iPad app.
This can also be played as a stand-alone Steinway.
Renowned piano manufacturer Steinway has launched a self-playing piano. Programmed via its own iPad and linked up to play more than 1,700 different pieces of music, the Spirio high-resolution system will be offered exclusively on select Steinway grands. Able to replicate the virtuosity of the most talented of pianists, this player piano is bound to impress unsuspecting dinner guests. Spirio Model O, £77,150 (020 7487 3391, http://www.steinway.co.uk)
The pianos in Istanbul’s Dolmabahçe Palace, which hosted some 1 million people last year, draw great interest from local and foreign visitors for their magnificence and harmony with their surroundings.
National Palace guide Osman Nihat Bişgin said Dolmabahçe Palace was a Tanzimat (reform-era) palace, adding, “All features of the reform era are clearly seen in Dolmabahçe Palace. This process, which we call the Europeanization and westernization process, made western music enter Dolmabahçe Palace.”
He said the palace had a total of 12 pianos, and all of them had ornamentations suitable to the style and harmony of the palace.
Bişgin said the palace opened in 1856 and the pianos were brought there nearly at the same time. “The wives of sultans were taking piano education in the palace, particularly in the final years of the Ottomans. There are many pianos and none of them were inactive; all of them were being played,” he said.
He said most of the piano brands in the palace were Hertz, Pleyel, Gaveau and Erard, and that the number of grand pianos was less.
Speaking of a striking green piano in Zülvecheyn Hall on the upper floor of the palace, Bişgin said it was a classical Pleyel-brand palace piano.
“Since the magnificence and glory was dominant in the palace, the pianos draw our attention visually. Their sound is not very famous, but they are very important and famous visually,” he said.
Bişgin said Zülvecheyn Hall had gilded ornamentation on its white and beige ceiling, adding, “We see enormous harmony between the piano and the ceiling.”
He said the furniture in Dolmabahçe Palace was in its original place, and added, “We can say that the pianos belong to these halls. The pianos in the Zülvecheyn and Süfera halls were designed to add visual richness to halls like them. They are not generally played.”
Crystal piano and chair in the Glass Kiosk
As for the rare crystal piano in the Glass Kiosk, Bişgin said the following: “The Glass Kiosk is a big venue hidden behind the walls of the palace. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk greeted the public in this place. It is like a winter garden surrounded with glass. In harmony with this kiosk, there is a crystal piano. It is a Paris-made Gaveau piano. Its chair is crystal, too.”
Another piano in the palace is a plain black German-made Steinway. Bişgin said its sound was very strong and it was very valuable.
“It was produced as a Hamburg Steinway in 1912. Then the factory moved to the U.S. Accordingly, there were only five Steinway pianos made in Germany. This is one of them. Its estimated price is 200,000 euros. It also has the emblem of the sultan Abdulmecid,” Bişgin added.
Speaking of the piano, which was used during the acceptance of ambassadors in the Süfera Hall, Bişgin said, “Süfera is the plural of the word sefir [ambassador]. This hall was created to address foreigners. The furniture is gold-plated; the ceiling is the same. There is a boulle-work piano here to show the beauty of metal and gold. This piano is wonderful for decoration.”
There’s more to a song than meets the ear, as Neil deGrasse Tyson finds out when he interviews singer/songwriter/producer Josh Groban. Josh shares how he got started playing his family’s electronic Casio piano while he was still in diapers, and whether he was a science geek in school.
In studio, concert pianist and MIT Lecturer in Music, Elaine Kwon, and co-host Chuck Nice add their voices to the chorus to help us hear the science woven into the songs. You’ll learn how artists breathe life into their music, and about the qualitative difference between human generated and automated music.
Explore the importance of the acoustics of a performance space, the effect music has on people, the difference between melody and harmony, the ranges the human voice is capable of, and which was more important, Charlie Parker’s personal style or his sax.
Plus, Neil and Josh discuss “acoustic panty removers”, Chuck admits to singing first soprano in his church choir, and we find out whether Rachmaninoff really had “big hands” and what rubato means.
Renowned pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim has unveiled a new type of piano, which he says is a “sound alternative” to the standard concert grand piano that has not undergone much change over a century.
Barenboim, 72, launched the instrument at the Royal Festival Hall here on Tuesday, in advance of his Schubert recital series.
Declaring the new piano a “sound alternative”, Barenboim said: “I’ve fallen in love with it and I want to spend as much time with it as possible.”
The exterior of the new piano looks much the same as any other modern concert grand piano, but inside, there are some dramatic differences, The Guardian reported.
Designed by the Belgian instrument-maker Chris Maene, the Barenboim has straight parallel strings instead of the diagonal-crossed ones of a contemporary piano. The wooden soundboard veins go in different directions. The bridges, ribs and bracings are specially designed and the hammers and strings have been repositioned.
Barenboim, currently heading Berlin’s flagship opera house, the State Opera, said he intended to perform the entire series on the new piano.
Modern pianos have become highly standardised, with few changes to their fundamental design over the past 100 years.
They are largely cross-strung, with the bass strings crossing over the middle and treble strings in an “X” pattern, allowing the sound to be concentrated on the centre of the soundboard.
He developed his idea with Belgian instrument maker Chris Maene, with support from Steinway & Sons.
As well as the straight strings, the Barenboim-Maene piano features a double bridge and horizontal soundboard veins.
According to a press release, the piano “combines the touch, stability, and power of a modern piano with the transparent sound quality and distinguishable colour registers of more historic instruments”.
Pianist Gwendolyn Mok, who plays an 1875 straight-strung Erard piano, has said that such instruments possess superior clarity.
“If you look inside your own piano, you will notice that the strings are all crossing each other,” she told the San Francisco Examiner in 2013.
“With the straight strung piano you get distinct registral differences – almost like listening to a choir where you have the bass, tenor, alto, and soprano voices.
“It is very clear and there is no blending or homogenizing of the sound. It therefore gives you huge opportunities in experimenting with colour.”
Listening to music can help you while you’re studying for your exams.
This is 3.5 Hours of the Best Classical Music – Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Chopin – Beautiful Piano, Violin & Orchestral Masterpieces by the greatest composers of all time.
• 1638 ~ Nicolas Forme, Composer, died at the age of 71
• 1652 ~ Jacques Huyn, Composer, died at the age of 39
• 1690 ~ Giovanni Legrenzi, Italian Composer, died at the age of 63
• 1708 ~ Jacques Danican Philidor, Composer, died at the age of 51
• 1738 ~ Bonaventura Furlanetto, Composer
• 1796 ~ James S McLean patents his piano
• 1799 ~ Jacques-François-Fromental-Elie Halévy, French composer whose five-act grand opera La Juive (1835) was, with Giacomo Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots, the prototype of early French grand opera.
• 1822 ~ Joseph Joachim Raff, German composer and teacher, greatly celebrated in his lifetime but nearly forgotten in the late 20th century.
• 1822 ~ Henry Wylde, Composer
• 1840 ~ Niccolò Paganini Composer and violinist died at the age of 57. He wrote six concertos for violin.
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• 1849 ~ “Blind” Tom Bethune, Pianist and composer
• 1878 ~ Isadora Duncan, Dancer
• 1878 ~ Carlo Marsili, Composer, died at the age of 49
• 1884 ~ Bax Brod, Composer
• 1888 ~ Louis Durey, Composer
• 1891 ~ Claude Adonai Champagne, Composer
• 1900 ~ Leopold Godowsky, Jr., American musician and photographic technician primarily known as a codeveloper of Kodachrome film (1935).
• 1915 ~ Mario del Monaco, Italian opera singer famed for Verdi and Puccini
• 1928 ~ Thea Musgrave, Scottish composer, best known for her concertos operas and choral and other vocal works.
• 1929 ~ Donald Howard Keats, Composer
• 1930 ~ Eino Tamberg, Composer
• 1931 ~ Veroslav Neumann, Composer
• 1932 ~ Jeffrey Bernard, Singer
• 1935 ~ Ramsey Lewis, American jazz pianist, composer and bandleader
• 1935 ~ Elias Gistelinck, Flemish Composer
• 1939 ~ Don Williams, Country singer
• 1940 ~ Rene Koering, Composer
• 1942 ~ Priscilla Anne McLean, Composer
• 1947 ~ Liana Alexandra, Composer
• 1950 ~ Frank Sinatra made his TV debut as he appeared on NBC’s “Star-Spangled Review” with show biz legend, Bob Hope.
• 1957 ~ Siouxsie Sioux (Susan Dallion), Singer with Siouxsie and the Banshees
• 1957 ~ That’ll be the Day, by The Crickets and featuring Buddy Holly, was released by Brunswick Records. On September 14th, the tune became the most popular record in the U.S. It was the first hit for Holly and his group after two previous releases went nowhere on Decca Records in 1956.
• 1961 ~ Singer Johnny Cash turned TV actor. He appeared on the NBC drama, “The Deputy”.
• 1972 ~ “Applause” closed at the Palace Theater in New York City after 900 performances
• 1813 ~ (Wilhelm) Richard Wagner, German composer
Read quotes by and about Wagner
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Happy Birthday Wagner-Style
• 1820 ~ Alexander Ernst Fesca, Composer
• 1850 ~ Johann Schrammel, Composer
• 1852 ~ Emile Sauret, Composer
• 1865 ~ Enrique Morera, Composer
• 1879 ~ Eastwood Lane, Composer
• 1879 ~ Jean Emile Paul Cras, Composer
• 1884 ~ Alceo Toni, Composer
• 1885 ~ Julio Fonseca, Composer
• 1900 ~ Edwin S. Votey of Detroit, MI patented his pianola, a pneumatic piano player. The device could be attached to any piano. Batteries not included.
• 1914 ~ Sun Ra (Herman Blount), American jazz composer and keyboard player who led a free jazz big band known for its innovative instrumentation and the theatricality of its performances. He passed away in 1993.
• 1916 ~ Gordon Binkerd, Composer
• 1924 ~ Charles Aznavour, French chanteur and composer
• 1924 ~ Claude Andre Francois Ballif, French composer
• 1926 ~ Elaine Leighton, Drummer, played with Billie Holiday
• 1966 ~ Iva Davies (1955) Guitarist, singer with Icehouse
• 1958 ~ Wedding vows were taken by rock ’n’ roll star, Jerry Lee Lewis and his thirteen- year-old cousin, Myra.
• 1965 ~ The Beatles got their eighth consecutive number one hit as Ticket to Ride rode to the top of the singles list. The song topped the charts for one week and became their eighth consecutive number one hit.
• 1966 ~ Bruce Springsteen recorded his very first song at the age of 16, along with his band, The Castilles. It was titled, That’s What You’ll Get. The song was never released.
• 2003 ~ The final manuscript of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, which was annotated by the composer, sold at auction for $3.47 million.
Each year on May 22 we observe National Buy a Musical Instrument Day. The day is all about playing music. If you are a musician, it might be time for a new instrument. Maybe you can learn to play a second or third one. If you have never played an instrument before, National Buy A Musical Instrument Day might be the motivation you need to start.
Naturally, here at the O’Connor Music Studio, a piano, keyboard or organ is recommended but this day is for all types of instruments and is for people of all ages. Grandpa can play his ukulele while the grandkids play the drums, trombone, and flute. Together they can all make terrific music!
MaryO'Studio 