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La Folia, Vivaldi.
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Nino Rota - L’Harem (via 8 1/2: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
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Astor Piazzolla - Estaciones Portenas for Piano Trio: Primavera Portena - Fuga
Performed by the Artemis Quartet
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Beethoven: Symphony No. 9 in D minor op. 125 “Choral” - 2. Molto vivace (13:04)
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Il Casanova di Federico Fellini, La poupée automate - Nino Rota.
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Philippe Jaroussky “Io ti lascio” dall’Ópera “Temistocle” di J.C.Bach dall’album “La Dolce Fiamma:Forgotten castrato arias”.
“Io ti lascio” aria di Lisimaco dall’Ópera “Temistocle” di Johann Christian Bach.
Philippe Jaroussky Countertenor
Le Cercle de l’Harmonie
Jéremie Rhorer conductor
Stephen Colbert is perfection.
The Colbert Report is the only television show that would feature ballet dancing, and only Stephen Colbert would join the dancing.
Stunningly rare and impressive collection of 12 ink AMQS on a single off-white 7.75 x 9.25 sheet bearing a pencil drawing of Gustav Mahler (signed illegibly by the artist), circa early 1930s. Each composer pens from three to six measures; most also add the title, and, in some cases, additional information or sentiments. The composers represented are: Ernst Toch (from Piano Sonata, Op. 47); Paul Hindemith (String Quartet, Op. 32); Heinz Thiessen (unidentified); Max Butting (unidentified); Alexander Jemnitz (Serenade, Op. 24); Kurt Weill (“Alabama Song” from the Threepenny Opera); Alban Berg (Wozzeck; Berg also adds in German: “So that the desire, after some bars of an aria from Wozzeck is taken even more into consideration, since I am not alone in this”); Arnold Schönberg (Jacob’s Ladder, including the sung text); Edmund Meisel (the film score Symphonie einer Großstadt); Ernst Krenek (Jonny spielt auf); Philipp Jarnach (unidentified); and Fidelio Finke (unidentified). A touch of very minor wear at edges, otherwise fine condition. The confluence of factors that contribute to the importance and rarity of this item is truly remarkable. In addition to the sheer number of composers who have signed together, fully half of the signers (Schönberg, Berg, Hindemith, Weill, Krenek, and Toch) can indisputably be regarded as figures of primary importance in the history of twentieth-century music. More incredibly still, these select six have quoted from some of their best-known and most recognizable works. icollector.com
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Nicola Vicentino: “Musica prisca caput”
From the album Nicola Vicentinos Enharmonik: Musik mit 31 Tönen
Patron saint of musical eccentrics, the composer and theorist Nicola Vicentino (1511-c. 1576) is one of the most fascinating figures of the Italian renaissance. Though he authored two books of madrigals and a handful of other compositions, Vicentino was best known for the unorthodox ideas about musical scales expressed in his 1555 treatise L’antica musica ridotta alla moderna prattica (Ancient Music Adapted to Modern Practice).
Like many musicians of the time, Vicentino was obsessed with the idea of rediscovering the fabled magical power of the art that had been possessed by the ancient Greeks. Following Greek practice, Vicentino constructed scales on the basis of tetrachords, or series of intervals within the span of a perfect 4th. The Greeks recognized three types or genera of tetrachord: the diatonic, consisting of two whole tones and a semitone, the chromatic, with a major third and two semitones, and the enharmonic, made of intervals close to what we now call a major third and two quarter-tones (intervals half the size of a semitone). When all the tetrachords were put together, the result was a system of 31-tone equal temperament that could be used to approximate a form of just intonation.
Not content to rest on his theoretical laurels, in 1561 Vicentino built a novel instrument to realize his idiosyncratic musical ideals: the arcicembalo, a harpsichord constructed to produce no fewer than 31 tones in the octave. The keyboard was specially designed with three terraced levels of keys on each manual. The same year he also invented the arciorgano, a portative organconstructed along similar lines.
A modern reconstruction of Vicentino’s arcicembalo by M. Tiella
While Vicentino’s intentions were not particularly radical—he was more interested in perfecting meantone temperament than in the exploitation of microtonal intervals—his instruments nonetheless became legendary symbols of techno-musical experimentation. His ideas helped inspire not only the chromaticism of late Renaissance composers such as Gesualdo, Luzzaschi, and Monteverdi, but also the resurgent activity in microtonal music and instrument building in the 20th century.
The four-part Latin ode, “Musica prisca caput,” written in honor of Vicentino’s patron Ippolito d’Este, demonstrates neatly the three tetrachordal genera as Vicentino understood them. The three sections of this short composition are composed strictly in each of the three genera: diatonic, chromatic, and enharmonic, respectively. The text reads:
Musica prisca caput tenebris modo sustulit altis, / Dulcibus ut numeris priscis certantia factis, / Facta tua, Hyppolite, excelsum super aethera mittat.
(Ancient music has now borne its source from the nourishing shades, so that, Ippolito, it may send with sweet numbers your great deeds, in contest with ancient deeds, to a new height above the ether.)
The Latin reads “You have revealed to me the obscure and secret things of your science.”
