Month: April 2020

Wednesday cheer

On By Kris FaatzIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

Welcome! 🙂 This blog features short piano pieces I’ve recorded at home. It began as a project for the quarantine, which initially was going to be a couple of weeks. I’m determined to keep it going as long as needed, in hopes that if you need a mental break during these tough times, you can find one here.

If you’re new to the series and would like to check out earlier posts, the first one is here. New posts go up on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Sundays. I’m also doing a Storytelling and Sound project through Facebook, which you can check out by following me at Kris Faatz, Writer.

Today’s post continues my Beethoven Bagatelle explorations. This piece caught my attention when I was reading through some of the Bagatelles I’d never studied before…looking for pieces short and straightforward enough to pick up quickly and record for the blog.

This one starts out sounding charmingly simple, a lilting country tune. Very soon, though, Beethoven shifts the harmony into a totally different place. The simplicity of the tune never changes, but that sudden twist gives the piece a whole new character.

It’s a delightful little piece. As you listen, if you’d like, see if it conjures up any particular story for you. As always, you’re welcome to share your thoughts and responses to the music in the comments.

Make sure to subscribe to the blog if you’d like a daily dose of music, and visit back soon!

Tip Jar (no pressure!):

If you’re enjoying the blog and would like to help support it, please consider clicking on the link below to leave me a tip. You’ll choose your own payment amount and pay securely through PayPal’s platform. As always, thanks for visiting!

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Monday smile

On By Kris FaatzIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

Welcome! 🙂 This blog features daily short piano pieces I’ve recorded at home. It began as a project for the quarantine, which initially was going to be a couple of weeks. I’m determined to keep it going as long as needed, in hopes that if you need a mental break during these tough times, you can find one here. If you’re new to the series and would like to check out earlier posts, the first one is here.

Today I’m continuing with my Beethoven Bagatelle streak. This piece is a favorite bagatelle, which I first learned somewhere around thirty years ago (yikes). It’s warm and charming and full of the humor that comes through often in Beethoven’s music. We tend to think of Beethoven as angsty and angry at life, which he often was, but he also loved jokes, puns, wordplay and music-play. This piece showcases his lighter side.

The ending, especially, is classic Beethoven. After the drama and contrast of everything that came before, he decides to sit on one chord for the whole last line of the piece. He milks that last chord for everything it’s worth while he lets the music tiptoe away until it disappears. Playing it, I couldn’t help smiling. I could just imagine Beethoven laughing as he wrote it.

As you listen, if you’d like, see if this “miniature” piece with all its contrasts conjures up any particular story for you. See if it sparks your imagination about the man who wrote it. As always, you’re welcome to share your thoughts and responses to the music in the comments.

Make sure to subscribe to the blog if you’d like a daily dose of music, and visit back soon!

Tip Jar (no pressure!):

If you’re enjoying the blog and would like to help support it, please consider clicking on the link below to leave me a tip. You’ll choose your own payment amount and pay securely through PayPal’s platform. As always, thanks for visiting!

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Sunday in the Renaissance

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Today’s post is a re-post of a piece I put up just a few days ago. I think this particular music deserves some more love. 😉 It’s also perfect for a quiet Sunday morning. 

Welcome! 🙂 This blog features daily short piano pieces I’ve recorded at home. It began as a project for the quarantine, which initially was going to be a couple of weeks. I’m determined to keep it going as long as needed, in hopes that if you need a mental break during these tough times, you can find one here. If you’re new to the series and would like to check out earlier posts, the first one is here.

Today’s piece is one of my favorites by English Renaissance composer William Byrd (1540-1623). This is one of Byrd’s folk-tune settings, in which he took a popular melody of the time and wrote a series of variations on it for solo keyboard. The song, called “The Maiden’s Song,” is gentle and contemplative, a little bittersweet. Byrd’s variations on it start out simple, and then get gradually more intricate before he returns to the original theme at the end.

I’ve posted before about Byrd’s harmonies, which can sound unusual to our ears as modern listeners because they’re based on an older tonal system. You can read more about the seven “modes” of Medieval and Renaissance music in this post. “The Maiden’s Song” also has an unusual feel to it, harmonically, because it’s in one of the modes that we don’t run into much anymore. This mode is called Mixolydian, very similar to major but with one note that sounds a little “off.” (If you have a piano or keyboard, you can hear the Mixolydian mode by playing from one G to the next G, one note at a time, using only the white keys. As you see, it’s a lot like G Major except for the F natural instead of F sharp.) Mixolydian was one of the most commonly used modes in folk music, and to our modern ears, it gives this particular piece its particularly Renaissance flavor.

As you listen, let the music take you back in history to a quieter time, with less ambient noise, clearer skies, and fresher air. See if this piece conjures up any particular images or ideas for you. As always, you’re welcome to share your thoughts and responses to the music in the comments.

Make sure to subscribe to the blog if you’d like a daily dose of music, and visit back soon!

Tip Jar (no pressure!):

If you’re enjoying the blog and would like to help support it, please consider clicking on the link below to leave me a tip. You’ll choose your own payment amount and pay securely through PayPal’s platform. As always, thanks for visiting!

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Folktale in Music

On By Kris FaatzIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

Welcome! 🙂 This blog features daily short piano pieces I’ve recorded at home. It began as a project for the quarantine, which initially was going to be a couple of weeks. I’m determined to keep it going as long as needed, in hopes that if you need a mental break during these tough times, you can find one here. If you’re new to the series and would like to check out earlier posts, the first one is here.

I went to the wayback machine for today’s piece: this is one I actually recorded a couple of years ago. It’s the second movement from a short suite called Tales of the Old Grandmother, by Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953).

Prokofiev witnessed the Communist Revolution in Russia, and like many artists, found himself trying to maintain an especially tough balance. Russian artists were revered as showcasing all that was right about Communism for the world to admire. At the same time, as free thinkers and free speakers, artists were considered potentially dangerous and subversive, enemies to the new Communist state.

Prokofiev was in a particularly difficult position because he traveled outside Russia as a young man, spending time in Europe and the United States with the sanction and blessing – initially – of the Communist government. When he came back to Russia in the 1930s, though, he found that his time in the West made him particularly suspect to Stalin’s regime. He spent the rest of his life in a strange and often dangerous limbo, both an ambassador of the State and a potential traitor to it.

Tales of the Old Grandmother is a short, technically simple, but evocative suite for solo piano. Prokofiev is “storytelling” here in a literal sense, capturing the flavor of mysterious and magical folk tales in his writing.

The second movement, featured in today’s video, is my favorite of the suite’s four movements. It’s quite short, less than two minutes, but lovely and bittersweet. For me, it always conjures up the summer when I first learned the suite, some twenty-five years ago. As you listen, if you’d like, see if it calls up any particular story in your mind, or perhaps a favorite memory. As always, you’re welcome to share your thoughts and responses to the music in the comments.

Make sure to subscribe to the blog if you’d like a daily dose of music, and visit back soon!

Tip Jar (no pressure!):

If you’re enjoying the blog and would like to help support it, please consider clicking on the link below to leave me a tip. You’ll choose your own payment amount and pay securely through PayPal’s platform. As always, thanks for visiting!

https://www.paypal.com/paypalme2/krisfaatz

Friday Bagatelle

On By Kris FaatzIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

Welcome! 🙂 This blog features daily short piano pieces I’ve recorded at home. It began as a project for the quarantine, which initially was going to be a couple of weeks. I’m determined to keep it going as long as needed, in hopes that if you need a mental break during these tough times, you can find one here. If you’re new to the series and would like to check out earlier posts, the first one is here.

Today’s piece is one of my favorite short works by Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827). This is one of a set of Bagatelles he wrote late in his compositional life. Beethoven, as I’ve written about before here on the blog, was an innovator who single-handedly changed the course of music history.

When we think of Beethoven, we might think mostly about his heroic, passionate style in music like the Ninth Symphony, which is a huge-scale piece of music, both in length and in terms of the number of performers it needs. Beethoven was definitely interested in expanding musical forms, especially in the middle and late periods of his career. But he was also interested in miniatures. His Bagatelles, which he wrote at various points during his compositional life, showcase that side of him.

Today’s Bagatelle is a lovely, lyrical little piece. Its gentle harmonies sound sweet and wistful. As you listen, see if the music conjures up any particular image or story for you. As always, you’re welcome to share your thoughts and responses to the music in the comments.

Make sure to subscribe to the blog if you’d like a daily dose of music, and visit back soon!

Tip Jar (no pressure!):

If you’re enjoying the blog and would like to help support it, please consider clicking on the link below to leave me a tip. You’ll choose your own payment amount and pay securely through PayPal’s platform. As always, thanks for visiting!

https://www.paypal.com/paypalme2/krisfaatz

The Maiden’s Song

On By Kris FaatzIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

Welcome! 🙂 I hope the daily music posts here on the blog are giving you a boost, in these strange and unsettling times. If you’re new to the series and would like to check out earlier posts, you’ll find the first one here.

Today’s piece is one of my favorites by English Renaissance composer William Byrd (1540-1623). This is one of Byrd’s folk-tune settings, in which he took a popular melody of the time and wrote a series of variations on it for solo keyboard. The song, called “The Maiden’s Song,” is gentle and contemplative, a little bittersweet. Byrd’s variations on it start out simple, and then get gradually more intricate before he returns to the original theme at the end.

I’ve posted before about Byrd’s harmonies, which can sound unusual to our ears as modern listeners because they’re based on an older tonal system. You can read more about the seven “modes” of Medieval and Renaissance music in this post. “The Maiden’s Song” also has an unusual feel to it, harmonically, because it’s in one of the modes that we don’t run into much anymore. This mode is called Mixolydian, very similar to major but with one note that sounds a little “off.” (If you have a piano or keyboard, you can hear the Mixolydian mode by playing from one G to the next G, one note at a time, using only the white keys. As you see, it’s a lot like G Major except for the F natural instead of F sharp.) Mixolydian was one of the most commonly used modes in folk music, and to our modern ears, it gives this particular piece its particularly Renaissance flavor.

As you listen, let the music take you back in history to a quieter time, with less ambient noise, clearer skies, and fresher air. See if this piece conjures up any particular images or ideas for you. As always, you’re welcome to share your thoughts and responses to the music in the comments.

Make sure to subscribe to the blog if you’d like a daily dose of music, and visit back soon!

Tip Jar (no pressure!):

If you’re enjoying the blog and would like to help support it, please consider clicking on the link below to leave me a tip. You’ll choose your own payment amount and pay securely through PayPal’s platform. As always, thanks for visiting!

https://www.paypal.com/paypalme2/krisfaatz

 

Midweek Bagatelles

On By Kris FaatzIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

Welcome! 🙂 I hope the daily music posts here on the blog are giving you a boost, in these strange and unsettling times. If you’re new to the series and would like to check out earlier posts, you’ll find the first one here.

Today’s post features two short Bagatelles by Ludwig van Beethoven. As I talked about in this post, Bagatelles are a “miniature” musical form that Beethoven was interested in throughout his life. While in other areas, like symphonies, concerti, and piano sonatas, Beethoven was expanding the scope of music, writing bigger and more complex pieces than anyone else had written before, he also remained fascinated by musical microcosms.

Both of today’s Bagatelles come from his Op. 119 set, which he wrote late in life. They’re both very short, just over a minute. They’re striking, though, in that the harmonies Beethoven uses belong much more to the Romantic era than the Classical era in which Beethoven was trained. These could be pieces written by composers of the next generation. We can see Beethoven breaking with the traditions of his own time period even in these very small works.

I learned and recorded both of these yesterday afternoon, so the recordings aren’t quite perfect. 😉 They do give a taste, though, of the changes Beethoven was making in the way music was written, and they give the flavor of these charming little pieces.

As always, you’re welcome to share your thoughts and responses to the music in the comments. Make sure to subscribe to the blog if you’d like a daily dose of music, and visit back soon!

Tip Jar (no pressure!):

If you’re enjoying the blog and would like to help support it, please consider clicking on the link below to leave me a tip. You’ll choose your own payment amount and pay securely through PayPal’s platform. As always, thanks for visiting!

https://www.paypal.com/paypalme2/krisfaatz

 

Re-post: One Small Sonata

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Welcome! 🙂 I hope the daily music posts here on the blog are giving you a boost, in these strange and unsettling times. If you’re new to the series and would like to check out earlier posts, you’ll find the first one here.

Note: the content of this post originally appeared on March 26. New pieces coming soon.

Today’s piece is by Franz Josef Haydn, who, along with Mozart, was one of the big names of the Classical era in music history (1750-1825ish).

In light of the uncharted territory so many of us live in now, under quarantine and without any certainty about when we’ll get back to some kind of recognizable normal, it seemed like a good idea to share some straightforwardly bright music today. Haydn’s style is light, elegant, and full of cheerfulness and humor, especially in this particular piece.

The whole sonata, in four movements, takes about three minutes. It has a dancelike feel throughout, and right now, is a good companion for the spring that’s arriving in spite of all the dark times we’re going through.

As you listen, see if the music evokes any particular place or scenery for you. Maybe imagine somewhere in the outdoors, fields or woods or beside water. As always, you’re welcome to share your thoughts and responses to the music in the comments.

Make sure to subscribe to the blog if you’d like a daily dose of music, and visit back soon!

Tip Jar (no pressure!):

If you’re enjoying the blog and would like to help support it, please consider clicking on the link below to leave me a tip. You’ll choose your own payment amount and pay securely through PayPal’s platform. As always, thanks for visiting!

https://www.paypal.com/paypalme2/krisfaatz

Monday Beethoven

On By Kris FaatzIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

Welcome! 🙂 I hope the daily music posts here on the blog are giving you a boost, in these strange and unsettling times. If you’re new to the series and would like to check out earlier posts, you’ll find the first one here.

Today’s piece continues an exploration of a collection I started looking at a couple of days ago: Ludwig van Beethoven’s Bagatelles. As I mentioned in this post, we know Beethoven as an innovator who changed the course of music history, especially expanding musical forms and diving into drama and passionate expression that other composers of his generation hadn’t considered.

The Bagatelles, though, are miniatures. In them, we hear a lot of the elegance and charm of more “typical” Classical Era writing…although there are still some surprising Beethoven-esque twists. We’ll see that especially in a couple of other Bagatelles I’ll be posting soon.

Today’s piece is gentle and conversational. You’ll hear how the right hand starts with the tune, and how later in the piece, the left hand takes it over as if the hands are having a dialogue. As you listen, if you’d like, think about what this musical “conversation” might be about. As always, you’re welcome to share your thoughts and responses to the music in the comments.

Make sure to subscribe to the blog if you’d like a daily dose of music, and visit back soon!

Tip Jar (no pressure!):

If you’re enjoying the blog and would like to help support it, please consider clicking on the link below to leave me a tip. You’ll choose your own payment amount and pay securely through PayPal’s platform. As always, thanks for visiting!

https://www.paypal.com/paypalme2/krisfaatz

Sunday Song

On By Kris FaatzIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

Welcome! 🙂 I hope the daily music posts here on the blog are giving you a boost, in these strange and unsettling times. If you’re new to the series and would like to check out earlier posts, you’ll find the first one here.

Today I’m reposting a favorite Song without Words by Felix Mendelssohn. I’ll keep the intro short, since (once again) I’m a bit late posting this today. As you listen, though, I invite you to think about what “story” Mendelssohn is telling in this piece. If it had a text and a singer, what would the text be about? How does it speak to you?

As always, you’re welcome to share your thoughts and responses to the music in the comments. Make sure to subscribe to the blog if you’d like a daily dose of music, and visit back soon!

Tip Jar (no pressure!):

If you’re enjoying the blog and would like to help support it, please consider clicking on the link below to leave me a tip. You’ll choose your own payment amount and pay securely through PayPal’s platform. As always, thanks for visiting!

https://www.paypal.com/paypalme2/krisfaatz