Category Archives: Music

Flower songs

A cycle of ten flower songs, “mixing memory and desire,” to celebrate the arrival of April. Bizet, Wagner, Parios, Chabrier, Puccini, Strauss, Britten, PiL, Schubert, Aznavour https://poetrypiano.wordpress.com/?s=flower+songs

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Listening to a last and a first

I have been listening for weeks to a very challenging new piece, the trumpet concerto HUSH (2023) by Kaija Saariaho (1952-2023). With its intricate tissues and textures, densities and dissolutions, the piece demands great concentration from the listener to unfold … Continue reading

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Listening that lates

I find this performance highly intriguing.  The piece is a piano transcription (1998) by Paul Barnes of Gandhi’s Sanskrit “Evening Song” that closes Act III of Philip Glass’s Satyagraha (1979).  While the operatic original creates a hypnotic suspension of time … Continue reading

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How a Wagnerian performance distributes the sensible and controls access to it

This is an attempt to think the performance of Richard Wagner’s operas in terms of Rancière’s aesthetics. According to Jacques Rancière, the distribution of the sensible is “a generally implicit law that defines the forms of partaking by first defining … Continue reading

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How Schubert listened to the brook’s lullaby

Franz Schubert’s lieder do not sound like poems set to music.  They sound like actualizations of musical settings.  It is as if the composer cast in notation the inner musicality of these pieces which, to his mind, were already written … Continue reading

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Piano paraphrase

What is a piano paraphrase?  Part of its seductive fluidity is that it is not a transcription (faithful rewriting), an arrangement, a piano reduction, a fantasy, a souvenir, or reminiscences yet it may contain elements of all of them. Furthermore, … Continue reading

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Participatory listening

I call “participatory” the creative listening where we are invited to contribute actively to our musical experience as opposed to sit back and absorb it.  In participatory listening we are expected to play an energetic role in the creation of … Continue reading

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What is canonical about classical music?

In a recent column entitled “Questioning the Canon,” Simon Woods, President and CEO, League of American Orchestras, argued that, in their effort for “greater inclusion,” orchestras should abandon the notion of a “classical music canon” and embrace the idea of … Continue reading

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The friend of Schubert’s winter traveler

Sometimes I think that my blog could have a single topic — the circulation and uses of this musical landmark which resonates across Western culture:  Since Dr. Pantelis Polychronidis, my “other self,” is a collaborative pianist, the question of the … Continue reading

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Rethinking operatic drama

Today’s pre-eminent opera duo, (German) Jonas Kaufmann and (Greek-German) Anja Harteros, have been inspiring us to rethink operatic drama. DON CARLO: last duet AIDA: “La Fatal Pietra” OTELLO: “Già nella notte densa” LA FORZA DEL DESTINO: act I, 3rd scene IL … Continue reading

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