A Big Surprise in Beethoven

Archived Music Blog

I’ll kick off this blog by giving you a steer to one of the great surprises in classical music. No, not the sudden fortissimo chord that rocks the slow movement of Haydn’s “Surprise” Symphony (surely classical music’s best known...

Solution to a Beethoven Mystery

Archived Music Blog, Uncategorized

In my previous post (“A Big Surprise in Beethoven”) I called your attention to a phrase–the climactic one in the first movement of Beethoven’s “Harp” quartet–that has the uncanny quality of sounding at once new and familiar...

Another transformation (this one in Saint Saens)

Archived Music Blog, Uncategorized

In the last post (“Solution to a Beethoven Mystery”), we traced Beethoven’s transformation of a melodic phrase into something almost (but, crucially and wonderfully, not quite) unrecognizable. In writing about this move, I was reminded of a...

A Still More Amazing Transformation?

Archived Music Blog

First things first: last week I invited you to find the hidden quotation of the ancient “Dies Irae” hymn in Saint Saens’ Danse Macabre.  If you found it (at 2:25 in this clip) congratulations on having a damn good ear (and probably not a little...

“Inch Worm” (or The Other Kind of Counterpoint)

Archived Music Blog

When we think of counterpoint, we’re usually thinking of the “imitative” kind, where melodies (or bits of them) echo one another.  This is certainly the kind most of us encounter first, when we learn as kids to sing “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” or “Frere...

Beethoven Bites Off the End of a Bottle

Archived Music Blog

Beethoven was facing an especially tough compositional problem. He’d just brought off one of the most singular coups in music.  The problem was how to repeat it. A little context: The third movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is that mischievous descendant of...