Hofnote Newsletter

February 2010

Hello and welcome back into the New Year. The first newsletter of this year begins by looking at endings!

In this newsletter we want to thank Jenny who asked the question, "What is a coda"

As ever we wish everyone well who is sitting an exam. Why do they call it sitting when you stand to play many instruments?

Hofnote in China

These Chinese lanterns captured the atmosphere of the Old town part of Shanghai.

Hofnote visited China. We went to the Music Exhibition in Shanghai. Shanghai was a most amazing place. and although it was very busy and very modern, (The skyscrapers are mind-blowing) we also found a bit of time to visit the older part of the city. There we were entranced with the colours and lights of the old style. Here is a picture of the Chinese lanterns which capture the feel of the old town. Everything was so colourful but it was very crowded too. Our hotel room was overlooking a school and it was interesting to see all the children doing their exercises on a morning at 8:00 and raising the flag in their grounds. There we saw some amazing instruments. Not only the traditional Chinese instruments but also some super modern pianos. Check out this piano from Schimmel!! http://www.schimmel-piano.de/images/208P-103.JPG, We also saw little pianos for very little people with full sized keys but a very shortened range. But the most memorable thing about the music exhibition was the noise!! Lots of manufacturers where demonstrating their instruments with very inspiring performances. I particularly liked an energetic duet I heard of the William Tell Overture on a Xylophone. Sometime there were several different instruments playing different tunes all at the same time. The above them all a saxophone started playing, 'Alone again, naturally!' It was great to meet music teachers there and talk with them about how students prepare for heir music exams.

Older stranger pianos

This revolutionary keyboard was invented by Paul von Janko in 1882. The advantage of the Janko keyboard is that it allows the pianist to span a wider range of notes with each hand. The keys are much smaller than on an ordinary keyboard, and stacked in tiers, and the keys arranged so that a scale is arranged over a much shorter distance than on the conventional keyboard. Janko demonstrated the keyboard himself, giving recitals of works by major composers of the 19th Century. His keyboard was, of course, developed from similar ones by earlier inventors going back to the early 18th Century. It was taken up by major piano makers such as Broadwood and Bluthner, but never caught on because players didn't want to re-learn. After all, by the time the piano was invented in the early 18th Century, the harpsichord with the kind of keyboard we all know had been around since the 14th Century. If you want to see pictures of more unusual pianos, have a look at http://www.pianoworld.com/fun/janko.htm

singing horses for a bit of fun

Here is a link to a rather fun site where you bring four singing horses together to have some fun. We thought that it would help those of you preparing for an exam to have a bit of relaxation time. And because there is only a limited number of things you can do with this it shouldn't take up too much of your time!! http://throbs.net/fun/swf.asp?hestekor.swf,

The Devil in Music

The Devil In Music You might have heard some expression like ...it's a devil of a job! That might be said by some people when they mean that the job they're talking about is really awkward. Musicians in Medieval times referred to the devil in music- but what did they mean? It has something to do with intervals (the gaps between notes), and when we think of intervals, scales and chords come to mind. Scales are made of tones and semitones, and chords have notes which are usually a third (three letter names, including first and last) apart. Of course, there's more to it than that, but that explanation at least sets the scene. You can use different notes of the scale next to each other - so form C to E is a third, C to F is a 4th and so on. If you alter the F (in the scale of C major) to F#, you get an interval called a tritone (augmented 4th) and this is the interval the Medieval musicians didn't like because it didn't sound good to them, and it didn't fit with their way of composing music, so it got the nickname diabolus in musica (the devil in music). When the system of writing in keys developed during Baroque times (1600 - 1750) the tritone became perfectly OK to use, and was actually described by the composer Georg Philipp Telemann as a "pleasant interval". It has an important role to play in the way harmony works. What was an awkward and unpleasant sounding interval for Medieval musicians became useful and perfectly acceptable in later times. Through the 19th and 20th Centuries, the tritone has been used in all sorts of music for all sorts of purposes. Composers have often used the tritone with its ancient association to portray something evil in music. Beethoven had the timpani tuned a tritone apart at the beginning of his opera Fidelio to produce a dark, brooding atmosphere. Later in the 19th Century, Camille Saint-Saëns used the tritone literally to depict the Devil in is Danse Macabre. Wagner used it in his opera Götterdämmerung. The theme tune to The Simpsons by Danny Elfmann opens with it. Here is an article you might like to have a look at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4952646.stm,(BBC News Magazine) For something a bit more technical look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritone,

Going back to the Medieval theme of our "devil in music", the idea of individual composers being the creators of the music we listen to has only really been part of our culture in the Western world for about 800 years or so. At least, the earliest writings about individual composers go back that far. An anonymous writer in the Thirteenth Century compared the composer Perotin (composer at Notre Dame Cathedral, Paris) with Leonin, who had held the same post before him. The music that survives from the Medieval era was supported by the Christian Church. The nobility of Southern France created a system of culture centred on life at court, and this produced music specialists who composed music for use at court. Much of this music was centred on the subject of love. Written music had been developing since the 9th Century in Europe, and by the 14th Century an elaborate system of notation had been developed as art music became more complex. At first, only the churches had the people with time to do this, but with the rise of the court system in Europe the aristocrats could commission music. Quite a lot of music survives from Medieval times, but as fashions and ways of playing instruments change, people forget how things sounded even a relatively short time ago. Today, we can't be sure how exactly music sounded, or whether it was at the exact pitch we have today. Instrument makers have, though, been able to make copies of instruments from early times, and there are instrumentalists who specialise in Early Music. To find out more about Early Music, you can get started at http://www.essentialsofmusic.com, To find out more about early instruments, visit http://www.diabolus.org/guide/guide-m.htm,

Arnold Schoenberg

Composer, Painter, Revoutionary?

Arnold Schoenberg is one of the pioneers of modern music style, although he is quoted as saying, " I am a conservative who was forced to become a revolutionary" An Austrian, born in 1874, his musical knowledge was self acquired as he was not from a wealthy family. He started having violin lessons when he was 8 and almost straight away started composing although he did not receive any tuition until his teens. Later he joined a local amateur string orchestra and started composing more with help from his friend. At first he wrote music in the Romantic style. He often composed music based on poems which dealt with big themes such as love and death such as the symphonic poem Pelleas and Melisande. However composers were experimenting with music which was not in any key and explored the relationships between the notes themselves. This was closely linked to the expressionist movement in painting and eventually with the abstract style. Schoenberg himself took up painting and became friends with artists such as Kandinsky. Kandinsky is interesting because he was also an accomplished musician and interestingly enough said, "Colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the harmonies, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul." The concept that colour and musical harmony are linked has a long history. It intrigued scientists such as Sir Isaac Newton. Kandinsky claimed that when he saw colour he heard music. But in his painting he used colour in a very theoretical and precise way. He associated tone with timbre (the sound's character), hue with pitch, and saturation with the volume of sound. Schoenberg went on to develop a way of composing which used all 12 chromatic notes in the octave, relating the sounds of each to their neighbouring notes while not repeating any until all twelve had been used. Called initially dodecaphonic technique because of the twelve notes, it became known as serialism. Serialism was one of the techniques which moved music from the Romantic period to the modern period. It was taken up by other composers such as Anton Webern and Alban Berg, who together with Schoenberg, became known as the second Viennese school. Schoenberg had to leave his homeland of Austria as he was a Jew and went to live in the USA. There he became friends with people in a wide range of the arts including the film industry. It is very interesting to see how music developed at this time along with the other arts, and especially painting. http://w3.rz-berlin.mpg.de/cmp/schonberg.html, http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_Schoenberg, You can listen to a programme about Schoenberg's First Chamber Symphony here http://www.www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/discoveringmusic/pip/n7rxx/,

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Hofnote in the Media

Hofnote are proud to have appeared in several publications including the Suzuki Magazine, Music Teacher and BBC Music Magazine. Below are some links to online references to Hofnote.