This week was fairly busy for me, and so I unfortunately didn’t have time to arrange anything new for my Representation Remixes series. However, yesterday, one of my young students helped me sort out a very simple duet for “Alexa’s Music Box” by Jean Coulthard. I want to stress how simple this duet is–I basically took the remaining notes from the piano arrangement and tweaked the octaves slightly–but simple’s better than nothing, right?
Over the past half of a year, I’ve been making a real effort to expand my music collection to reflect the composers I’ve featured in my History Hunt series (and hope to continue to feature when time and health permit!). It’s been a real challenge, though, especially with my flute music collection. There are real gaps–so much so that I recently had to apologise to one of my students for only giving her music by white men to play so far when neither of us fit that bill.
So I’ve started to do some very simple arrangements to fill in the gap a little. Normally, I keep my arrangements as a perk for members of my studio, but addressing the incredible imbalance in core flute repertoire is something I feel very strongly about. So, I’d like to make these arrangements generally available.
The first one I’ve completed is “Skipping Rope,” by Yelena Fabianovna Gnesina. It’s found in the Grade 5 Royal Conservatory of Music repertoire book; the arrangement should be suitable for flute students playing at a Grade 1/2 RCM level.
I hope you all enjoy, and please feel free to send me feedback! I don’t arrange music as often as I should, and so I could do with some constructive criticism.
One of my students asked me if I could put together a version of Katy Perry’s “Rise” for her to play. I had a bit of spare time yesterday and today, so I arranged the opening of the song for beginner piano. Any students of my studio can download the arrangement from my website while logged in.
A visual representation of tritones in relation to the twelve tones of the most common Western scale.
Even if you aren’t mathematically minded, the matrices are certainly pretty to look at! Lefferts’ diagrams become even more artistic in his followup piece, Tri-Tone Duality of Music.
Triads and how they relate to one another.
Music is beautiful even when represented with mathematical diagrams! Is anyone surprised?
Anyone who’s been following this blog for a while will probably have figured out by now that I love covers. I can’t get enough of hearing people’s interpretations of well-known songs. I love witnessing the hard work they put into their music, and the way they share a little of themselves with their listeners.
This week’s cover that I adore is an arrangement of Michael Jackson’s “Smooth Criminal,” led by professional musician Yoshimi Tsujimoto on the shakuhachi and backed by Yuko Watanabe and Erina Ito on the koto.
To learn more about all three musicians, check out this article. I hope they collaborate on other projects in the future!
As a nearly lifelong fan of the Super Mario series (some of my earliest memories are of watching my cousins play Super Mario Bros. for the NES), I never get tired of listening to remixes of its main theme. The only thing better than finding a cool new remix, as far as I’m concerned, is finding a cool new remix and learning something in the process.
Recently, I discovered a video of a young woman in Taipei, Taiwan, playing her own version of the Super Mario Bros. Theme (and the Underground Theme), complete with sound effects. This time, however, instead of playing it on the violin, this performer plays it on the sheng. The sheng is a Chinese instrument that was first invented over three thousand years ago and remains popular in a slightly modernised form to this day. And apparently it’s perfectly suited to playing videogame music!
Happy 2016, everyone! I hope you all had a great holiday and are ready to meet the new year’s joys and challenges head-on!
First of all, I have a little site news: on Christmas Day, I became a kitty foster parent for the first time, and I’ve already had my first success story! I’ve added a section on my website where you can see who I’m hosting as well as read about the kitties who found their forever homes with loving families. I hope that if you’re in the Ottawa area and looking to add some warmth and fuzziness to your life that you’ll consider adopting one of the cats from J’s Animal Rescue!
Second, here I am with my first musical link of the new year! I first learned of Jimmy Fallon’s Wheel of Musical Impressions a little while ago. Guests on his show are randomly assigned a singer to imitate and a song to sing. Since singers work very hard to have their own, unique sound and tend to be well known for the music they specialise in, the results can be pretty funny!
Here’s a video of Ariana Grande guest starring on the show, including the amazing duet she and Jimmy Fallon sing at the end:
If you’d prefer to skip to a singer/song in particular, you can click the links below:
This will be my last post of 2015 as I take some time off to get my studio prepared for the winter semester–and to rest, of course! Today I thought I’d share something rather timely, given a certain movie has just come to theatres….
Have a wonderful rest of 2015, everyone, and may the Force be with you!
This week (well…it was supposed to be last week, but I had a ton of errands), we’ll be meeting our second Canadian of History Hunt, someone who actually lived fairly near me! It was a really neat discovery for me, and I’m planning on going out of my way to introduce my music students to him as soon as I can track down some of his works.
Robert Nathaniel Dett was born in Drummondville (now a part of Niagara Falls), Ontario, Canada on October 11, 1882.
Ontario, Canada, birthplace of R. Nathaniel Dett
At first, Dett’s musician parents didn’t realise that their youngest son had inherited their gift, but that was soon to change. While two of his older brothers were receiving piano lessons, Dett began to copy them. He played their pieces–but without the sheet music they were using. When his brothers’ teacher found out, she was so impressed that she started teaching him for free!
When Dett was eleven, his family moved to the United States side of Niagara Falls. There, he continued his piano lessons and later, around when he was fourteen, he took a job as a bellhop at a local hotel. When he had the time, he would play the piano located in the lobby, which earned him more than a few fans.
The next year, in 1897, Dett made a decision. While he was setting up chairs in the hotel parlor for a visiting bass singer (who had actually been his Sunday School superintendent), he told himself that the next time he moved chairs, it would be for his own recital. Sure enough, later that summer, he was able to put on a piano recital in the same hotel parlor.
When he was sixteen, Dett became church organist at a church on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. In 1901, Dett began studying at the Oliver Willis Halstead Conservatory of Music; two years later, he quit his job as church organist to join the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. There, he majored in both piano and composition, which would have been a tremendous amount of work. It also would have been expensive, but luckily, when Dett gave a benefit concert after his first year to raise money for his classes, one of the attendees was so impressed that he promised to help him pay for his lessons.
While Dett was at Oberlin, he heard a performance of Antonín Dvořák’s American quartet that changed the course of his life. This work for strings was composed using traditional folk songs, and as Dett listened, he remembered his grandmother, who had sung songs written by African-Americans while enslaved. Dett had never been comfortable with the reminders of such a terrible time those songs brought. But now, he became determined to keep the memory of these songs alive, so they wouldn’t fade away.
In 1908, Dett graduated from Oberlin, holding a Bachelor of Music degree with honours. He was the first Black person to earn this degree at Oberlin. That wasn’t the last time Dett studied music, though: he earned degrees and honourary degrees from universities all over the United States, including the highly prestigious Harvard University. By far, Dett’s biggest learning trip was to Paris, France, later in his life. There, he studied with Nadia Boulanger, the older sister of last week’s History Hunt composer, Lili Boulanger.
After Dett’s graduation, he began teaching at Lane College in Jackson, Tennessee. In 1911, he showed he was a man of many talents by publishing a book of poetry he dedicated to his mother. He spent the next few years teaching at two more universities and studying how to teach choirs, and then, in 1914, he gave two piano recitals that cemented his reputation as a composer and a pianist–one of which was at the Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Club in Chicago, Illinois. (This club was named after a previously featured History Hunt composer, who you can read about here.) He also entered a composition contest that same year put on by the Music School Settlement of New York and came second.
During World War I, Dett wrote music to keep up the spirits of both Canadians and Americans alike. He also got married, in 1916, to Helen Elise Smith, who was the first Black person to graduate from the Damrosch Institute of Musical Art (which later became part of the famous Julliard School of Music).
After the war, Dett founded the National Association of Negro Musicians in 1919, and was its president between 1924 and 1926. The next year, he published an essay in four parts called Negro Music, which was an analysis of the state of Black folk songs and how they might best be preserved. This essay won him a Bowdoin Prize from Harvard. These prizes are “some of Harvard’s oldest and most prestigious student awards” (Harvard); winning one was very significant indeed. He also won a Francis Boott prize from Harvard in the same year, this time for his composition “Don’t Be Weary, Traveller.” And, on top of that, later on, one of the groups to commission compositions from him was the TV station CBS, who asked for two separate symphonies!
After teaching at numerous universities, Dett settled at Hampton Institute in Virginia. There, he became the university’s first Black Director of Music by 1926 and united the university choir with local singers. With Dett at its head, the resulting choir went on numerous tours all across the United States and even to Europe and became very popular indeed. They performed in famous venues such as Carnegie Hall and Constitution Hall–the very same location that, eight years later, would refuse to allow Marian Anderson to perform for racist reasons. (See my History Hunt post on Marian Anderson for more information.)
Dett’s determination to preserve and help Black traditional music grow lives on even today. The Nathaniel Dett Chorale states on its website that it “is Canada’s first professional choral group dedicated to Afrocentric music of all styles, including classical, spiritual, gospel, jazz, folk and blues.” Dett would have been proud indeed.
Below is one of Dett’s most popular pieces from the suite In the Bottoms, “Juba,” which is based on traditional Black music and dance.
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Apologies for missing last week’s History Hunt post, everyone! It was my last week of lessons and I had a fair bit of work to wrap up. Because of that, I hope to post two History Hunt biographies this week–fingers crossed!
For my first post this week, then, we’re moving back in time thirty years and off to France to learn about a composer who shone brightly for a far too short period of time.
Juliette-Marie Olga Boulanger (nicknamed “Lili”) was born in Paris, France, on August 21, 1893. Her family was an extremely musical one, with composers, teachers, and artists in her family tree. Her mother, who claimed to be a Russian princess (although whether she was, or if she was a countess or something else entirely is unclear), was a singer who had met Boulanger’s father when she took lessons from him later in life.
Unfortunately, when Boulanger was only two years old, she caught pneumonia. Like many illnesses, this wasn’t nearly as easy to treat as it is today, and so she nearly died. Though she survived, her illness left her much more susceptible to sickness, and she spent a lot of her life ill.
However, even as a little girl, Boulanger was determined to get the most out of life that she could. Her first teacher was her older sister Nadia (who will be a future History Hunt feature!), and she also learned from the famous composers that often visited the Boulanger household. She started tagging along to her older sister’s classes at the Paris Conservatory when she was five; by the time she was six, she was sight-reading music written by the famous French composer Gabriel Fauré! She learned not only how to sing, but how to play the piano, the harp, and the violin. Her first public performance on the violin was when she was eight, and she was eleven when she participated in her first piano recital.
When Boulanger was sixteen, she was at last able to properly join the Paris Conservatory. There, she took multiple composition classes. As a teenager, while Boulanger was of course dedicated to music and composition, she was also, like many her age, dedicated to having fun. She would often write in her diaries about who went to the various musical events and dinners she attended and how many people were there, with clear pleasure.
In 1911, Boulanger’s older sister, Nadia, once again became one of her teachers, this time for composition. A year later, Boulanger made an important decision: she was going to win the Prix de Rome (“Roman Prize”). In order to do so, she would need to work very hard indeed–in over one hundred years since the musical category of the Prix de Rome had been created, not one woman had won first prize. Boulanger, however, was convinced that she would be the first.
For the next year, she worked as hard as she could. In her diary, she wrote about being sick very often and even missing sleep as she worked on her composition. She studied for and passed the exam to the class that would allow her to enter the Prix de Rome. At the same time, though, she made sure to take breaks and enjoy herself, going out dancing, to concerts (where, for the first time, her compositions were performed), and to dinner.
Sadly, while Boulanger entered the Prix de Rome competition in 1912, she became too ill to participate and had to drop out. Still, Boulanger didn’t give up. She entered the contest again the next year, in 1913–and won! For the first time since the musical contest began 1803, a woman had placed first in the Prix de Rome. And, not only that, she was (and still is!) one of the youngest composers of any gender to win, at only 19 years old.
As part of her prize, Boulanger was awarded a publishing contract and she and her family were allowed to stay at the Villa Medici in Rome, Italy. Unfortunately, her visit was cut short when, in 1914, World War I began. She returned to France and instead stayed in Nice for a while to compose, before going home to Paris. She and her sister wanted very much to help out their fellow musicians off fighting in the war. So together they helped create a committee of French and American volunteers to send care packages to their friends on the front lines and money to both soldiers and their relatives back home. Boulanger also helped care for wounded soldiers who had been sent away from the war front to recover, and she even edited a publication on recent composition lessons taught at the Paris Conservatory to send out to musicians so they could keep up their studies.
Though her wartime work kept her very busy and she was often sick, Boulanger kept on composing. In 1916, she started work on an opera called La princesse Maleine (“Princess Maleine”), and she visited the Villa Medici again for a time. She even started to experiment with new composition techniques.
Sadly, Boulanger died in 1918, when she was only twenty-four. Even still, she kept composing to the very end: her last work was dictated to Nadia when Boulanger was too ill to write herself.
For the rest of her life, Nadia did her best to make sure her younger sister wasn’t forgotten. She founded The Lili Boulanger Memorial Fund, which awards money to help talented composers and musicians. There’s now a Nadia and Lili Boulanger International Centre, created from the merger between the Friends of Lili Boulanger Association and the Nadia and Lili Boulanger International Foundation. And, in 1927, nine years after Boulanger’s death, she had an asteroid named in her honour, 1181 Lilith. Lili Boulanger may be gone, but as long as we keep working hard, she won’t be forgotten.
Listen below to Boulanger’s Hymne au soleil (Hymn to the Sun), an extremely powerful vocal work she wrote when she was 19.
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