Musicon / Notes / Salim Ghazi Saeedi, A guitarist in need of a self
Salim Ghazi Saeedi, a young guitarist in Iran, tries to find his way inside rock music. I have listened to four of his compositions — Throne Accession, My Third Eye, Artemis The Huntress, Dance in Solitude — and, if these are enough to make a judgment, I’d say that Salim’s ::More
Musicon / Saint Saens / Jean-Yves Thibaudet: Saint-Saens is great fun!
“I actually regard playing a concerto almost like it’s chamber music. That’s why I enjoy it so much,” pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet says. As a concerto soloist, “I don’t feel I’m playing and not listening to the orchestra while they follow me. Music is ::More
Musicon / Musical education / Classical improvisation
The art of embellishment—improvising cadenzas, adding ornaments, taking other opportunities for creativity in performance—is a hot topic in classical music these days. For generations, conservatories preached absolute fidelity to the score: do what the composer wrote and nothing more. The ::More
Musicon / Musical education / Jazz was important once..
Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue attacked harmony; instead of following the convention of improvising on chord changes (that is, the underlying harmony in a tune), Davis gave his players specifically composed scales to solo on, a strategy that made the playing both freer and more melodic. Take ::More
Musicon / Musical education / Cadenzas
Compositions belonging to the category of chamber music, and concertos for solo instruments with orchestral accompaniment, all have individual characteristics conditioned on the expressive capacity of the apparatus. The modern piano is capable of asserting itself against a full orchestra, and ::More
