Musicon / Musical education / Seiji Ozawa: I hope Asiatic peoples love classical music
Seiji Ozawa was born in Manchuria during the Japanese occupation - his father a Buddhist, his mother a Presbyterian - he was raised in Tokyo, and greatly influenced by western culture and a Christian upbringing. His love of music was first explored through the church, but later he studied at the ::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
Musicon / Musical education / Bassoon - The grave voice of the oboe
The grave voice of the oboe is heard from the bassoon, where, without becoming assertive, it gains a quality entirely unknown to the oboe and English horn. It is this quality that makes the bassoon the humorist par excellence of the orchestra. It is a reedy bass, very apt to recall to those who ::More
Musicon / Mendelssohn / Mendelssohn - He went on writing music until he suffered a fatal series of strokes
According to Goethe, Mendelssohn bore “the same relation to the little Mozart that the perfect speech of a grown man does to the prattle of a child.” Even if Goethe got a bit carried away, his enthusiasm is understandable. Mendelssohn began composing at the age of ten, and within a year or ::More
Musicon / Music and Literature / Learning to laugh
Then the door of the box opened and in came Mozart. I did not recognize him at the first glance, for he was without pigtail, knee breeches and buckled shoes, in modern dress. He took a seat close beside me, and I was on the point of holding him back because of the blood that had flowed over the ::More
