Daily Hit of Music

A "griot" (also known as "jeli", "jali" or "gewel"), is a West African troubadour-historian. For many griots, society's history and music go hand in hand. If you are a griot, you are either a musician, or a storyteller, or both.  A griot from Guinea Image source The griot profession is hereditary and has long been part of West African culture. Historically, only those in a family of griots were allowed to study music, but now studying music is a personal choice. The role of a griot is to pass on the histories of families and society through stories and poems - many of them use music to do this.  Watch the following on West African Griots: DHM YouTube   Many griots play the kora: a long-necked harp lute with 21 strings. This traditional instrument is now studied by many young people in music conservatoires.  Kora Image source Many griots will also play the Djembe (drum). Djembe Image source In addition to serving as the primary storytellers of...

Lilli Lehmann was German soprano of phenomenal versatility. Across the span of her career, she performed 170 different parts in a total of 119 German, Italian and French operas as well as 600 lieder (songs). She left her legacy as a singer in recordings made later in her life as well as her book on vocal study: Meine Gesangskunst (1902; My Art of Singing ). (1848 - 1929) Image source Listen to a recording of Lilli Lehmann singing Verdi, aged circa 58: DHM YouTube Her first singing teacher was her mother, who had been a prima donna at the Cassel opera. After singing small parts on stage, Lehmann made her proper debut in 1870 (aged circa 22) in Berlin. She sang in the first Bayreuth Festival in 1876. The Bayreuth Festival Theatre is an opera house north of Bayreuth, Germany, built by the composer  Richard Wagner  and dedicated solely to the performance of his stage works. Lehmann was coached by Wagner in the parts of one of the Rhinemaidens and the Forest Bird for the first perf...

Different Trains is a work by Steve Reich for String Quartet and pre-recorded performance tape. The basic idea of this way of composing is that selected recordings of speech generate the musical materials for the instruments of the quartet.  Album cover for Different Trains Image source Listen to it here:  Different Trains - Part 1 America Before the War : Different Trains - Part 2 Europe During the War : Different Trains - Part 3 After the War : To put things into context, this was composed in 1988 and premiered by the Kronos Quartet on 2 November at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in the same year. To put such a thing together and coordinate its performance was significantly more difficult then that it would be now with modern technology and yet the work is still considered to be novel compared to the vast majority of works performed today.  Reich's parents separated when he was just one year old, which meant that he would frequently travel back and forth: his mother lived in ...

In the Soviet Union, one of the 20th century's greatest violinists and one of its greatest composers were close friends:  David Oistrakh and Sergei Prokofiev.  Listen here to Prokofiev's Violin Concerto No. 1 performed by David Oistrakh: DHM YouTube Although Oistrakh did not premiere the concerto, he did work on the piece with the composer and recorded it in 1954, a year after Prokofiev's death. As well as being legendary musicians, both Oistrakh and Prokofiev were passionate chess players.  The official announcement of the match between Sergei Prokofiev and David Oistrakh Image source  In fact, on the 9th of November 1937, they played each other in a prestigious match at the Master of Art Club in Moscow, overseen by the two chess giants at the time: Vladimir Alatortsev and Ilya Kan. The 1937 Prokofiev - Oistrakh Match Image source Prokofiev was rather more outstanding as a chess player, to the extent that in 1909 he drew with Emanuel Lasker - world chess champion f...

The Swedish term "kulning" (pronounced "coolning") is a contraction of the words "Kuh" (cow) and "lock" (to call or coax).  Along with the cowhorn and lur (long horn), kulning was an important part of the pastoral herding traditions that has existed in Scandinavia for centuries. It has its origins in ancient Norse culture and has been passed on in an unbroken oral tradition up to the present day, where it has been assimilated into modern folk music.  Jonna Jinton Image source Kulning is powerful and beautiful, considered by musicologists to be the essential sound of the Nordic folk music tradition. Since the forest is the original environment of the song, this tradition belongs in the natural world. The kulning song is a loud call, using the head tones of the voice, so that it can project over long distances: the call rings and echoes against the mountains. The animals, a number of whom wear tuned bells, begin to respond to the call. The sound of...

Amy Beach is considered to be the earliest American female composer of enormous success. She wrote over 150 works which include piano pieces, chamber music, a piano concerto, an opera and a symphony. Her work was held up as a beacon of American accomplishment. Although she was valued by the press and society as a symbol of women's progress, she herself did not speak very openly about this aspect of her career.  Amy Beach (1867 - 1944) Image source At the age of 17 she performed Chopin's  Piano Concerto in   F minor with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. The next year, aged 18, she married Dr. Harrison H.A. Beach - an eminent surgeon, Harvard University professor and devoted amateur musician. Her husband objected to the idea of her pursuing a career as a concert pianist, but did encourage her to compose. So Amy embarked on a rigorous course of self-instruction in musical theory and composition. This was unusual, given that most American composers travelled to Europe to study ...

The Lamentations [of Jeremiah] is an Old Testament book belonging to the third section of the biblical canon, known as Ketuvim, or Writings.  In the Hebrew Bible, the Lamentations is part of the Megillot - the five scrolls that are read on various festivals of the Jewish religious year. In the Jewish liturgical calendar, Lamentations is the festal scroll of the Ninth of Av, a day commemorating the destruction of the First and Second Temples of Jerusalem. Some of chapters consists of an acrostic poem with the each verse beginning with a letter of the Hebrew alphabet. The letters follow, starting with ALEPH, the second starting with BETH. The poems are laments over the destruction of Judah, Jerusalem, and the Temple by the Babylonians in 586 BC.  Robert Dow Tudor Partbooks Image source Listen to Robert Whyte's musical setting of the lamentations (Chapter 1, verses 8 -13). Verse eight begins with HETH and notice how Whyte sets even the simplest word - a letter of the alphabet - i...

Kate Anna Rusby is an English folk singer-songwriter from Penistone, Barnsley (South Yorkshire). Rusby was born into a family of musicians and after learning to play the guitar, the fiddle and the piano (as well as to sing) she played in many local folk festivals as a child and adolescent, before joining (and becoming the lead vocalist of) the all-female Celtic folk band 'The Poozies'. Known as the "Barnsley Nightingale", she has headlined various British national folk festivals, and is one of the best known contemporary English folk singers.  Kate Rusby Copyright Andrew Sanderson Image Source 1995 saw the release of her breakthrough album, Kate Rusby & Kathryn Roberts, a collaboration with her friend and fellow Barnsley folk singer Kathryn Roberts.  Listen to Hunting the Hare from that album - the tune is the traditional Welsh Hela'r Ysgyfarnog and the English words are from A.P. Graves' The Celtic Song Book (1928): DHM YouTube Playlist - Hunting the Ha...

"Harold in Italy" is a symphony in four movements with solo viola, composed by Hector Berlioz in 1834. Hector Berlioz was a French composer, conductor and critic.  Hector Berlioz (1803 - 1869) Portrait by Pierre Petit  Image source Berlioz wrote Harold in Italy as a commission from the virtuoso violinist  Niccolo Paganini , who had just purchased a Stradivarius viola. However, having seen the first movement of the work, Paganini found the piece to be insufficiently flashy for his own performance and therefore never played it. He did, nevertheless, confess to admiring it and still paid the agreed fee.  Listen to it here: DHM YouTube Playlist Berlioz explained his inspiration for the work in this way: "My idea was to write a series of scenes for the orchestra in which the solo viola would be involved as a more or less active character, always retaining its own individuality. By placing the viola in the midst of poetic recollections of my wanderings in the [Italian] Ab...

Rock 'n' roll is a style of popular music that originated in the United States in the mid -1950s. By the mid-1960s it evolved into the more encompassing international style known as 'rock' music. Some describe rock 'n' roll as a merger of country music and rhythm and blues, but this is an oversimplification and were it so, it would have existed long before it burst into the national consciousness. The roots of rock 'n' roll had been in place for decades, but the genre flourished in the mid-1950s when nourished by a volatile mix of black culture and white spending power.  Heralding this new sound were disc jockeys such as Alan Freed of Cleveland who created rock-and-roll radio by playing hard-driving rhythm-and-blues and raunchy blues records that introduced white suburban teenagers to a culture that sounded more exotic, thrilling, and illicit than anything they had ever known. It was Alan Freed who popularised the phrase "rock 'n' roll"...

Vincenzo Bellini's vocal writing epitomises the Italian Bel Canto ('beautiful singing') school of singing. The term describes the style of singing which embodies beauty and evenness of tone, smooth legato phrasing and perfection of technique.  Vincenzo Bellini (1801-35), painting by Granger. Image source Bellini was born on 3 November 1801 in Catania, Sicily. He came from a family of musicians (both his father and grandfather were organists of Catania Cathedral and maestri di cappella ), but a musical career was heavily opposed. Such was Bellini's ability, though, that friends of the family exerted pressure on his father to relent, and when the duke and duchess of San Martina offered to fund the young Bellini's studies at the Real Collegio di Musica di San Sebastiano in Naples, his father finally gave in.  Bellini was a diligent student, writing several sinfonias, masses, a cantata and his first opera. The opera was produced at the Conservatorium with such success t...

Tuvan throat singing (known in Mongolian as 'throat harmony') is one particular variant of overtone singing practised by people in Mongolia, Inner Mongolia, Tuva and Siberia. In 2009, this art-form was inscribed on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity of UNESCO.  Tuva Image source Despite what the term might suggest, throat singing (in this context) does not strain the singer's throat. Tuvan throat singers can produce two or three, sometimes even four pitches simultaneously. The singer starts with a low drone. Then, by subtle manipulations of his/her vocal tract, the singer breaks up the sound, amplifying one or more overtones, just enough so that they can be heard as additional pitches while the drone continues at a lower volume.  Listen: DHM YouTube Playlist DHM YouTube Playlist The ancient tradition of throat singing developed among the nomadic herdsmen of Central Asia, people who lived in yurts, rode horses, raised livestock and had a ...

The organ is a keyboard instrument, operated not only by the player's hands, but also their feet. Pressurised air produces notes through a series of pipes. The term organ  encompasses reed organs and electronic organs but, unless otherwise specified, is usually understood to refer to pipe organs. Although it is one of the most complex of all musical instruments, the organ has the longest history and the largest and oldest extant repertoire of any instrument in Western music. In spite of substantial technical developments, the organ's basic principles of operation remain relatively unaltered from when they were discovered more than 2,000 years ago. Organs usually possess several sets of pipes (also known as stops or register), playable from several keyboards and a pedal board (operated by the feet).  Image Source The pipes are arranged over a wind chest that is connected to the keys via a set of pallets (or valves) and fed with a supply of air by electrically or mechanically ac...

Teresa Carreño was a celebrated Venezuelan composer, mezzo-soprano and, most notoriously, pianist, who was known for playing with great power and spirit. Teresa Carreño (born Dec. 22, 1853, Caracas, Venezuela - died June 12, 1917, New York City) Listen to her Elegia ( Elegy ), as recorded by Clara Rodríguez:  DHM YouTube Playlist Teresa Carreño was given her first piano lessons by her father, Manuel Antonio Carreño, a politician and talented amateur pianist. Exiled because of a revolution, the family settled in New York in 1862; there Carreño studied with Louis Moreau Gottschalk. After this, she spent four in Paris as a pupil of Georges Mathias and Anton Rubinstein, after which she embarked on a long and highly successful concert career. In addition to being a virtuoso pianist, she developed a mezzo-soprano voice of sufficient calibre to enable her to appear as an opera singer. With the second of her four husbands (the baritone Giovanni Tagliapietra), she organised and directed an ...

Thoughts on Notation " People sang and played instruments long before ways of writing music down on paper were invented. Even today, nearly everyone can sing, though not everyone can 'read' music. Many people can also play instruments without being able to read a note of music: like some of the great jazz musicians, they play 'by ear'. Clearly, it is perfectly possible to make music without having it written down. Indeed, when one considers the world's music as a whole, one finds that the use of music notation  (written signs representing musical sounds) is actually quite rare. Many countries in the East, for example, have ancient musical traditions which are very beautiful and sometimes very elaborate, yet which make little (if any) use of notation. Their musicians scarcely ever learn from written-down music or use it when they are performing.  In Europe, however, the use of notation became central to the development of music. At first (well over a thousand ye...