Tag Archives: Tone Poem Tuesday

Tone Poem Tuesday

Today, a rarity: or something that felt to me like a rarity many years ago, when I was still playing the trumpet (and, I might add, at a pretty high level!). The evolution of the trumpet as an instrument meant … Continue reading

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Tone Poem Tuesday

One of Leonard Bernstein’s main self-appointed missions in life was the advancement of new American music. As comfortable as he was in the orchestral repertoire all the way back to Mozart, Bernstein saw it as his duty to stand up … Continue reading

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Tone Poem Tuesday

Reinhold Gliere was a Russian composer who lived long enough to stop being a Russian composer and become a Soviet one. He was born in 1875 and lived to 1956, almost exactly contemporary with Joseph Stalin. As the last living … Continue reading

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Tone Poem Tuesday

Sometimes it’s interesting to compare performances by the same conductor, but separated by decades. Here we have Leonard Bernstein conducting his own Overture to Candide, which is likely the most enduring of his own works. The first performance is from one … Continue reading

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Tone Poem Tuesday (Farewell, Seiji Ozawa)

Maestro Seiji Ozawa died last week, aged 88. Ozawa was best known for his long tenure as music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, all twenty-nine years of that tenure–the longest of any of that great orchestra’s many amazing conductors. … Continue reading

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Tone Poem Tuesday

Ugh! I don’t know why this didn’t publish. I could swear I clicked the right thing on here. Anyway, this should have run the day before yesterday. Admittedly, this is one of my “Fallbacks because I’ve been having a busy … Continue reading

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Tone Poem Tuesday (PDQ Bach edition)

Peter Schickele died on January 16 of this year. He was a composer and a comedian who was best known as the self-styled musicologist responsible for “unearthing” the music of “P.D.Q. Bach”, the “21st of J.S. Bach’s 20 children”. Over … Continue reading

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Tone Poem Tuesday (National Pie Day edition)

Today is National Pie Day, which no one seems to really observe anymore seeing as how we’ve adopted March 14, “3.14”, as the quasi-official Pi Day on which we celebrate pie in addtion to pi. But anyway, that being the … Continue reading

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Tone Poem Tuesday

Chinese composer Tan Dun always interests me, and yet I always feel like I haven’t heard enough of his music! Here’s a fascinating tone poem, based on a three-note motif. And where does the motif come from? Well: Imagine if … Continue reading

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Tone Poem Tuesday

Let’s get right into 2024 with something familiar, and yet…not! Rodion Shchedrin is a Soviet/Russian composer, born in 1932. He is still alive as of this writing, and he has apparently been a very productive and prolific composer over his … Continue reading

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