Beloved Christmas carols: The little drummer boy
Musicology for Everyone
by David Guion
6M ago
The 19-year stretch between 1932 and 1951 gave us 19 top hit Christmas songs. “The Little Drummer Boy” was written in 1941. When I decided to write about it, I found that hardly anyone knew it existed for 10 years. It didn’t become a hit until even later. Yet now, we can choose among hundreds of recordings. It started out as a choral piece, but many top vocal soloists have recorded it. Like it or not, it’s hard to avoid hearing “The Little Drummer Boy” throughout December every year. You might even hear it more than once in a day. I will confess that I don’t like it nearly as well as I like ot ..read more
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Just before and after the battle: two songs by George F. Root
Musicology for Everyone
by David Guion
8M ago
The American Civil War inspired more great songs than any other conflict. George Frederick Root composed a large share of them. Some of them are rousing patriotic tunes, such as Battle Cry of Freedom. But he also composed songs about the devastating impact of the war on American families. “Just Before the Battle, Mother” is one of the earliest of these. It became such a great hit that it inspired many other songs. Root himself composed more than one of them, including the companion piece “Just After the Battle.” It also inspired parodies that take a very different viewpoint. Just Before the Ba ..read more
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Háry János, opera and suite by Zoltán Kodály
Musicology for Everyone
by David Guion
8M ago
Háry János statue in Szent István Square, Szekszárd, Tolna County, Hungary / Pal Farkas (1992) via Wikimedia Commons  Zoltán Kodály is a towering figure in 20th-century music: folk music collector, music educator, and composer. Along with his good friend Béla Bartók, he showed the world of art music the riches of Hungarian folk music. His opera Háry János, and more famously, the suite he derived from it, put it on full display. Hungary has had a long tradition of foreign domination: the Turks for more than a century, then Habsburg Austria. Franz Liszt, the first internationally signific ..read more
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Swan Lake Suite(s) by Tchaikovsky
Musicology for Everyone
by David Guion
9M ago
Tchaikovsky as a young man (1870s) I came across some old notes I wrote about my community orchestra’s performance of Tchaikovsky’s Suite from Swan Lake. It was kind of a shambles, because, it appears, there is more than one suite. We found that out when the guest conductor had a completely different score than what we had prepared. Investigating on the internet, I don’t find any explicit description of more than one suite, but I do find that Tchaikovsky himself did not extract a suite from his ballet. And that the ballet was not especially successful in his lifetime. Swan Lake, the ballet E ..read more
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Louis Moreau Gottschalk’s Civil War concert tour
Musicology for Everyone
by David Guion
10M ago
Gottschalk tour poster, 1860s Louis Moreau Gottschalk became the first internationally famous American piano virtuoso and composer. Given his importance and popularity, it may come as a surprise that he spent so little time in the United States. His most important American concert tour coincided with the Civil War. All his life, Gottschalk kept a journal, in French. In 1881, his sister Clara Peterson and her husband translated it to English and had it published as Notes of a Pianist. It has proved to be one of the great musical diaries of the nineteenth century. Gottschalk recorded detailed ..read more
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