My son had to wait in school a couple minutes extra while I sat in the car listening to this Handel aria (Fra l'ombre e gl'orrori) on CatMusica today.
Seeing the score is quite frightening, especially the 2+ octave leaps at the end.
A blog about our life in Sant Cugat between 2007 and 2015, strange discoveries, amusing local news, politics, economics and cute stories about kids.
Showing posts with label music. Show all posts
Showing posts with label music. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
Saturday, December 19, 2009
Music in Spain
The musical education is a bit strange here. First of all, the A-G letter names aren’t used for labeling notes, instead they use “Do Re Mi..”. For me, I learned “Do Re Mi” as a relative system, where “Do” is the root of whatever key I’m in, so this screws me up. For note lengths, they use names similar to the British system (oh how I hate those hemi-demi-semiquavers… give me a 64th note any time). Musical education is considered complete once you have managed to figure out how to blow air into a recorder.
However, music teachers are AMAZINGLY cheap (by North American standards anyway). I guess people don’t value them too much. Our kids’ music teacher costs about 8 euros for a half hour (it was about $30 in the US). The book of choice for learning piano in Sant Cugat is “John Thompson’s Easiest Piano Course”.
Early music is popular in Barcelona. I love Jordi Savall and his work, so it’s a real pleasure to be able to go see him whenever he is in town.
Unfortunately I hate the gralla which is very popular here. It sounds like a bagpipe without any bags, ie animal in distress. They had a special the other day on CatMusica (101.5 FM, good classical music) where they were playing it all day and I was going nuts.
However, music teachers are AMAZINGLY cheap (by North American standards anyway). I guess people don’t value them too much. Our kids’ music teacher costs about 8 euros for a half hour (it was about $30 in the US). The book of choice for learning piano in Sant Cugat is “John Thompson’s Easiest Piano Course”.
Early music is popular in Barcelona. I love Jordi Savall and his work, so it’s a real pleasure to be able to go see him whenever he is in town.
Unfortunately I hate the gralla which is very popular here. It sounds like a bagpipe without any bags, ie animal in distress. They had a special the other day on CatMusica (101.5 FM, good classical music) where they were playing it all day and I was going nuts.
Thursday, December 17, 2009
Friday, December 11, 2009
The Bach cello suites and Sant Cugat
Just finished reading The Cello Suites by Eric Siblin about Bach and Pau (Pablo in Spanish) Casals. It even has reference to the Arxiu in Sant Cugat that holds many of his papers and effects.
It's an amazing story about how Pau discovered the suites in an old Barcelona music store and was one of the people most responsible for making them world famous.
In case you were wondering, one of the main motivators for building the Arxiu was to house "Els papers", which had been confiscated by Franco and stored in the archive in Salamanca. The papers are now safely back in Catalunya.
It's an amazing story about how Pau discovered the suites in an old Barcelona music store and was one of the people most responsible for making them world famous.
In case you were wondering, one of the main motivators for building the Arxiu was to house "Els papers", which had been confiscated by Franco and stored in the archive in Salamanca. The papers are now safely back in Catalunya.
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