There's a new musical featuring Mozart's classics on the West End opening in a few weeks. Anyone interested?

Good morning everyone, and Happy Halloween. Each week, we'll listen to a piece recommended by the community, discuss it, learn about it, and hopefully introduce us to music we wouldn't hear otherwise :) And since today is Halloween, I wanted to share a fun piece to fit the mood.

Last time we met, we listened to Mahler’s Symphony no.2 “Resurrection” You can go back to listen, read up, and discuss the work if you want to.

Our next Piece of the Week is Henry Cowell’s The Banshee (1925) …

Score from IMSLP

…

Some listening notes from Anthony McDonald:

…from an early age Cowell showed a keen interest in folk music and the music of other cultures. When the family bought a property in San Francisco the young boy was given rein to explore Chinatown where he recollects listening to Chinese music. He also heard Japanese music in the city. Amongst the eclectic group of acquaintances the growing Cowell befriended were the children of theosophist John Varian. It was John Varian himself and not Henry’s father who instilled in the boy a fascination with Gaelic folklore. As Henry learned piano he also learned to compose, again not in a very formal manor at first. As a radical teenager in a radical environment by the mid 1910s Cowell was already moving in directions that would lead towards works like The Banshee. He was working with extended piano techniques and combining the sounds he created with poetic evocations of Irish folklore from John Varian.

By the time Cowell was touring Europe he had developed an even more novel "string piano" technique of playing inside the body of the piano directly on the piano strings. This is what is going on in The Banshee and it may have started for Cowell back in California in his teens in the 1910s. There is a tantalizing recollection to support this theory from an acquaintance with a grand piano who was moved to prop up the lid carefully when Cowell visited to play, lest it came crashing down on his arms.

… The techniques used create an eerie sound which is alluded to in the title, once again based on a poetic interpretation of Gaelic folklore by John Varian. According to Henry Cowell:

A Banshee is a fairy woman who comes at the time of a death to take the soul back into the Inner World. She is uncomfortable on the mortal plane and wails her distress until she is safely out of it again. The older your family, the louder your family banshee will wail, for she has had that much more practice at it.

The work contains a number of what Cowell referred to in his theoretical works New Musical Resources and the unpublished The Nature of Melody as "Sliding Tones". For example the A) technique is an example of sliding up to a pitch from a starting note, not unlike the portamento on standard string family instruments for example, and the B) technique is an example of sliding along the same pitch to change the sound or timbre of the note. It may have been New York where Cowell gave the debut of The Banshee early in 1926 at Aeolian Hall. Like with most of his folkloric works with extended techniques of this time The Banshee received varied reviews from critics. Paul Rosenfeld expressed shock at the performance. Referring to how the piano might react to Cowell’s playing of the strings Rosenfeld wrote:

“…Few members of the audience could help feeling that if they were the piano, they would certainly get up and sock the fellow…”

Although of this concert Cowell himself noted that The Banshee had to be repeated due to the level of audience enthusiasm.

Cowell took the work on his 1926 European tour and over in the UK a London performance elicited a similarly mixed response. Critics mockingly wondered why he didn’t use his nose, knees and feet. One critic at the Daily Mail wrote:

:…The housemaid at home when she dusts the piano, often gives us an unconscious imitation of Mr Cowell’s Art…"

In the same review however, it was admitted that the piece was popular with the audience and had to be encored. Encores of this work in particular became a running theme. The public was clearly fascinated.

The appeal of the piece led to Cowell later rewriting it effectively to be combined with chamber orchestra as part of a suite of three Irish pieces for string piano and chamber orchestra. Cowell began writing for dance performers in the 1920s striking up collaborations with Martha Graham and others. Some of his music was also arranged to be danced to, and Doris Humphrey danced The Banshee to critical acclaim.

Ways to Listen

• Sorrel Hays: YouTube Score Video

• Joan Cerveró and Víctor Trescolí: YouTube

• Sonya Kumiko Lee: YouTube

• Henry Cowell: Spotify

• Cheryl Seltzer: Spotify

• Chris Brown: Spotify

Discussion Prompts

• What are your favorite parts or moments in this work? What do you like about it, or what stood out to you?

• Do you have a favorite recording you would recommend for us? Please share a link in the comments!

• What do you think about using these kinds of effects and extended techniques? Does it change the way we think a piano (or any instrument) is “supposed to be played”?

• Have you ever performed this before? If so, when and where? What instrument do you play? And what insights do you have from learning it?

...

What should our club listen to next? Use the link below to find the submission form and let us know what piece of music we should feature in an upcoming week. Note: for variety's sake, please avoid choosing music by a composer who has already been featured, otherwise your choice will be given the lowest priority in the schedule

PotW Archive & Submission Link

Welcome to the 198th r/classicalmusic weekly piece identification thread!

This thread was implemented after feedback from our users, and is here to help organize the subreddit a little.

All piece identification requests belong in this weekly thread.

Have a classical piece on the tip of your tongue? Feel free to submit it here as long as you have an audio file/video/musical score of the piece. Mediums that generally work best include Vocaroo or YouTube links. If you do submit a YouTube link, please include a linked timestamp if possible or state the timestamp in the comment. Please refrain from typing things like: what is the Beethoven piece that goes "Do do dooo Do do DUM", etc.

Other resources that may help:

• Musipedia - melody search engine. Search by rhythm, play it on piano or whistle into the computer.

• r/tipofmytongue - a subreddit for finding anything you can’t remember the name of!

• r/namethatsong - may be useful if you are unsure whether it’s classical or not

• Shazam - good if you heard it on the radio, in an advert etc. May not be as useful for singing.

• you can also ask Google ‘What’s this song?’ and sing/hum/play a melody for identification

• Facebook 'Guess The Score' group - for identifying pieces from the score

A big thank you to all the lovely people that visit this thread to help solve users’ earworms every week. You are all awesome!

Good luck and we hope you find the composition you've been searching for!

The Chéreau/Boulez Centenary Ring was remastered in HD quality on Blu-ray video and released sometime in 2022, and I've always wanted to see it, but sadly I don't own a Blu-ray player and I'm not exactly a movie/opera person, so I don't know how these remasters work and if they're usually good or not. Has anyone seen it? Is it any good?

It's chopin-esque, (or rach? Honestly no idea) with a fast sixteenth-note? passage in the left hand descending almost chromatically (so the notes are closer to each other than in revolutionary but the piece is a little similar to revolutionary) and the right hand is playing chords (because i dont know the tonality, i'll just give you how the lowest & highest notes of the chords would sound in A minor: E (short) top C (long) ... E top C ... E top C, D E, (in triplets:) (D C D) E (here there's some kind of modulation to the relative major idk) anyways i am going crazy because i KNOW this piece but i can't for the life of me remember the name so that i listen to it and get it unstuck in my head

Anyone fans of this one? I had recently heard Inessa Galante’s version and was blown away then came upon this one. Thought it was incredibly beautiful. In particular the part around 1:50-2:20 or so

https://youtu.be/wk7-hH-SBhM?si=clB792YP-7JGnbkN

I'm a big Beethoven fan but I've always thought Beethoven didn't know how to write for voices. I have the late quartets on my everyday listening playlist and also the symphonies every week, but I have removed the 4th movement of B9 from said playlist because it really seems like a miss to me, I've even seen it live and my opinion hasn't changed.

The thing for me is, I've seen don Giovanni live, two years ago, and I've also seen Fidelio a little than one year ago and it's just apparent to me that Beethoven can't write for voices as well as he does for instruments.

I know it's influential of Beethoven to add voices to the symphony genre, but I don't think he was the right guy to do it. What are y'all's thoughts?

It is a common misconception that there is no improv in classical music, but contrary to that belief, many classical composers would write parts of their compositions specifically to be improvised over.

Are there any modern classical players who play classic pieces and improvise over them? If so, any recommendations?

Kind of like a fairytale, beautiful haunting melodies, that kind of vibe.

Thanks in advance!

Looking for as unnerving choral pieces as you can suggest. I want dissonance, screaming, trills, ululatuons, infrasound. It can be foreign works or western works. Doesn't matter to me. I like raw, violent, uncomfortable pieces of music on occasion.

Whatever you have; I'll take.

Thank guys.

I am aware that the most importand part is your audition, and that your gpa doesnt matter too much as long as it isn't horribly low, but how much do extracurriculats matter? I have been on the student board for my high school orchestra for 2 years and next year I am going to be the president, and I was in my local youth orchestra last year and I am going to be in it again next year. Outside of music I am one of the presidents of a club at my school. How much could those effect my chances?

As in right on top of each other at the same time, not switching keys halfway through. Is that a thing? Should I make it a thing?

I was cleaning up a bit, and ran across the one week free ticket that came from them when I ordered the streaming season program.

The code must be claimed by tomorrow (Thursday, Oct. 31). And since it's not a keyed code (specific to one user), it should be good for anyone who wants to give it a try.

The code is NEW247DAY and it can be claimed at https://www.digitalconcerthall.com/ Hope this is of use to someone.

This sonata begins with a light, pastoral theme in E major. Every time I hear those ornamented notes, I think birds chirping. This piece screams spring to me, as I write this in the end of October in Minnesota. The development adds a little turbulence, but more like a gust of wind than a thunderstorm, which leads to a soaring variation of the primary theme for the beginning of the recapitulation. Nothing in this movement screams groundbreaking, but I do notice more clustered chords in the lower registered and a moving baseline, something Beethoven begins to utilize more and more as his style develops.

Another minuet that seems to act as both the slow movement and the scherzo. It is in the parallel minor key of E minor, but there is something more whimsical and mysterious about this movement, like a cool, cloudy day as you drive through the countryside. This piece in Scherzo-trio form.

The rondo begins with a warm, even theme. Another movement with a lot of emphasis on the lower registers. Although this movement is overall more light hearted, or really the entire piece, there is something kinda sweet about this movement especially. Yes there are areas of turmoil and tension, but it can’t all be happy. Even in our happiest moments there are some mixed emotions.

As I go through each sonata, I notice more and more a sense of humanity in his music that is really hard to describe, and this sonata portrays that even more than previous sonatas, despite being a “step back” from his previous sonatas.

Hey! As a long time lurker, people in this sub have shown me some excellent music. Today I thought I might be able to return the favor.

I just came out of a string concert honoring a few composers of my home state here in Brazil, Paraná, and two pieces really stood out:

The first one is from Henrique de Curitiba (1934 - 2008, born Zbigniew Henrique Morozowicz), he composed more than 150 pieces. Sonata 87: III movement, Vivace de xaxado. Just a little context: Xaxado is a type of dance invented in the Sertão, used to celebrate the victories of Lampião (he was a famous Robin Hood-ish type of figure).

The second is from Rogério Krieger (1963 - 2023), he was one of the founding members of the symphonic orchestra of Paraná. Capoeira e Fandango. In this piece he uses the cello to simulate a berimbau, an African instrument, commonly used in capoeira.

I hope you enjoy those songs! Also, I would love to hear everyone's opinion :)

A new Chopin piece has been unearthed, and I couldn’t be less excited. I listened to the beginning of it. Couldn’t get any further. Nope, not this one either. Sorry, Frederic.

EDIT: I’m open-minded. If you suggest something, I’ll give it a listen.

EDIT 2: I listened to the whole of the new piece. Still nothing.

https://preview.redd.it/b235tpgwcvxd1.png?width=2310&format=png&auto=webp&s=7a7466c6825943fd9aa4ed31293fee03b268b0a6

It would be really cool if ChatGPT can read music notes. I guess music language is not a natural language after all.