Too many people say to me “I’m tone deaf”, but I’ve yet to meet someone who acutally suffers with this disability. Yes, tone deafness is a real medical condition. Tone deafness is an inability to recognise relative pitch, which is a subsection of a condition called amusia. People who suffer Read more…
MOOC [mook] n. massive (or massively) open online course: a usually free online course open to anyone and potentially having a huge number of enrolled participants. Anyone here taken a MOOC? I have just completed my first two MOOC courses with Coursera, one of the major provide of free online courses. The Read more…
So we’ve travelled the best part of 2,000 or 3,000 years as we’ve examined the history of music, and especially the history of vocal music. If you’ve missed any of the posts in this series, you can jump to all of them here: Introduction – Early History Renaissance Era Baroque Read more…
October is here and it’s time for a new Composer of the Month This month, to time with this composer’s birthday, I’ve chosen one of the “one hit wonders” of the musical world. Sometimes it’s easy to forget that many composers who are now only known for one work struggled Read more…
For most people, when they think of “modern” music, the first things that spring to mind are either contemporary popular music (which is a story for another series), atonalism, or 4’33. For singers, however, none of these ideas really reflect the vocal music produced in the 20th century. It feels Read more…
The Romantic Period in musical history is so termed because it’s an era of music that’s endlessly high on emotion whether in art, music, or literature. Largely, this “Romanticism” is considered to be a reaction to the developing Industrial Revolution which saw machines take over from people and cities grow Read more…
Last week, we began journeying through the history of music with the Renaissance period. The Renaissance slowly transitioned into the Baroque (Bar-RO-ck) period around the start of the 16th Century. The name Baroque developed from a Latinate word meaning “rough or imperfect pearl” and was actually initially used to make fun Read more…
The Renaissance – a time of grandeur, of experimentation and of scientific progress. For me, the Renaissance (ruh-NAY-sonce) conjures up grand Italian and Spanish courts with explorers and architects lining up to impress the monarchs. (Well, unless you pronounce it REN-ess-ahns, in which case, it’s bad wench costumes and spit roast pig Read more…
When learning to read musical notation, the representation of pitch is pretty logical. When the blobs go up, the pitch gets higher, when the blobs go down the pitch gets lower. So far, so good. However, what’s less clear is rhythm. Most musical theory works start with the crotchet, or Read more…
Once or twice, I’ve had students insist to me that a Cb is the same as a B. Each time, I have to remind them that, actually they’re not the same note at all and as singers it’s very important to remember that. Now, many of you may go “huh? Read more…