Music

820 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 14 of 14.

Va, pensiero turned Verdi into Italy's unofficial soundtrackGiuseppe Verdi dominated Italian opera after Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti, folding French grand-opera lessons into dramas of power and intimacy. Early choruses such as Nabucco'…
Machaut's death is how scholars date the end of ars novaGuillaume de Machaut so dominated fourteenth-century French music that modern historians use his 1377 death to mark the turn from ars nova to ars subtilior. Poet-composer in the o…
Du Fay's Florence motet crowned Brunelleschi's dome in soundGuillaume Du Fay, leading European composer of his generation, wrote an intricate ceremonial motet for the 1436 consecration of Florence Cathedral's dome. An often-illegitimate pr…
Mahler conducted for a living and composed in the cracksGustav Mahler was unassailable as a conductor long before audiences trusted his vast symphonies. Bohemian-Jewish roots left him feeling permanently unwelcome; conversion and the V…
Harriet Smithson haunted Berlioz as a musical idée fixeHector Berlioz fell obsessively for Irish actress Harriet Smithson at twenty-four; seven years later she married him. Symphonie fantastique turns her into a recurring idée fixe—th…
Purcell packed a uniquely English Baroque into thirty-six yearsHenry Purcell, born beside Westminster Abbey in 1659, fused French and Italian colors into a voice still called distinctly English. Dido and Aeneas, The Fairy Queen, and more than…
More chants survive by Hildegard than by any other medieval womanHildegard of Bingen—abbess, visionary, medical writer, and the Sibyl of the Rhine—left more surviving sacred chants than any other female medieval composer. In 2012 Benedict XVI e…
Sibelius fell silent for thirty years after TapiolaJean Sibelius helped Finland hear itself while Russification pressed hard—Finlandia, seven symphonies, a violin concerto. After the Seventh (1924), The Tempest music and Tapiola (…
Orphaned at ten, Bach became the organist posterity forgot firstJohann Sebastian Bach flooded the late Baroque with Brandenburg Concertos, Cello Suites, Well-Tempered Clavier, Passions, and hundreds of cantatas. Decades after 1750 he was remem…
The Waltz King had a banker father who forbade musicJohann Strauss II composed over 500 dances and the operettas Die Fledermaus and Der Zigeunerbaron, earning the title Waltz King. His famous father wanted him to be a banker instea…
Brahms was mocked as Bach and Beethoven's heir—and still wonJohannes Brahms wrote four symphonies, four concertos, a German Requiem, and oceans of chamber music while the War of the Romantics cast him as conservative. Hans von Bülow crowne…
Spielberg's almost-constant composer also runs the Boston PopsJohn Williams has scored most of Steven Spielberg's features and the galaxy far away for George Lucas, banking twenty-seven Grammys and five Oscars along the way. The same romanti…
Haydn shaped the symphony while stuck on a Hungarian estateFranz Joseph Haydn earned nicknames Father of the Symphony and Father of the String Quartet by reinventing forms from inside the Esterházy family's remote palace orchestra. Isolat…
Josquin may be the first Western composer with afterlife fameJosquin des Prez built a Franco-Flemish polyphonic language so prized that sixteenth-century Europe performed and imitated him for decades. Martin Luther praised him; theorists Gl…
Ravel rejected Impressionism yet ruled French music anywayMaurice Ravel is forever paired with Debussy under the Impressionist sticker both men refused. In the 1920s and 1930s he was nonetheless ranked France's greatest living composer—a…
Orchestras didn't always agree what an 'A' sounds like.Today most music is tuned so the A above middle C vibrates at 440 times a second. For centuries, pitch varied from city to city, even organ to organ. An international conference i…
Perfect pitch may have more to do with your first language than your genes.People with absolute pitch can name a note out of thin air. It is often called one in 10,000, but nobody really knows. What is clear is that it is far more common among people who…
Did a 14-year-old Mozart really steal the Vatican's secret music by ear?The story goes that Allegri's Miserere was guarded by the Pope, and that the teenage Mozart heard it once in the Sistine Chapel and wrote it all down from memory. The piece was re…
Six seconds of drumming from 1969 built entire genres.Near the end of 'Amen, Brother', a B-side by the funk band The Winstons, drummer G. C. Coleman plays a four-bar solo lasting about six seconds. Sampled and sped up, it became the …
A performance of a John Cage organ piece began in 2001 and will end in 2640.Cage's score says only to play 'as slow as possible'. In a German church in Halberstadt, a specially built organ is taking that literally: a 639-year performance, with sandbags ho…
At the premiere of his Ninth Symphony, Beethoven couldn't hear the applause.On 7 May 1824, Vienna heard Beethoven's Ninth for the first time. The almost completely deaf composer stood on stage beating time, while the players had been told to follow the re…
The blues lives in notes that fall between the piano keys.A blue note is sung or played slightly flatter than the standard pitch, often somewhere a piano simply can't reach. Measurements of early blues recordings suggest these notes clus…
The piano was invented by a Medici instrument keeper, and critics found it too quiet.Around 1700, in Florence, Bartolomeo Cristofori built a harpsichord that could play soft and loud, depending on how hard you struck the keys. Hence its name: pianoforte. Its hamme…
Can't get a song out of your head? Try chewing gum or doing an anagram.Nearly everyone gets earworms: short loops of music that replay uninvited, usually just 15 to 30 seconds long. Researchers have found that they feed on the same mental machinery y…
Two tones with equal sound pressure can sound unequally loud. Blame your ears.Loudness isn't just physics. Our ears are most sensitive between about 2,000 and 5,000 hertz, partly because of how the ear canal resonates, so deep bass and very high notes need …
Almost every piano is slightly out of tune, on purpose.Modern Western tuning splits the octave into 12 exactly equal steps, each a ratio of the twelfth root of two. The cost is that only the octave is acoustically pure; every other in…
John Cage's most famous piece has no notes in it, and it isn't silent.In 1952 a pianist walked on stage, closed the keyboard lid, and played nothing for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. The audience thought it was a joke. Cage's point was that…
In Bali, instruments are tuned slightly out of step so the music breathes.Balinese gamelan instruments are built in pairs, one tuned a fraction higher than the other. Played together, they produce a shimmering pulse called ombak, 'wave', meant to evoke …
Benjamin Franklin invented a musical instrument, and Mozart wrote for it.In 1761 Franklin mounted 37 glass bowls on a spinning rod and played them with wet fingers. The glass armonica sounded, as one listener said of its forerunner, like a cherub in a …
Do-re-mi comes from a medieval hymn to John the Baptist.Around a thousand years ago, an Italian monk called Guido of Arezzo was tired of singers spending years memorising chant. He helped develop the musical staff and taught with sylla…
For decades, music got louder and flatter, and streaming may have called a truce.From jukeboxes to CDs, record labels pushed tracks to sound louder than the competition. Digital compression let engineers squeeze out the quiet parts until songs became a wall of…
Your phone can't play a man's voice. Your brain fills in the missing note.Most telephones can't reproduce sounds below about 300 hertz, yet a typical male voice sits around 150. We still hear its true pitch, because the brain reconstructs a note from th…
Listening to Mozart doesn't make babies smarter. The study never claimed it did.A 1993 study found that students did slightly better on a paper-folding puzzle for about 15 minutes after hearing a Mozart sonata. The press turned that into 'Mozart makes you sma…
Some singers can produce two notes at once with a single voice.In Tuva, Mongolia and beyond, overtone singers hold a low drone while a second, whistling melody floats above it. They don't have two voices. They reshape their mouth and throat t…
In Indian classical music, some melodies belong to the morning and others to the monsoon.A raga isn't a tune and isn't quite a scale. It is a framework of notes, phrases and rules from which a musician improvises, and each one is meant to evoke a particular mood. In t…
The Rite of Spring's famous 'riot' wasn't called a riot until 1924.On 29 May 1913, Stravinsky's ballet about a pagan sacrifice opened in Paris to jeers, fights and an uproar that drowned out the orchestra. It became music's most famous scandal. B…
There is a sound that seems to rise forever but never gets higher.The Shepard tone stacks notes an octave apart, fading the top ones out as new bottom ones fade in. Your brain hears endless climbing. It's an auditory barber's pole, and filmmaker…
In blind tests, top violinists often prefer new violins to Stradivari.A Stradivarius can sell for millions, and its tone is said to be unmatched. But in carefully blinded studies, leading soloists wearing dark goggles played old Italian and new viol…
The theremin is the only famous instrument you play without touching.Two metal antennas sense where your hands are: one controls pitch, the other volume. Invented by a Soviet physicist in 1920, it gave Hollywood its eerie sci-fi sound. And a teenag…
One chord in Wagner's Tristan has kept music theorists arguing ever since.The opening of Tristan und Isolde contains four notes, F, B, D sharp and G sharp, that refuse to settle into a key. Theorists still disagree about what the chord is and what it do…