MMmusing
MMmusing is a English-speaking blog specialized in the field of classical music and opera. As such, MMmusing is a qualified source of soclassiq, like FT.com Music or Classical Music Daily and many others. The oldest article indexed by soclassiq is dated 2012-02-28. Since then, a total of 286 articles have been written and published by MMmusing.
MMmusing blog activity
With 2 articles published in the last 90 days, MMmusing is currently a not very active news source. "Not very active" does not mean that MMmusing is less interesting than another more prolific source. Each blog follows a specific editorial line, publishing according to its own rhythm.
This editorial activity is slowing down compared to the previous period.
The last article in MMmusing, "Seventeen, Going on Eighteen", is dated 2024-02-25. By 2023, this source had published 10 articles (2 since the beginning of 2024).
MMmusing in the last 36 months
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2024-02-25 03:43:00
No time for a major post to celebrate this blog's seventeenth anniversary. But I thought I'd post this fun video I made a little over a year ago. It's been on my list of things to blog about for all of that time, and I'd still like to say more about it, but the basics are as follows:I'd created a worksheet for an Intro to Music Theory class which provided a series of arpeggios. The students' job was to identify the triad quality represented by each arpeggio. As usual with a worksheet, I made some effort to create a semi-random sequence of triads so there wouldn't be any obvious pattern to help students guess the answers. This also means that the patterns created were intended not to have any clear functional relationship from bar to bar. But...I noticed while absent-mindedly playing the page for the class that I kind of […]
2024-02-03 22:45:00
One of my favorite parts of teaching middle school boys the past five years is that we spend a quarter of every fall semester slow-watching Into the Woods. In my opinion, it's a perfect musical for this transitional age - a show that is constantly exploring what lies "in-between" the safety and familiarity of childhood/home and the excitement and danger found in wishing for more freedom and responsibility. Every middle schooler lives in this transition between kid and grownup.In addition to watching, we do multiple projects which give the students a hands-on opportunity to engage with Sondheim's musical ideas. This year, I found a good deal of success getting groups of four students to learn a central section of the big "Your Fault" number in which characters argue back and forth in rapid-fire fashion. (Believe me, rapid-fire argument comes naturally to these boys - but they don't usually do it […]
2023-12-25 14:44:00
Once upon a time, I wrote my first twenty-first century fugue back in December, 2015. (I do have one ancient twentieth century fugue as well.) I've played this fugue at some point just about every year since, but have never been happy with the original piano recording I made on an out-of-tune piano. So, the other day when I found time on a beautiful Steinway to record my new "O come, all ye faithful" fugue, I did a few takes of Fugue in Royal David's City and definitely improved on the old version. (A better organ version is still on the to-do list.) Just in case you don't know the original tune which famously opens every King's College Lessons and Carols service, here it is. Some of the verses are printed below as well.MMerry Christmas! 1 Once in royal David’s citystood a lowly cattle shed,where a mother laid her babyin a […]
2023-12-24 03:47:00
This will be short, but as the year comes to a close, I've used an old technique to get me to do something I otherwise might not do. In this case, I submitted a new Fugue on Adeste Fideles as title of the prelude for tomorrow afternoon's second Christmas Eve service. The fact that this fugue didn't yet exist was just a way of writing a check that I'd have to cash.For better or worse, the check has cleared, and I even have a couple of recordings to show, one a rather overblown virtual organ fest and the other a quiet run-through on piano this morning. As with all of the two-dozen or so hymn fugues I've written in the past few years, I've often thought of these as primarily functional and flexible, so I like the idea that this fugue can reach a grand and triumphant conclusion - or […]
2023-10-31 23:37:00
Just to put a bow on my previous post, I'm back with one more version of my Erlkönig in G Major. Though it might seem I'd taken this as far as I could, there was still a level of horror to unlock: have a creepy synth voice sing the new "translation" I'd made to go with the major/minor tonality flips. (Please don't mention that there is theoretically yet another step, which would be to have a real person sing this.)So, what better day than October 31 to prove that Schubert had only begun to explore the darkness in his iconic song? There is lovely irony in the fact that turning the tune to major actually makes it more disturbing than the original. The same is true for the way a disembodied synth voice brings its own special kind of undeadness that no live human could quite achieve. I hope. […]
2023-12-21 18:56:00
Back in 2014, the 50th anniversary year for Terry Riley's iconic aleatoric masterpiece In C, I was inspired by a pun (as so often) to create a holiday homage. It may have been that the pulsing C's which traditionally anchor performances of Riley's work first reminded me of jingle bells. I can't remember for sure, but once I made the "In C  → In Season" connection, there was no going back. Best of all, I think it really works.Rather than the 53 generic riffs in C Major that Riley devised, I used melodic snippets based on well-known seasonal tunes. Thus, part of the game of listening is to hear these various melodies emerge from the texture and intermingle in unexpected ways. You may read about the origins of In Season here, and I highly recommend a visit to this dedicated page which includes an embedded virtual performance and links to the score […]
2023-12-01 03:27:00
Sondheim Slanted Evening
Hopefully the post title is reason enough to be wary of where we're headed here. Just two years and one day ago, I was writing a tribute to the remarkable creative force behind Company, Sweeney Todd, and Into the Woods, and here I am presenting a couple of silly distortions of his exquisite musical/lyrical ideas. But it certainly comes from a place of affection.First up, a couple of months ago, I mentioned seeing just a two-bar cadential figure shown in a question on a Facebook group and I knew at once I'd played this flourish.It took me a bit of time to realize it's the closing gesture (hear at 2:29 here) from On the Steps of the Palace, Cinderella's big number from Into the Woods. When I mentioned this to some friends online, one repeated a suggestion she'd made before about combining Sondheim's Steps with Borodin's lovely orchestral tone poem In the Steppes of […]
2023-11-12 04:01:00
Time and again, I return here because of some happenstance by which I make unexpected connections between two works. We've had:Stravinsky and CoplandCopland and MendelssohnBeethoven and StraussShostakovich and Vaughan WilliamsBritten and IvesJackson and MenkenIn the last few weeks, I've been doing a lot of accompanying of young string players, and it's provided opportunity for a couple of unexpected new discoveries. The first connection came up two weeks ago when I had back-to-back rehearsals for a concerto competition with a violinist playing the first movement of Prokofiev's first concerto and a violist playing the first movement of the Walton Concerto. I adore the former, but do not know the latter well, having only played it once years ago on short rehearsal - although I did once make this [warning: viola joke] "director's cut" video. Anyway, after some rehearsing of both, I started to notice a strange kinship between the two concerti. Each first […]
2023-09-25 01:40:00
This is really just an update to the previous post. Having "translated" the music of Schubert's Erlkönig from G Minor to G Major, I was bothered that the text displayed was still Goethe's dark and tragic German. Although I'm not capable of re-writing the German, I decided I would translate the original into English. As it happens, the connections between transcription and translation have been of interest to me since I started the blog, as can be seen here among many other posts. (A search of the name "Hofstadter" on the blog will turn up lots more!) But most importantly, this will work better when you inevitably feel led to sing along.So, here we have an updated version of the story. No more "stranger danger" or creepy dancing daughters. (See Goethe's original here.) Because I'm insane, I did try to adhere pretty closely to the stanza structure of Goethe's poem, but […]
2023-09-23 01:14:00
 Recently, the following image made its way around on social media:Schubert's Erlkönig is one of the most iconic works in the classical canon, helped a good bit by the fact that it shows up in many anthologies for music history/appreciation classes. Although Schubert is rightly celebrated for his hundreds of songs, it's a little unusual that this is often the standard-bearer since he didn't really write anything else quite like it, but it packs an incredible dramatic punch. The mercilessly cruel piano part might seem to be a disadvantage for getting the song performed, but the notoriety it adds has only helped to amplify the legend. (I once expressed this in J. Peterman form.) As it happens, I spent extra time with this song while leading a piano seminar at a chamber music camp this past summer. I wanted to expose the pianists - some of whom were playing pretty advanced […]