Events

Today's Blogging A-to-Z challenge post will, like yesterday's, take us back in time. Almost every day I've shown samples of music using modern notation. Any contemporary musician should have no trouble reading them. Almost a thousand years ago, in 1025, the monk Guido d'Arezzo decided to record music on paper in a way that would enable people to read it even if they'd never encountered it before. He used blocks on lines with stems indicating how the notes were connected, and it looked like this: The...

Today's Blogging A-to-Z challenge entry goes back in time a little bit. Before there were keys, there were modes: the original scales used in Ancient Greece that still pertain today. Our C-major scale roughly corresponds with the Ionian mode. (I say "roughly" because while the fifth, octave, and probably fourth notes would have sounded the same back then as they do now, the rest of them probably would have sounded slightly out of tune to modern ears. This is a topic for next week.) If you start on D...

Now that Apollo After Hours is behind us, I can start plugging our Spring Concerts: Tickets are $35 in advance. It's going to be a really cool concert.

I don't always have time to write Blogging A-to-Z challenge posts ahead of time. This week I've had almost no free time until just now. Today I'm going to slide into the topic of  markings. Music involves more than just the notes on the page; it's an artistic expression. Composers use a whole palette of markings and (usually Italian) words to convey to performers how to express the music. Take this snippet of Bach's Invention #1 in C: First, I should point out that Bach famously almost never added...

One hundred years ago this hour (Sunday 13 April 1919, 17:37 HMT), Brig. General Reginald Dyer order his men to fire on 10,000 unarmed Indian civilians within an enclosed space from which they had no escape: On the afternoon of April 13, a crowd of at least 10,000 men, women, and children gathered in an open space known as the Jallianwalla Bagh, which was nearly completely enclosed by walls and had only one exit. It is not clear how many people there were protesters who were defying the ban on public...

Brewpubs, but at distilleries and serving their own spirits, may be coming to Illinois: Legislation approved Thursday by the Illinois House would license craft distillers similar to the way craft brewers are regulated, with the aim of giving a boost to the burgeoning community of artisan spirits makers in the state. The bill, which still faces a vote in the Senate, would create a license that allows small distillers to self-distribute some product, removing a major hurdle for unknown brands trying get...

For day 11 in this year's Blogging A-to-Z challenge, we take a look at keys. Not the ones on a musical instrument, but the ones on a staff sheet. A key designates which scale the piece (or part of the piece) uses to establish its tonality. In this year's very first A-to-Z post, I showed you the four principal scales (major, natural minor, harmonic minor, and melodic minor) that Western music uses most of the time. In that post, you may have noticed that the major scale had the notes C through C without...

It's just past midnight in Brussels, and it appears the UK hasn't crashed out of the EU yet. Britain has until October 31st to figure their shit out. And the world shakes its head.

Now that you know everything about harmony...oh, wait. Because regular old harmonies have nothing on jazz. So for today's Blogging A-to-Z challenge entry I'm going to lift up the curtain on some pretty wild stuff. I'm actually not going to have a lot of musical examples today. I'm merely going to point you toward other places that do it better. I will, however, draw your attention to the greatest jazz musician in history: Bach. He improvised the way that other people breathe. And he influenced modern...

Today I'm going to write about a topic that would have come second in any reasonable course on music theory. But in the Blogging A-to-Z challenge, sometimes the cart does come before the ox. Because even though I've already shown you the German 6th chord, fugues, and a reasonable harmonization of a simple melody, today I'm going to show you intervals. An interval is simply the distance between any two notes. If the distance is one note, we call that a second; two notes, a third; and so on, up to seven...