picking topic for music essay, need help

[paris]

hey!

it has been awhile since i last visited here, but now i really need help. i must write 2 essays on music, for foreign language (in english), it has to be relatively short (1-2 pages)

last year i did -chopin competition
                      -lang lang

please give me some ideas 

[pianistimo]

well, if it were me - i'm back at the recently discovered 'grosse fuge.'  but, frankly - the more i look at it - the more i understand why it was put in a box in the basement in a corner of a theological seminary.  he was crazy by that time.  it just 'doesn't compute.'

how about 'misunderstood' music?  i think alistair has a lot of insights and history that he can bring to almost any topic of 20th-21st century music.  what interests me, in particular - is how music mirrors art, math, science, everything.  that is my perception.  i think it's like an element that can combine with many things. 

for instance, the science side could be 'music therapy.'
the math side - studying fugues or anything with counterpoint or special forms.
art - the expression of feelings and emotions.

perhaps the 'muses' is where it all goes back to from a traditional music history perspective.  the greeks thought they were all interconnected.  i tend to think so too.

just in case you are interested - i have a bunch of info on the grosse fuge and it's recent discovery.  i think i could dig it up.  but, of course, there are many misunderstood pieces.

another idea is lost and found.  how pieces can be lost for many years and then found again.  traced back through this and that place or person.  it's kind of interesting.  perhaps thefts now and agin - so the item doesn't turn up until everyone forgets it was stolen.  not sure about which piece in particular - but you know, i still wish for a few more mozart cadenzas to show up.  basically, the ones that we don't have (unless, of course, there was no 'folio' of cadenzas that i vaguely remember being mention between leopold and mozart - and he DID spontaneously improvise most of them).  the barenreuter edition had some interesting things to say - otherwise - and that there was a distinction between his 'improvisations' and 'cadenzas.'

[pianistimo]

you know, music therapy is really becoming an 'in' thing.  i believe at several uni's there are in-depth programs and majors for that subject.  ie temple university.  twould be interesting to find out what exactly is covered and how the therapy is now being used.

[Bob]

Development of the piano?  That would easily fill 2 pages.

Careers in music?

[burstroman]

You might try to make "an argument or a a case" to promote a relatively unknown composer.

[iumonito]

Vocal Music on the piano (Focus on Liszt, mention Thalberg and his excellent method on the art of singing applied to the piano, draw a difference between art songs and opera transcriptions, then explain why it is absurd that three generation of pianists have turned their back on this seminal part of the literature for the instrument, and that there is some requrgence, particularly due to the discovery by many youngsters of gems such as Liszt Schubert transcription and Rigoletto (the other two Verdi solos still await for a break-through performer to bring them back to the limelight where they belong).  You can mention Bach chorale preludes and the Fitzwilliam virginal book as antecedents).

[Bob]

Make it easy -- a brief history of music.  Music periods.  Easy two pager.

Make it difficult -- The development of the range of the piano.  How the keyboard grew.  The composers.  The pieces.  The technical innovations.  All that in two pages.

[pianistimo]

whilst ruminating about the grosse fuge ...i happened upon this article written in 1931 by sydney drew (on jstor).  it is entitled:  'the grosse fuge': an analysis from music and letters, vol 12, no 3 (july 1931), pp 253-261

'this work of beethoven's exemplifies the kind of composition that eludes any established system of describing form.  since it is a highly organic thing, it must appertain to one or more of the highly organic forms -- as the fugue, the sonata (first movement form), the variations, the fantasia (in bach's sense), the rondo (in beethoven's) and so forth.  but, the moment we try to interpret it in the terms of any one of these classical forms, it breaks that form, however elastic we may make the form in order to bring it and the music into a reasonable agreement.  even when we try to let the work suggest of its own accord a fashion of two or three of the forms, it is sure sooner or later to do something which asks us to incorporate still further familiar types  of architecture, until we feel for a little while either that this work is formless, or that it is simply the manifestation of an attempt to adopt all forms to one end.

in such cases as this, we have to appeal to the spirit of the composition.  if that spirit answers the appeal, everything becomes satisfactory.  the work proves to be informed with reason and purpose throughout, and we see that the structure could not be other than it is, however peculiar, anomalous, or arbitrary it may be when tested of any of the set standards.

my own experience of the 'grosse fuge' has taught me that the work is formally perfect, in view of what the composer has to express.  but my period of instruction was not brief or easy.  even after somefifty hours of studying the score, i could not feel the central governing energy that brought the work into the shape it has, and so it still seemed as apparently rhapsodical, and indeed chaotic, as it had during the the moments when i first glanced at the pages.  knowledge began to come to me, however, from the hour in which i realized the character and probable purpose of the passage from bar 351 to bar 414 (the passage that completes the first half of the big A-flat movement, leading the movement to its middle cadence in E-flat, and bringing about the return of the main theme of the big B-flat movement).  in this passage i discovered  the climax of all the preceding effort and labour; and with that discovery made, it was of course an easy matter to work backwards and forwards, until the entire thing became coherent -- that is orderly, or of perfect form.'

what do you think about this start?  i want to read the rest of the article - but i don't have access to jstor.  i actually copied the grosse fuge off of a site from the beethovenhaus.  it's interesting because it's one of the last pieces beethoven wrote.  (he wrote it for four hands).  it has a death knell type of feeling.  beethoven so deaf.  so full of being 'musically pushed to the limit.'  he was probably half sane and half crazy - but his music you still feel the old beethoven.  just a shadow of his former self.  i really liked this article after viewing some of the grosse fuge myself.  it is a topic of which i want to study further - but possibly too deep for a two pager.  unless you write of hard to understand music.

[lichristine]

I would do one on exactly why it's seemingly impossible to find a color keyboard.

There are articles upon articles that show that such things exist, but never for purchase.

(Color keyboard as in colored light is projected nto a screen of your choice in accordance with a note that's played)

[pianistimo]

toys r us.  my daughter has one.  it's not full size, though.  do they have those?

[lichristine]

Apparently they've made such things, but I've never seen one for sale.
Toys R Us? Really? I love that store!!! Merci!

[paris]

thank you for your replies:)

i've done one about yundi li in the end (rivals, last year lang lang, this year li hehe), one is still opened, blank, and i'm staring in it.

however, i'll consider your replies, having in mind my not-very-proud-of english..

[pianistimo]

aspects of performance practice?  you already know this - so you don't have to do THAT much work.