Musical Musings Volume 7 - Concertos Part Two

The history of concerted music for orchestra and one or more soloists is a long one, beginning with the early Baroque period (beginning roughly in 1600) to the modern contemporary period. The repertoire for one or more soloists and orchestra is huge in sheer number and variety of works, hence the Concerto category is the first category to have a second volume devoted to it.

The solo concerto really came into being in the early 18^th century with the Italian composer Antonio Vivaldi who made the concerto a vehicle for a soloist on one instrument with orchestra backing. He also steered music away from counterpoint and fugue and into the more accessible style gallant.  Vivaldi’s innovations in style and content led to the result in t he early 19^th century of the performer/composer, virtuoso performers that wrote music for their own use that would show off their prowess on their given instrument. Many composers first made a name for themselves as performer/composers such as Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt, and many, many more.
 
This 7th volume in a series of ebooks about classical music composers and their works is a collection of 50 concertos. Included are works by familiar and unfamiliar composers, as well as well-known and so not well-known compositions.  There are 37 different composers included, so this volume has the greatest variety of composers of any other of the seven current volumes.

As with the rest of the volumes in the series, there are links to performances of the works that are discussed included at the end of each article.  I invite one and all to Musical Musings, the blog where these articles first appeared. 

Musical Musings Volumes 4 and 5

Two more ebooks of classical music analysis and performances:


Musical Musings Volume 4 - Music For Keyboard

This is the 4^th volume in my series of articles about classical music. All of these articles originally appeared on my classical music blog Musical Musings. As with the other volumes in the series, there is a link to a performance of the musical work discussed in the article.

This volume contains works for keyboard; works for organ, clavichord, harpsichord and piano. There are examples of all 4 instruments in articles that begin with the Italian composer Girolamo Frescobaldi (1583 - 1643) and end with the American composer Henry Cowell (1897-1965). By the way, the work by Cowell that is included, The Banshee, is to be played on the piano, but by using the fingers of the ‘pianist’ directly on the strings, so it isn’t actually for a keyboard per se. 

The repertoire for piano alone is enormous. Add the repertoire for other keyboard instruments and the number grows to gigantic proportions.  This collection is but a miniscule scratch in the vast repertoire of keyboard music, and as such it is hardly representative. The pieces contained herein are some of my favorites, some familiar, some not so much, and some have been added purely for their uniqueness.

Musical Musings Volume 5 - Works For Orchestra

This 5^th volume in the series of ebooks taken from my music blog Musical Musings contains articles concerning works for orchestra that are not symphonies or concertos. This primarily means that that works in this volume are overtures from operas or concert overtures, and symphonic poems.

The most heavily represented composer in this volume is Franz Liszt. While Liszt was not the first composer by any means to write music inspired by other arts, he was the first to label them as symphonic poems. Nine of his thirteen symphonic poems are in this volume. Along with Liszt are 22 other composers from Beethoven (born in 1770) to Penderecki (born in 1933).

As with other volumes in this ebook series, there is a link at the end of each article to a performance of the work discussed.