Sounds Interesting: All the Fun of the Fanfare

This podcast from the Sounds Interesting series spotlights a selection of fanfares composed for a variety of occasions during the last century.         Links to the music featured in this podcast: Maurice Ravel L’Éventail de Jeanne (8.573354) Morton Gould Fanfare for Freedom (8.572629) William Alwyn Fanfare for a Joyful Occasion (8.570705) David Read More …

All the fun of the fanfare.

The Naxos Glossary of Musical Terms has this definition of the word ‘fanfare’: A fanfare is a flourish of trumpets or other similar instruments, used for military or ceremonial purposes, or music that conveys this impression. The Naxos catalogue tells a slightly different story, in that you’ll find a number of compositions with the word Read More …

The long reed

For some woodwind instruments, their close cousins sound markedly different. Take the closing bars of Beethoven’s Egmont Overture, for example. When the shrill piccolo slices through the texture, there’s no way you would mistake it for the sound of an homogenous flute. And when the bulky contrabassoon enters in Ravel’s Mother Goose Suite, it’s a Read More …

April playbill

We’re well into April, the name derived from the Latin word aperit which means ‘opening’. Flowers and trees in the northern hemisphere do indeed begin to bloom at this time, but April can be a most confusing, if not frustrating month: drearily wet one day, promisingly warm the next, armed with surprises and contradictions, daisies Read More …