“Curlew Call”, Peter Bagshaw
The call of the curlew is its best known feature – indeed, the potential disappearance of this sound from the soundscape of the countryside is one of the most potent…
Tag: music for another world
“The Curlew”, song cycle by Peter Warlock of Yeats poems.
One of the more colourful, if not notorious, characters of British music was Peter Warlock. Like Arnold Bax he gained much inspiration from a sojourn in Ireland “The Curlew” song…
Blossom Dearie, “Somebody New”
I have long admired the singing of the late Blossom Dearie, who effortlessly conjured up a world of rueful sophistication with immaculate phrasing. “Blossom Dearie” was he real name. This…
Play That Funky Classical Music White Boy
Raiding the vast (and out of copyright) canon of classical music has been a recurrent theme in popular music, from Frank Sinatra to The Farm to Eric Carmen (though Carmen’s…
Let’s Get Sophisticated! #SophistiPop Old and New …. with Bryan Ferry, ABC, Michael Franks, Destroyer, Red Box, Aztec Camera, Marshall Crenshaw and the Style Council
“Sophisti-Pop” is a subgenre of pop that takes musical elements from jazz, MOR, synthpop and what could be best called easy listening, and mixes them with a more literary-than-visceral, slightly…
Piano minimalism from 1880 – Liszt’s “Via Crucis”, Reinbert de Leeuw
Liszt’s piano setting of his late work Via Crucis (originally for choir, soloists and organ) has many passages that sound extraordinarily like Satie or other much later exponents of minimalism. Wikipedia…
Séamus Sweeney 