From the monthly archives:
I discovered a most remarkable piece of information today: a list of the 365 top selling songs of the 20th century as compiled by the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America). I encourage you to spend a few minutes and look down the list to see what songs have charmed Americans for the past eleven [...]
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In the Baroque, Italian composers deemed melody as the most important element in a composition, whereas French composers held melody as subordinate to harmony, melody being merely the top voice of a progression of chords. This is clearly an oversimplification, but these philosophies have resonated down through the ages. Some songwriters come up with a [...]
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This morning I watched the 1991 PBS special Songs of the Civil War that features the McGarrigle sisters, Rufus and friends singing “Better Times are Coming” and “Hard Times Come Again No More.” In it we see a 17 year old Rufus Wainwright lost in the joy of singing. Not only he, but his mother [...]
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As an artist, being influenced by someone is a tricky confession. I once told ex-Byrd David Crosby that he was a tremendous influence on my compositional aesthetic. I played him some examples of my music where I heard an obvious influence, but he was baffled. Music critics are notorious in their descriptions of new music [...]
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The previous posting seems to have garnered a flurry of responses on two of the RW bulletin boards: rutopia and rw.com.
I post their responses here.
A technique I use in teaching music theory from time to time, is after I’ve lectured for a while, I’ll stop, and with a straight face, draw a false conclusion to [...]
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In my idealistic way, I thought “what a great idea to transcribe his piano and voice songs so that ‘everyone’ can sing them.” I met with soprano Juliana Gondek the other day to find three songs for our upcoming March 9 concert at UCLA, and we were both surprised at how so few of them [...]
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I plan to use notated musical examples in my book, although I know many interested readers do not read music. It is my hope that they can look at the lyrics to guide them through the shapes of the notes and try to understand whatever point is being made. My question to those of you [...]
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Friend and musicologist Mitchell Morris and friend and composer Mark Carlson have had to put up with my obsession about Rufus Wainwright for the past several years. Mitchell encouraged me to write a paper about RW: “present it at musicological conference, let our community discover him.” So, I started writing an article, and it seemed [...]
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