On Books, Music, and Other Things

This is a continuation of my Baroque music listening project . A Short Introduction to the Baroque Period The Baroque period in Western Classical Music lasted roughly between 1600 - 1750. I use the "Western" prefix to distinguish from other classical music traditions.  A musical era cannot be strictly defined as having begin and ended in specific years. The years 1600 and 1750 are set as the boundaries of this period by music historians for ease of study. If we have to look for notable events in these years - the first modern opera as we understand it today was written around 1597, and 1750 marked the death of Johann Sebastian Bach. The Baroque period saw the rise of opera and other forms like the oratorio, cantata, solo and trio sonatas, the prelude and the fugue. During the Baroque period words took precedence over the structure of the music as opposed to the preceding Rennaisance period where it was the opposite. The "Doctrine of Affections" is a defining c...

Gustav Adolf Huber was a German musician, composer and music educationist. He was born in 1872 in Magdeburg, Germany. I learnt his beautiful Concertino in G Major recently and tried to find out more about his life. Information about Huber is hard to come by. Popular encyclopedias of classical music do not mention him at all. There is very little on the internet - except for a tiny bilingual website dedicated to him. The English version seems to have been Google-translated from the German version, with odd results. The site does have a few photographs of his family and descendants, and an incomplete list of his compositions. I found this video to be an expressive rendition of the Concertino in G Major. In contrast to the sparseness of information about Huber himself, the number of videos on YouTube of students playing his compositions is far higher. His compositions are widely used - as his eponymous website correctly claims - in music teaching. The name of his hometown is perhaps bet...

A few years ago, I decided I wanted to own a record player. From the first passing thought, triggered by something I had read, it quickly became an obsession where I spent hours researching players, stereo setups, availability of vinyl records in India and reading what others have done. My music was completely digital until then, because of the dual factors of convenience and availability. The cassettes of my schooldays had been relegated to being locked up in cardboard boxes for many years since there was nothing to play them on. I went through all the initial phases that are typical of the vinyl newbie who is not discerning enough yet, has money to spend, and follows all the advice they read online - often conflicting - to the letter. I was driven to possess a medium that I grew up listening to - courtesy a father who invested in music - and I realized that this was a good investment when I listened to Boney M's Oceans of Fantasy on vinyl for the first time. My father ...