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...

"Not Baroque Enough" I have wanted to build a better understanding of Baroque music for a while. My forays into Baroque are limited to what I’ve played on my violin and listening to compositions I like. I don’t have a formal education in music or music history - so this seemed like a daunting task. A casual question posed to my violin teacher set the ball rolling. I was working on some pieces from Baroque Violin Pieces Book 2 - and the consistent feedback I received was "It does not sound Baroque enough".   How does one learn to play in the Baroque style? And is there a single Baroque style? What about the differences in instruments then and what we have now?   My teacher’s answer was simple but effective. "Listen more. Listen to different composers and see how they had their individual styles. Try to understand how that style changed from composer to composer". This seemed like an approach that I could take up by myself with help from online and physical ...

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...