For a high school (‘Rhetoric’) class at the school where I teach, I’m putting together a master list and a series of blog posts with some comments about different periods in the history of Western Classical music; I plan to have these postings span over about three months and be finished by December of this year.
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This is my personal favorite among my albums.
This is perhaps the project in which I've most featured my own special techniques on solo hammered dulcimer --- at least that's how it felt at the time and as I reconstruct the pieces in live settings (in the studio we usually do much more than just record solos) and the creative vision is worked out in great detail and with much joy!
...When you’ve developed a performance piece, or even just something you’ve learned which you like to play on your own, it may be easy to simply draw on your memory of the way the composition goes, and bring it out and replicate it.
Or it may turn out to be a big challenge to reconstruct all the details in the way you intended originally, and you have to struggle to get it right.
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When I was a baby, my mom would sit at the piano in the living room and play Beethoven, Chopin, and Rachmaninoff, and she would sing Romantic pieces such as ‘The Holy City,’ ‘Gesu Bambino,’ and ‘O Holy Night,’ exclaiming how wonderful these works were and how she didn’t really do them justice --- and I absorbed every nuance of these experiences.
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Recently I’ve come to the realization that the typical melody has four simple traits that we can easily look at and figure out --- whether we’re learning a new tune or coming up with our own new composition.
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There are certain musical pieces that we personally love, and that our whole culture seems to love. Sometimes I like to consider what it is that is so lovable, then make my own arrangements with ideas from what I find.
Here’s a really clear one as an example! Today I was talking with a student about how to arrange the old Shaker tune ‘Simple Gifts,’ and I mentioned how Aaron Copland had made a theme and variations from it in section seven of his very popular orchestral Appalachian Spring Suite. (Many folks from my generation and older remember one part of it as the theme music for the weekly TV news show The Twentieth Century with Walter Cronkite.)
...When I perform, people often ask me how long I’ve been playing the hammered dulcimer. I think they mean this question to compliment my apparent years of study, probably many, you know, to learn from teachers how to develop the appropriate virtuosity on the instrument.
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