In contrast, theEighth Symphonyis a peaceful, happy piece. It is a walk in the Bohemian countryside, full of flute bird-calls and pastoral tranquility. After his triumphantSeventhDvorak wanted to write a symphony for himself. He described it as “different from the others, with individual thoug...
I just had this piece of paper that I had folded into thirty-seconds trying to explain something to somebody, and it was sitting on the table next to a golf pencil I had for some reason, and I started to fill in the boxes. I was going to do the other side but it looked like som...
Maybe the travel and the compositions were his life after he became famous. Nevertheless, I was impelled to read on because the first part was so interesting, and I quickly looked up some of Dvorak’s music on YouTube and played it as I read. Some of the most interesting tidbits that ...
As for the map, it took me a goodly time to figure it out. Originally she asked if I could do it in the style of the famous “View From 9thAvenue”New Yorkercover, and I did start out with a more conscious imitation, but as the project progressed, it sort of expanded in all kind...
I love this piece; it’s always been my intention to clean it up in Photoshop and, if I can get permission from the estate of Robert Graves, to sell prints. The original hangs beside my desk and has for years, and yet only now I’m noticing a missing apostrophe. There’s a few ...
This attitude conflicts with an essential determinant of symphonic idiom, which is that the establishment and working-out of tensions in the piece are primarily occasioned by purely musical, formal means and that extramusical data, interesting though they may be, are not directly relevant to ...