In the first of two Easter Sunday posts exploring the festival as seen from diverse viewpoints, Mahlerman looks eastwards. With more than a millennium of Christianity behind them the Russian Easter (Pashka) is the single most important day in the Orthodox calendar. Last year I played with a straight bat at ... Read More...
About Author Profile: Mahlerman
This mellow Sunday afternoon Mahlerman rocks us gently with some maternally musical lullabies... As the poignant letters of Vincent van Gogh reveal, a mother fixation became one of his great obsessions toward the end of his short life. A couple of years before his death in 1890 he painted a series ... Read More...
Can serious music be funny? This week Mahlerman brings us four pieces guaranteed to raise a smile... Serious music, and humour; it has never really worked has it? And although Papa Haydn may have raised a laugh in 18th Century Europe with his 'Surprise' Symphony, and Mozart with his 'Musical Joke' ... Read More...
This week Mahlerman shows that losing an arm need not mean the end of a pianist's career... When Paul Wittgenstein woke up in a Russian field hospital in 1914 he was missing his right arm and was effectively a prisoner of war. A shock for anybody, it was particularly so for ... Read More...
This week Mahlerman is contemplating the peace of the grave... Over 500 years ago in Flanders, or possibly France, Johannes Ockeghem notated the earliest extant Requiem Mass that contained two melodic threads woven together to make a satisfying, formalized whole - and polyphony had arrived in liturgical music. For hundreds of ... Read More...
Today, Mahlerman examines the legacy of James Joyce: the language in the music, and the music in the language... The great modernist writer James Joyce was so saturated in music that, for a while as a young man, he considered devoting his life to it, but although music's loss became literature's ... Read More...
This week Mahlerman's ears are ringing... Whilst not exactly littered with (good) examples the bell, in all its many forms, is quite common throughout the classical music canon, at least from the mid 19th Century onward. Gustav Mahler had a particular weakness born of a peculiar sentimental streak that somehow managed ... Read More...
This week Mahlerman turns his attention to the visual arts - the work of great photographers accompanied, as you'd expect, by some remarkable music... Although all Dabblers dabble under the banner of Culture, an almost complete absence of it here in costal Spain invited me to consider what Culture actually is. ... Read More...
A Christmas Day treat for you, from Mahlerman... That Johann Sebastian Bach was the most inspired master of polyphony (the mixing of two, or several, melodic voices) to arise since the dawn of Western music is no longer disputed, but it is worth reminding ourselves that he was nothing if not ... Read More...
One of Beethoven's many musical legacies is a superstition about the symphonic number 9. Today, Mahlerman looks at some composers who might be said to have fallen at the ninth hurdle... It is now almost universally accepted that the standard set by Beethoven early in the 19th Century with his cycle of ... Read More...
