music

  • Notes for a distant room

    Poems and prose are constrained by the boundary of words, limited to the alphabet’s small alphabet of symbols. Paintings are fenced in by pigment and canvas, their emotion frozen by the moment of their completion. But music breathes as it moves through time in an unfixed, intangible and often an inexplicable manner- speaking directly to

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  • Orchestrated Illusions

    Throughout history, all the forms of art we know have been seen as an instrument of control, music more than any other perhaps. During the Cold War, the cultural battlefield was as critical as the political one, with the USSR and the USA vying for global influence through their artistic output.  The US had a

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  • March Without Mercy

    March Without Mercy

    The restless, relentless, mechanical and thunderous beat goes on as the left hand begins to pound the piano. The right hand follows suite and thus begins one of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s most well known compositions- his Prelude in G Minor from Études-Tableaux Op. 39 No. 6. While Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in G Minor seems to be glorious

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  • Notes for Sale

    Notes for Sale

    The year is 1501. That was the fateful year that sealed the future of Music as the world knew it. Till 1501 to the present day, music was the last way of expression that was not commercialized, however the first printing and publishing of the first music work that year by Ottaviano de Petrucci is

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  • Symphony of Censorship

    Symphony of Censorship When Dmitri Shostakovich premiered Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk in 1934, its bold orchestration and raw emotional intensity shocked and thrilled Soviet audiences—until it terrified the regime. The modernist and sexually charged opera where Shostakovich intended to show the patriarchal society in which we live in, where through frustration and years of abuse

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