Richard Clayderman (born Philippe Pagès on December 28, 1953, Paris) is a French pianist who has released numerous albums, including renditions and arrangements of popular music, French chansons, and popular piano works of Beethoven, Chopin and Mozart.Most of his recordings focus on popular music in general and orchestral arrangements of well-known romantic songs in particular, such as Yesterday, The Sound of Silence and Memory, rather than on Jazz or Classical Music.He is known to alter many famous pieces of music such as Für Elise. His music is generally played with an orchestra.
Thursday, August 7, 2008
Jay Chou Piano Battle In Chopin Style
"Secret" : There were several occasions when Jay Chou paid tribute to his favourite composer, Chopin .
1. Right at the beginning of the movie, a lesson about Chopin was being taught in class. He was described as a gifted musician and composer.
2. There were 2 paintings in the music room that were supposedly Chopin and his lover (George Sand). The conversation between Xianglun & Xiaoyu was about Chopin and his lover. Xianglun lamented that the two eventually parted ways. However, Xiaoyu seemed envious that the couple was able to spend 10 years together, which to the couple, was possibly a long time. Jay may have added this element (Chopin & lover) because the 10 years was the period of time in which Chopin produced his most outstanding work.
3.Qin Yi (Sky) carried Chopin’s manuscript and kept it in her locker.
4.Chopin's Waltz (Op.64 No.2 C# minor) and "Black Key" Etude (Op. 10 No. 5) feature in the 鬥琴(Piano Duel) scene. Note that the melodic sequence of the "Black Key" Etude that is performed includes both the introductory black key sequence, as well as an excerpt from later on in the piece, which is played only on the white keys.
Sunday, August 3, 2008
People Who Are Maniacs In Piano Do....
25 ways to kill a piano
A couple of years ago, one of the angriest comment threads ever on Music Thing concerned a bunch of students in Aberystwyth who bought a piano on Freecycle, put it on a beach, burned it, and said it was art. Today, YouTube is stuffed with people being mean to pianos. Damn, you must have had some bad piano teachers...
A couple of years ago, one of the angriest comment threads ever on Music Thing concerned a bunch of students in Aberystwyth who bought a piano on Freecycle, put it on a beach, burned it, and said it was art. Today, YouTube is stuffed with people being mean to pianos. Damn, you must have had some bad piano teachers...
1.Throw it off a cliff, set fire to it
2.Shoot it with shotguns and an AK47
3.Knock it over and jump on it
4.Jens Johansson (who is Yngwie Malmsteen's keyboard player) smashes up an old piano while giggling hysterically
5.Back a pickup truck into it
6.Play it with a JCB digger (this one really is the stuff of nightmares)
7.Drive over it in an enormous truck
8.Put on a leather coat and fill it with fireworks
9.Smash it and sample it
10.Fire it from a trebuchet (or here at Burning Man, where presumably it's performance art)
11.Throw it down a hill
12.Burn it and call it art (again)
13.Pull it off the back of a moving pickup truck
14.Drag it behind a pickup truck
15.Chop it with an axe
16.Hit it with a sldege hammer
17.Throw it off a building (Warning: Video contains giggling MIT students, where they've been doing it since 1972)
18.Bash two together
19.Drop it off a fork lift truck
20.Drive a car into a piano shop
21.Blow it up
22.In the interests of fairness, here's an organ getting smashed by giggling metal fans
23.Use a burning acoustic guitar to set it alight
24.Throw stuff at it
25.Blow up a grand piano with really a lot of TNT
2.Shoot it with shotguns and an AK47
3.Knock it over and jump on it
4.Jens Johansson (who is Yngwie Malmsteen's keyboard player) smashes up an old piano while giggling hysterically
5.Back a pickup truck into it
6.Play it with a JCB digger (this one really is the stuff of nightmares)
7.Drive over it in an enormous truck
8.Put on a leather coat and fill it with fireworks
9.Smash it and sample it
10.Fire it from a trebuchet (or here at Burning Man, where presumably it's performance art)
11.Throw it down a hill
12.Burn it and call it art (again)
13.Pull it off the back of a moving pickup truck
14.Drag it behind a pickup truck
15.Chop it with an axe
16.Hit it with a sldege hammer
17.Throw it off a building (Warning: Video contains giggling MIT students, where they've been doing it since 1972)
18.Bash two together
19.Drop it off a fork lift truck
20.Drive a car into a piano shop
21.Blow it up
22.In the interests of fairness, here's an organ getting smashed by giggling metal fans
23.Use a burning acoustic guitar to set it alight
24.Throw stuff at it
25.Blow up a grand piano with really a lot of TNT
Fazioli: The Best Grand Piano in the World Today?
When those who play piano professionally are asked which piano is the best one in the world today--the easy answer, of course, is typically Steinway. A Steinway piano is still considered the greatest ever and ranks #1 with the majority of artists around the world endorsing it with their signature on the company's website. But in recent years, an Italian-made grand piano has started to capture the imagination of a lot of legendary pianists; so much so that a few internationally-renowned pianists have recently declared they'll only play on this one piano for all concerts and recordings in the studio. It's called a Fazioli, named after Italian concert pianist and engineer Paolo Fazioli. Even though it was created already in 1978--careful additions have been made to it through its evolution that make it one of the most carefully-crafted pianos in the world today. The original aim of the company in the late 70's was to create a piano that had its own unique sound (in a time when many were made to sound virtually the same), produce smaller numbers of them due to the higher-quality materials put forth into making them and to make it an ever-evolving piano creation in progress to live up to modern standards as each decade wore on. When they were finally showcased for the first time at various preview shows in Italy during the late 70's and early 80's--it was treated almost as if it was an Italian fashion show instead of a preview of pianos. Well, the Fazioli was almost as beautiful as a female Italian model...and probably just as tall if set on its side.
Nocturne : A Word That Has Stunned The World Is...
A nocturne (from the French for "nocturnal") is usually a musical composition that is inspired by, or evocative of, the night. Historically, nocturne is a very old term applied to night Offices and, since the Middle Ages, to divisions in the canonical hour of Matins.
The name nocturne was first applied to pieces in the eighteenth century, when it indicated an ensemble piece in several movements, normally played for an evening party and then laid aside. Sometimes it carried the Italian equivalent, notturno, such as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's quadraphonic Notturno in D, K.286, written for four lightly echoing separated ensembles of paired horns with strings, and his Serenata Notturna, K. 239. At this time, the piece was not necessarily evocative of the night, but might merely be intended for performance at night, much like a serenade.
In its more familiar form as a single-movement character piece usually written for solo piano, the nocturne was cultivated primarily in the nineteenth century. The first nocturnes to be written under the specific title were by the Irish composer John Field, generally viewed as the father of the Romantic nocturne that characteristically features a cantabile melody over an arpeggiated, even guitar-like accompaniment. However, the most famous exponent of the form was Frédéric Chopin, who wrote 21 of them. One of the most famous pieces of nineteenth-century salon music was the "Fifth Nocturne" of Ignace Leybach, who is now otherwise forgotten. Later composers to write nocturnes for the piano include Gabriel Fauré, Alexander Scriabin and Erik Satie (1919), as well as Peter Sculthorpe. In the movement entitled 'The Night's Music' ('Musiques nocturnes' in French) of Out of Doors for solo piano (1926), Bartók imitated the sounds of nature . It contains quiet, eerie, blurred cluster-chords and imitations of the twittering of birds and croaking of nocturnal creatures, with lonely melodies in contrasting sections. Other notable nocturnes from the 20th century include those from Michael Glenn Williams, Samuel Barber and Robert Helps.
Other examples of nocturnes include the one for orchestra from Felix Mendelssohn's incidental music for A Midsummer Night's Dream (1848), the set of three for orchestra and female choir by Claude Debussy (who also wrote one for solo piano) and the first movement of the Violin Concerto No. 1 (1948) by Dmitri Shostakovich. French composer Erik Satie composed a series of five small nocturnes. These were however, far different from those of Frédéric Chopin and John Field.
The first movement of Ludwig van Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata has also been considered a nocturne (certainly, Ludwig Rellstab, who gave the piece its nickname, thought it evocative of the night), although Beethoven did not describe it as one.
Nocturnes are generally thought of as being tranquil, often expressive and lyrical, and sometimes rather gloomy, but in practice pieces with the name nocturne have conveyed a variety of moods: the second of Debussy's orchestral Nocturnes, "Fêtes", for example, is very lively.
The word was later used by James McNeill Whistler in the title of a number of his paintings, consistent with his theory that fine art should essentially be concerned with the beautiful arrangement of colors in harmony. Debussy's nocturnes were inspired by Whistler's paintings. Several other artists followed suit.
The name nocturne was first applied to pieces in the eighteenth century, when it indicated an ensemble piece in several movements, normally played for an evening party and then laid aside. Sometimes it carried the Italian equivalent, notturno, such as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's quadraphonic Notturno in D, K.286, written for four lightly echoing separated ensembles of paired horns with strings, and his Serenata Notturna, K. 239. At this time, the piece was not necessarily evocative of the night, but might merely be intended for performance at night, much like a serenade.
In its more familiar form as a single-movement character piece usually written for solo piano, the nocturne was cultivated primarily in the nineteenth century. The first nocturnes to be written under the specific title were by the Irish composer John Field, generally viewed as the father of the Romantic nocturne that characteristically features a cantabile melody over an arpeggiated, even guitar-like accompaniment. However, the most famous exponent of the form was Frédéric Chopin, who wrote 21 of them. One of the most famous pieces of nineteenth-century salon music was the "Fifth Nocturne" of Ignace Leybach, who is now otherwise forgotten. Later composers to write nocturnes for the piano include Gabriel Fauré, Alexander Scriabin and Erik Satie (1919), as well as Peter Sculthorpe. In the movement entitled 'The Night's Music' ('Musiques nocturnes' in French) of Out of Doors for solo piano (1926), Bartók imitated the sounds of nature . It contains quiet, eerie, blurred cluster-chords and imitations of the twittering of birds and croaking of nocturnal creatures, with lonely melodies in contrasting sections. Other notable nocturnes from the 20th century include those from Michael Glenn Williams, Samuel Barber and Robert Helps.
Other examples of nocturnes include the one for orchestra from Felix Mendelssohn's incidental music for A Midsummer Night's Dream (1848), the set of three for orchestra and female choir by Claude Debussy (who also wrote one for solo piano) and the first movement of the Violin Concerto No. 1 (1948) by Dmitri Shostakovich. French composer Erik Satie composed a series of five small nocturnes. These were however, far different from those of Frédéric Chopin and John Field.
The first movement of Ludwig van Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata has also been considered a nocturne (certainly, Ludwig Rellstab, who gave the piece its nickname, thought it evocative of the night), although Beethoven did not describe it as one.
Nocturnes are generally thought of as being tranquil, often expressive and lyrical, and sometimes rather gloomy, but in practice pieces with the name nocturne have conveyed a variety of moods: the second of Debussy's orchestral Nocturnes, "Fêtes", for example, is very lively.
The word was later used by James McNeill Whistler in the title of a number of his paintings, consistent with his theory that fine art should essentially be concerned with the beautiful arrangement of colors in harmony. Debussy's nocturnes were inspired by Whistler's paintings. Several other artists followed suit.
Piano On The Stage Is....
The piano is a musical instrument played by means of a keyboard that produces sound by striking steel strings with felt hammers. The hammers immediately rebound allowing the strings to continue vibrating at their resonant frequency. These vibrations are transmitted through a bridge to a soundboard that amplifies them.
The piano is widely used in Western music for solo performance, ensemble use, chamber music, and accompaniment. It is also very popular as an aid to composing and rehearsal. Although not portable and often expensive, the piano's versatility and ubiquity have made it one of the most familiar musical instruments. It is sometimes classified as both a percussion and a stringed instrument. According to the Hornbostel-Sachs method of music classification, it is grouped with Chordophones.
The word piano is a shortened form of the word pianoforte, which is seldom used except in formal language and derived from the original Italian name for the instrument, clavicembalo [or gravicembalo] col piano e forte (literally harpsichord with soft and loud). This refers to the instrument's responsiveness to keyboard touch, which allows the pianist to produce notes at different dynamic levels by controlling the speed with which the hammers hit the strings
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