Natural minor, harmonic minor, melodic minor….There is only ONE major scale, so why are there 3 minor scales? And what’s the difference between them?
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I am delighted to announce that two of my wonderful students, Yufei Wu and Linda Huang won Third Prize (Grade 1 Class and Grade 4 Class) at the London Youth Piano Competition 2021, out of the 467 competitors who entered from 36 countries. Congratulations!
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The benefits of practising with a metronome are well-known in the industry. It helps you speed up or slow down as required, stops you racing ahead, or dragging and improves your sense of timing – something that’s essential as an instrumentalist.
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Baroque music can be relatively serious and complex, but its surface is often enlivened by plenty of decoration and ornamentation. There are many types of Baroque expression, ranging from busily flowing movements deriving from dance forms to grandly religious works.
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The beginning of the Classical Period saw a reaction against the more lofty and earnest ideals of Baroque music. Now the aim was more to entertain, with a simpler and more transparent style. Later in the period, however, Beethoven and Schubert increasingly poured more personal emotions into their music.
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The main ingredients of jazz are: Swung Rhythms – where 2 normally equal notes, e.g. quavers, are changed to a triplet feel, with the 1st note twice as long as the 2nd. This can produce a lazy, mellow feel in slow music, and a springy bounce in faster passages.
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Building on the trend towards self-expression pioneered by Beethoven, the Romantic composers found ways of increasing the emotional intensity of their music. The composer’s personal life was now more likely to be an inspiration, as were nature, paintings, literature etc.
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The breakdown of the old certainties of society at the beginning of the Twentieth Century, heightened by the tragedy of the 1st World War, propelled composers away from the lush magnificence of late-Romantic music into a leaner and often more aggressive style.
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