The Whole Music Experience

Wikipedia As I mention in my book Whole Music , when I was a child I fell in love with timbre and the voices of the individual instruments we listened to in music class.  Each instrument conjured a specific emotions or feeling in me.  The French horn caused me to feel majestic and the cello invoked melancholy.  My moods would shift with each instrument that I heard and my moods would shift quickly. Today, I listen to more than timbre, but I have an understanding of how tone, frequencies of the tone and timbre (the color of the tone) affect me on all levels.  And I wonder what listening to an entire symphony does with its many voices, themes, keys, musical passages etc... In the concept of "whole music" I prefer not to separate musical components, but in the case of this post, I will present solo instruments for your listening and feeling pleasure. If you keep a music journal (and I hope that you do by now), write down the emotions that come up with each instr...

Céline Moinet J.S. Bach, Berio, Britten Oboe Harmonia Mundi The oboe has always fascinated me.  The instrument’s timbre falls somewhere between a cornet, English horn, and flute--so mysterious and alternately melancholy. If you asked me to single out the sound of the oboe in an orchestra, there’s a good chance that I’ll mistake the oboe for an English horn.  On Céline Moinet’s recording Oboe , the musician explores diverse territory ranging from the baroque architecture of J.S. Bach and then skipping ahead several hundred years to modern composers Elliott Carter, Luciano Berio and Benjamin Britten. By bringing compositions by those composers, we might end up thinking that J.S. Bach was ahead of his time as far as polyphonies played on a single instrument. However, the Bach pieces that Moinet chose for this recording, (both father and son, CPE Bach's work), were originally composed for transverse flute. Still that doesn’t stop Moinet’s oboe from resembling a...