Organs

The funny thing about organs is that they're really a lot of instruments bundled together.  A lot of instruments are this way, for instance, pianos, and piano-accordions and harmonicas.  Each note has its own sound-producing system.  In a piano, there's a set of strings devoted to each note.  In an organ, there's a number of pipes devoted to making sounds for each note. 

For a flute, for instance, in contrast, all the notes use the same tube to produce their sounds.  Same with a clarinet, or a trumpet, or (my instrument) a baritone, or Euphonium, or bassoon.  In all of these, there isn't a way for one note to stop working, leaving the other notes alone.  If you've played on an ancient piano, you might have experienced some notes being dumb, but the other notes sounding.  Organs have that problem occasionally.  But not flutes and clarinets and bassoons.

It's well known that organs have different sounds that can be turned on.  For each sound, there has to be a whole set of pipes, one for each key on the keyboard.  For 5 octaves, there would be 61 pipes for each sound.  For two sounds, 122 pipes.  For the pedals, another 61 pipes.  This should explain why there's so many pipes in an organ!

If you listen carefully to an organ playing a run (like maybe a scale), you might hear one pipe sounding just a little different!  This isn't intentional; just that the pipe—or pipes—for that note sounded different for some reason.  After all, it's a whole unique pipe!  (In fact, there are organs in which every note has a different sound quality!  This is just for fun, and not for serious music.)  Also, organ pipes are built in a room, and the acoustics of the room could influence how each pipe sounds, because they're placed in slightly different positions.  This sound variation from note to note, if there is one, would be normally considered part of the natural charm of the instrument, and not a flaw.

Archie 

Träumerei—Reverie

This (above-named) piece of music, is very well-known.  Unfortunately, it is a movement from Robert Schumann's Kinderszenen (Scenes from Childhood), a collection of piano pieces of only moderate difficulty.  I suspect the reason that it isn't more popularly known is that German title, with its intimidating Umlaut.

Träumerei is a slow-paced piece, with a memorable tune, and I thought it would be a natural for our New Horizons band, to play in a band arrangement.  So I went over to YouTube, and looked for such a thing. 

One arrangement popped up: by a 'Symphonic Middle-School Band'.  I kept looking for a better arrangement, but didn't find one.  When I went back to hear that first one again, guess what?  I couldn't find it!

Aha!  I did finally find it:

 Traumerei for String Orchestra

 

Tchaikovski's Baby Swans

One of my all time favorite musical / ballet pieces is a dance from Swan Lake: The Dance of the Cygnets:

Cygnets 

One comment: when I first heard this piece, as a little kid of 9 or 10, the piece ended softly; just two staccato chords, pop, pop!  That's my preference even today, not two thundering chords, which sound really stupid. 

Tchaikovsky was really a genius.  I occasionally try to imagine composing this piece—thinking of it as just a piece of music—and I think what an amazing piece of music it is!  Deep and learned, as well as cute and cheeky, at the same time. 

And then the orchestration, starting of with nothing but double reeds (at least, that's what it sounds like to me; there could be other hidden instruments).  And later, there are flutes joining in)!

It is so magical to see it ḍanced; these days just a small group of four dance it, with linked hands, I think following the choreography of Petipa, or someone like that.  And I have seen not one but two comedy versions of the same dance, with one baby swan totally confused, and confusing the other three as well!  I declare there's nothing funnier than the comedy version of that dance!  If only Tchaikovsky were alive to see it!

Pure genius. 

Arch 

The Chord of the Ninth

The chord of the 9th—not at all a rare chord in 19th, 20th and 21st century music—is interesting.  I was just thinking of the song 'Close 2 You', made popular by The Carpenters, and I realized that I had not often talked about harmony from the viewpoint of amateur musicians, especially guitar players.  The very first chord of that song is a subdominant 9th.  To avoid horrible terms like 'subdominant,' we have to decide what key the song will be in; let's say F.  The most common chords of F major are

(1) F-A-C, the F chord;

(5) C-E-G, the C chord;

(4) B♭-D-F, the B-Flat chord.

But the first chord of this song is, stripped down, B♭-D-F-C.

Hey, you're probably thinking, what's that C doing there?

Well, before the chord sounds, there are two notes: D F, which correspond to the words 

"Why do ..."

The next word is "birds," and that word is sung to C, which is why the chord of the 9th makes sense here.

The song continues with "...suddenly appear, anytime you are near?"

There is an excellent reason why this chord works well there; it's because the notes to which the next few syllables are sung are B♭ C and D, so we would consider the C an (accented)  passing note, which are notes that are not harmonized; they're just sounded over the preceding harmony.  The rules of popular music have evolved to allow those passing notes to be incorporated right into the chord, and it's given a name: chord of the (added) ninth.  (On B♭, of course.)

Dowland: Suzanna

Years ago, I acquired a CD of Dowland music performed by The Extempore String Ensemble.

There were certain tunes on that CD that I got to like, and among them a few that were 'earworms'; that is, they stuck in my memory.  Their names did not stick; just the tunes themselves.

Today, I happened to be on YouTube, searching for Dowland music, when I stumbled on this piece that I really like, titled Suzanna.  I'm pretty sure that was not the title of the piece on the CD, but anyway, go look for Suzanna by Dowland, and put it on!

Favorite Piece?

Watching a clip about the piece that stops various classical music lovers in their tracks, on hearing it.  Each one had a different one, and I got to thinking: how would I answer that question?  I'm likely to change my mind, depending on what I had been doing ...

But here's one favorite: the last chorus of the St. Matthew Passion by Bach— Wir setzen uns, mit Tränen nieder ... I have to check that title; I've forgotten it.  The disciples, and the two choirs (that work requires two choirs, and two orchestras and two organs), are seated symbolically at Jesus's grave, and are weeping. 

There is a powerful tune that keeps returning (these sorts of tunes are called a ritornello.)  It's in two parts.  One part starts in the major key, and ends in the minor.  The other one is almost a twin of the first, except that it starts in the minor, and finishes in the major. 

It's sad, but I love it!  I ought to give you a link to a recording, and maybe I will, later. 

Archie 

Kerry Dancing

My favorite English choir had an album in which there was this song: The Days of the Kerry Dancing, which not being something I was familiar with, I was not at all impressed with.  I heard it again here and there; on the radio, in the houses of other people, and I continued to be underwhelmed. 

Then, during band practice, (I play in this brass band for seniors) our leader handed out parts for a medley of British folksongs.  I recognized the tune at once, but now the circumstances were different!  The part I was playing would be classified as an inner part by band people, but choir people would hear it as a tenor line.  But all the three harmony lines ('voices', to be technical) were beautifully chromatic.

It's a little tough to explain what that word means without examples, but this song is a perfect example of a piece with chromatic elements in it.

Most folksongs, if they're moved down to C major*, would be playable only on the notes of C major, that is only on the white keys.  Occasionally the tune may wander into other keys, usually what we call neighboring keys, because they have the same notes as C major, except for one extra note: 

• F has B Flat instead of B,
• G has F# instead of F,
• A minor has G# instead of G, and so on.

So if the tune gets to be flavored with a chord in one of these keys, there's going to be an extraneous note inserted.  That would be a harmony note.

But around the time of Mozart, people began to write melodies that had these extra black notes purely for melodic effect, with no implied harmony at all!  This is what we call chromatic music. 

Well!  That made all the difference!  Unfortunately the piece didn't sound like a typical folksong anymore, but boy, was it fun to play!

[To be continued.]

Bobby Darin, Simple Song

I knew Bobby Darin as s popular singer of the sixties, who sang with The Ventures.  The Ventures were a great guitar group, and the combination was really fabulous!

Later, I discovered that he sang the English version of La Mer, a well known French song, whose English title was 'Somewhere beyond the sea.'  He also made the Kurt Weil song "Mac the Knife' popular.  His first hit was Dream Lover, and already it was clear that he had a great pop, rock, jazz voice. 

He co - wrote songs with Connie Francis, and had a romantic relationship with her, but they were prevented from marrying by her father. 

Apparently he was a Democrat, and gravitated towards writing protest songs, one of which is 'A Simple Song of Freedom'.  You can hear him picking on the guitar; he was clearly a talented musician.  It's said that he could play guitar, drums, and piano, and other instruments too.  He was a good actor, and I'm not sure what prevented him from pursuing a career in movies.  He married Sandra Dee, but they divorced. 

I must find out more, but stories about celebrities are even harder to verify than stories of classical composers.  Bobby Darin died in the mid seventies. 

Archie

The End of the Beatles

Fans without much life experience like to look for reasons and agents for the breakup of the Beatles.  They feel that there has to be someone who caused the breakup. 

The easiest one to blame is Yoko Ono.  She was an uncompromising woman, and she decided to show John all the things that were really wrong with her world.  The biggest thing at that time was the Vietnam War.

Starting from there, she showed him numerous things that she felt were wrong, including men deciding all sorts of matters—which affected women—without consulting the women. 

She saw that Paul was taking leadership of the Beatles, without waiting for consensus. 

She let John decide these things for himself.  Sometimes it was hard going; John resented some of the conclusions he was forced to arrive at.   Not forced by Yoko, but by force of logic. 

George was becoming frustrated at not being given an equal chance to include his music in Beatles albums, and he saw Paul as the main obstacle to that happening. 

This was enough to make the whole thing fall apart. 

There were smaller factors that grew into major problems: needing a manager (Paul wanted Linda's dad; John wanted another guy, who was revealed as too money - motivated).

By that time, they were all either married, or going steady, so it wasn't just keeping four people together.  It just couldn't last. 

A lot of fans wanted them to stay together very, very much; in fact, to some fans, it seemed like the end of the world when they broke up.  These are the ones who, to this day, keep looking for scapegoats.  I take a no fault approach. 

Archie.

The Father of Classical Music

I have often repeated that there is no greatest composer (or singer, or pianist, or whatever).  But J. S. Bach, the amazingly musical genius of the first part of the 18th Century, deserves to be granted special mention, as an authority in the classical stream of music: the music that flows from harmony. 

To some degree, even up to the time of Wagner, the inspiration for all music can be said to have been classical harmony; the harmony which J. S. Bach developed and polished during his lifetime. 

In the 65 or so years that Bach lived—as a student, a performer, a composer, and a teacher of music, he built a solid foundation of music—his own compositions, as well as adaptations of the music of others—that there would have been literally a whole library full of music for future generations to work on.  But, alas, not all of it has survived. 

There is a huge number of misstatements and misunderstandings about the music of Bach: that it is dry; that it is merely intellectual; that it is difficult to play; that it is outmoded, and so on.  All these statements are not entirely false; but they're subjective statements, and maybe true for some people. 

Bach was born in the month of March.  But at that time there were (at least) two calendars that were followed; the Julian Calendar, which was fairly useful, because the leap years were adjusted for the length of the year not being exactly 365 days.  (If not for leap years, Midsummer's Day would not fall on the longest day of the year.  To most people, the test of a good calendar is that midsummer and midwinter would, each of them, always fall on the same date each year.  [I re- phrased that a little; I did not intend to mean that Midsummer and Midwinter should be celebrated on the same day.])

By the 17th Century, astronomers in Rome had concluded that, in fact, the Leap Years—February 29 once in four years—was overdoing it.  By just a few minutes each year.  The solution was to cancel a leap year every 100 years.

Now Bach lived in a part of Germany that was strongly Protestant.  To them, any scheme invented by the Catholics in Rome was something they wouldn't stand for.  So, when Bach was born in 1685, on March 21st, it was weeks into the summer, and not the Spring Equinox, which it should have been. 

What are we to do?  Should we celebrate the birth of our favorite composer on the date entered in the church register, or should we celebrate it on the date it would have been in the more accurate Roman Catholic world?

Well, March 21 is, today, the Equinox, so it is convenient to celebrate Bach's birthday on the Equinox.  In the year he was born, it would have been some weeks later in the year, and we really could figure out what date it would have been in the rest of the world, but to hell with it.  I will celebrate it on the Equinox, and what is more, if Bach were to be brought alive, he would be happy, because (not being an accomplished astronomer), he was very likely confident that his birthday was March 21, because that would have been what his family told him. 

I repeat this story every year.  And now my duty has been discharged.  So I will plan a mini celebration for this Friday!

Archie 

[Edited on 2025/4/11.]

Paul Simon

The Beatles provided the sound track for my teen years; I liked lots of other artists and groups, but I loved the Beatles the most of all. 

I loved to sing, and the Beatles' songs were the ones I loved to sing the most.  There were others: Peter, Paul and Mary; Harry Belafonte; Simon and Garfunkel; The Rolling Stones; The Seekers; The Mamas and the Papas; and various uncles and aunts, whose names I can't even remember now. 

But, as an adult, reflecting the full sensibilities of my adult musical tastes, I think I have to single out Paul Simon.  His tunes, his lyrics, his instrumentation, his harmony; it's all perfect.  I don't need anyone to agree with me; I just think he captured almost exactly how I would have wanted to write a song.   How I would have written a song, if I could've written a song. 

I think I'll come back to this post, and add in my favorite Paul Simon tracks—I'll probably leave out the S & G tracks; there's too many of them—but not right now.  He did write some songs that didn't like; can't be helped.  Also some songs that I never knew; in fact, there are a lot of albums released in the last decade or so that I have completely missed.  I think 'Still Crazy After All These Years' is probably my favorite album from him; 'Graceland' comes a close second. 

Archie

Incy Spincy Spider

I'm wondering what would happen if I wrote a little piece based on the nursery rhyme ...

A Tune Used by Bach for a Chorale-Prelude

In the last several years of his life, Johann Sebastian Bach, my musical hero, prepared several packages of music for publication, though he did not expect them to be actually published.  They were intended to serve as a sort of summary of his art, a testament to his compositional skill. 

The Matthäuspassion, in English: the St. Matthew Passion.  This is a brilliant Oratorio, depicting the last days of Jesus, from the scene in the Garden of Gethsemane, to his interment in the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea.

The Mass in B Minor.  This version of the Catholic communion service is set to some of the most glorious music by Bach.  Some of the numbers are modifications of existing arias and choruses by Bach himself.  The work also features amazing writing for Baroque brass instruments. 

The Musical Offering (Musicalische Opfer), a set of contrapuntal compositions called canons, of very high ingenuity. 

The Goldberg Variations, a set of variations on a single theme, given by a German aristocrat.

The Brandenburg Concertos, a collection of 6 concerti grossi, an old musical form for groups of diverse instruments

The Well-Tempered Klavier, a set of 48 preludes and fugue in every key, major and minor, to celebrate a way of tuning a keyboard to make it possible to play in any key

The Art of Fugue, a set of 14 fugues, all based on the same subject.  ('Subject' can be interpreted as 'theme'; a fugue uses a subject over and over, the subject not undergoing modification, as it would in a Beethoven symphony, however.)

The Art of Fugue is considered to be incomplete, because the last fugue (a fugue on four subjects—the common subject of the entire set, and three more subjects) is incomplete.  That's not surprising, because writing a fugue on four subjects is not at all easy.  To make it harder, the fourth subject he intended to use was his name: B A C H.  In Germany, the letter B stood for B Flat; the letter H stood for B Natural!  Using this as a subject for a fugue is not impossible, but Bach must have wanted to write a really good one. 

Anyway.

After Bach had died, the music of the several fugues of The Art of Fugue were discovered among his belongings, together with the Unfinished fugue.  And, on that last page, there was a chorale: 'Vor deinen Thrön hiermit' ("Here before Thy throne I stand").  Though it is called a chorale, that's the German word for chorale-prelude, that is, a composition based on a hymn- tune, where one of the voices is (possibly an elaborate version of) the hymn. 

The hymn, based on an hymn tune composed by Frenchman  Louis Bourgeois in the 1400s,  was held in such high regard that it was printed in many hymn books for many years, until its popularity has faded in recent years. 

When I was younger, I heard it sung in a favorite hymn, by an English choir:  "The day thou gavest, Lord, is Ended."  Obviously an evening hymn, the words are poetic, and the tune does suit the words well.  Today, though, other tunes are used for this hymn.

As I wrote in an earlier post, evening hymns are occasionally used as funeral hymns (e.g. "Abide with me, fast falls the eventide.")  So this tune, associated with two funeral hymns, could have been taken to mean that Bach felt his end was near, and so placed this chorale at the end of his Unfinished fugue.  There is some reason to believe, however, that it wasn't placed by Bach at all, but by one of his assistants, or a son.  (On the other hand, Bach is known to have died from complications arising from an eye operation, so if not completely blind, he was really in no state to write new music at the time of his death.)

There is also a lot of evidence (which I have not examined personally) to show that Bach was working on the Art of Fugue for at least 15 years; also, this Chorale had been written earlier. 

Even without the drama, actual or invented, of the last minutes of Bach's life, The Art of Fugue is a fascinating collection of pieces.  In particular, the very first fugue in the collection—titled Contrapunctus 1—is probably one of the best introductions to what a fugue is.

Arch

[Added later:]

Here is the Wikipedia-supplied link to an entry in an article for BWV 668:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Eighteen_Chorale_Preludes#BWV_668?wprov=sfla1

Tom Hulce, in Amadeus

I learned, just a couple of days ago, that Tom Hulce, who played the role of Mozart in Amadeus, did not initially know to play the piano!  He learned the instrument in order to take the role.  (If you remember, he played the piano while being held upside down, in one scene!)

Now, we know movies these days have amazing tricks they can use, and people who put up these pieces of information often sensationalize the stories to increase their audience statistics.  I'm not accusing the author of the story I read of anything; I'm just warning you not to swallow this story wholesale.  But there's a good chance the story is largely accurate.  (Tom Hulce looked like a very clever fellow.  If the story is true, he must be an incredibly clever man, and we ought to be making a bigger fuss over him.)

I'm sure I wrote a blog post on the movie Amadeus.  I just looked through the list of all the posts, and didn't find anything like a review of the movie. 

Amadeus

It is commonly regarded that the play Amadeus, by Peter Shaefer is a carricature of mozart. In my opinion, it isn't a carricature at all!   When I wasin school,  one year I win a prize book, called Letters of Composers, and it had numerous letters—in translation—written by Mozart.  I can say quite confidently, that Mozart's manner of speaking in the movie is a perfect depiction of what his letters were like.  Shaffer has clearly read this book, and the character of Mozart is true to this source.  (The irritating giggle was Tom Hulce's invention, but, honestly, that's probably how the great man laughed.) 

Lots of Mozart admirers were embarrassed at how their idol was depicted; nothing can be done about that; Mozart was probably just a shade—at most—more sedate than how Tom Hulce portrays him; but this is all of a piece with what we know of the man. 

There's a certain amount of invention in the playwrights depiction of Mozart's wife and mother-in-law, but not much.  That's how they are described by many witnesses!  But the miracle is how Mozart was inspired by them, and they appear in his operas in disguised form!  With a genius, nothing is wasted. 

If you haven't seen this movie, go get it and watch it.  All the characters are brilliant, including the King, Salieri, Mozart's father, the archbishop, and even some courtiers.  (One of them was instrumental in Haydn's composition of The Creation, Die Schopfung.)

Dvorak's Song to the Moon

Song to the Moon, from Rusalka. 

I was browsing the—usually annoying, but surprisingly interesting—feed from YouTube, when I stumbled on this soprano aria from 2018.  I'll try and link it here, but I've had bad luck doing that the past few times I have tried. [Succeeded!]

Apparently it's from his opera Rusalka.  It just knocked me flat; it was so lovely.  The girl entreats the moon to remind her lover that she waits for him.  Near the end, she practically screams at the moon to not disappear!  I can certainly sympathize; you don't want the one to whom you're talking to start walking away,  or disappearing!

I would say that this aria is as deeply moving as Strauss's fourth Last Song: Im Abendrot, though it is much more diatonic. 

I read the synopsis of the story on Wikipedia, and it is essentially identical to that of The Little Mermaid, by Hans Christian Andersen.  'Rusalka' means, essentially, water spirit in Czech, and except for some details, the story follows that of the Andersen fairy tale.  It ends in tragedy, which—I believe—was the original Andersen ending. 

Not surprisingly, the best performances of the aria is by those who were native speakers of Czech, or at least those who understood the language.  When Rusalka scolds the moon for disappearing, Dvorak's setting is very angry.  That's probably appropriate, considering that Rusalka is the child of The Water Sprite, a powerful spirit.

https://youtu.be/Us_F2xLJgKI?si=BdZOIjP3NoTlaFGi

Paul McCartney: A Wonderful Christmastime!

When U was living with my parents, in Ceylon (Sri Lanka), I can't remember very much of what the Beatles—post breakup—were doing.  I probably didn't really know.  (Actually, I thought Imagine was post-breakup, but it might not have been ...)

Then, when I got here, I was confronted with a lot of McCartney and Wings-type music, a little of which I really liked ('Uncle Albert, Admiral Halsey' - type songs, and Band on the Run), but a lot of which I didn't care for.  John Lennon's early songs I rather liked, but not the Double Fantasy songs, for the most part.  But that was close to half a century ago; I heard Wonderful Christmastime just yesterday, I believe, and I thought: wow, what a great song!

Some of these late McCartney songs really show us, in clear focus, what McC could do: very musical, highly whimsical songs. 

Lennon, in contrast, thought in very edgy musical terms.  If Paul declared that something John wrote was a little too conventional or formulaic, we have reports that John would rewrite it.  ("Here come old Flattop," the opening phrase of Come Together, was a case in point.  I recently sangthis with a Karaoke machine, at wedding, andpeople looked at me crosseyed.)

You can easily see how Lennon and McCartney, together, could moderate each other's tendencies, to produce essentially perfect pop songs, which is what the fans wanted.  The fans who still deplore the fact that the band broke up don't realize that the vast majority of Beatles fans just would not like Lennon/McCartney songs now.  It's impossible. 

The Concert on the Roof, which was their last live broadcast, was (in my view,) brilliant.  You might think: why couldn't we have more of that?  Well, those songs were mostly written when they were in their teens, or were just parodies of their early songs.  They had had breakups, the frustrations that they wanted to express were very individual.  There were "You never give me your money," - type frustrations, which united them, but a lot of what they wanted to express would probably not found echoes in what the others wanted to express.  Or they probably didn't want to express some of those feelings at all; after all, they were English.  They were quite capable of expressing their feelings, but I'm sure they had rather not.  Perhaps in allegorical form, but it might have struck them as just too much work. 

(I can't resist deploring the murder of John Lennon.  Can't say anything more than that.)

Well, all McCartney's post-breakup music awaits my attention.  I would not be able to persuade anyone who wasn't already an ardent Beatles fan about what an amazing band they were.  Listen to the music, I'd say; if it doesn't grab you, give it up. 

Archie

Dancing In the Street

Just set the record straight, this song, Dancing in the Street, was sung by Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, and reportedly reached no. 4 on one of the charts in the USA, and rose a little higher, I believe, in the UK.  Then it was covered by all sorts of acts, not least David Bowie and Mick Jagger.  Wikipedia has a full list of the artists who covered the song. 

The song was written by a trio of composers Marvin Gaye, (who incidentally did one of the cover versions), William Stevenson, and Ivy Jo Hunter. 

Ït was a culturally significant song, because it was used as a kind of Civil Rights anthem in the sixties.  (I wasn't around at that time, and can't attest to just how much of an anthem it really was.)

In many ways, it is a joyous song.  The theme of dancing in the streets has connotations of great celebration, in most English-speaking countries, even beyond the simple description of actually Dancing in the streets; the kind of universal rejoicing called for at the end of a war, for instance.  (Incidentally, there is a brilliantly sardonic song composed by Ed McCurdy, called Last night I had the strangest dream in which this phrase—Dancing in the Street—is invoked ɓrilliantly.)

I feel, however, that the song has a sort of static feel, as though it isn't going anywhere.  It doesn't need to; it's a celebration!

Why doesn't it move?  I think it has to do with the so-called flattened leading note.  The flattened Leading- Note makes the tune sound as if it's in a medieval mode.  Tunes in modes typically don't modulate to other keys, but it's the modulation that gives the feeling of motion.  By the simple expedient of putting the tunein a major key, it will immediately sound as though there the potential for movement.  On the downside, there will have to be movement now.

The Beatles

OMFG: What is wrong with this country, that they have to figure out who is the best at something?

I studied mathematics, and we have a subject (within mathematics, of course) where we study the whole concept of 'more than', and generally 'better than'.  (A more fundamental idea is that of 'better than, or just as good as'.)

Well, it was soon pretty clear that many things that are celebrated as 'the best' something-or-other simply did not make sense to receive that title.  It's not that they were not the best.  It just didn't make sense. 

The Beatles were an amazingly talented group.  They were excellent at live shows; in fact, they gave some of the most greatly enjoyed live performances on record.  There's a lot of news reports of the fabulous Beatles performances, though of course they were nowhere as well-attended as, say, Taylor Swift shows today.  But there were at least two problems that I can guess.

Firstly, they were never satisfied with the music quality of their live shows.  The records they made were put together with a lot of effort, often recorded up to twenty times, just for one song!  They listened to tapings of their live shows, and they were horrified at the poor quality.  I'm not saying they should have been satisfied; but John, in particular, hated how they sounded.

Secondly, those live shows took a lot of energy.  There was a lot of clowning around, and their traveling accommodations were primitive at the time, and they had to put a good face on it, for the next audience. 

Musically, they fit very well with each other.  They had been together since they had been around 17, 18; it isn't any surprise at all that they were impatient with each other by the time they were in their thirties.  At that point the only authority they knew was that of George Martin, their producer; when Paul imposed his perfectionism on them, it was all too much. 

Many faithful Beatles fans felt betrayed when the Beatles broke up.  But get serious; you couldn't expect those four men to have stayed together much longer.  I bless them for the magic they did give us. 

Archie

The Greatest Guitarist

Guitarists seem to be judged based on playing electric guitars.  And on playing melodies. 

I prefer to hear the picking sounds of Bob Dylan,  Paul Simon, Peter, Paul and Mary, and James Taylor.  There's no doubt that Jimi Hendrix and company enriched our sound world considerably.  But it seems just a matter of opinion whether it is they, or the guitarists who played principally acoustic instruments, who gave us most enjoyment.

Arch.

Beethoven's Fifth

Most everybody knows about Beethoven's 5th Symphony.  I've heard a dozen recordings of it, including ones by Toscanini, von Karajan, and Furtwangler, Gardiner.  These names might not mean anything to you now, but classical music lovers eventually develop sort of a crush on this symphony, and particular recordings have particular significance to them. 

Admittedly, most of us (yes, obviously I'm one of these people) are a little in awe of this work.  This is not a very good thing, because that makes us not get the piece as music, but rather as a sacred relic.  It is just a fantastic piece of music in its own right; just sit and listen to the thing. 

If this is the first symphony you've listened to, it's rather overpowering, and not in a good way for everyone.  The ending alone goes on for quite a while. 

This next bit is for those who are new to symphonies.  Symphonies are usually in four movements. 

The first movement is in rather special form, which I will detail later. The second movement is usually slower, and mostly quieter. The third movement is in triple time, and often has a sort of 'dancy' swing to it. The fourth and final movement is often a rondo, with a recurring tune.  Well, I'm pooped; I'll fill in the rest soon.