Toumani Diabate

The kora is a chordophone string instrument from Mali. Watch this video of Toumani Diabate playing:



March 25, 2008 — This performance of 'Cantelowes' is from the recent live World Premiere of "The Mandé Variations" at the prestigious El Real Alcazar de Sevilla in Spain which left the audience spellbound and was described by the The Independent as "a performance that surpasses anything....for sheer scale of ambition and technical achievement."

Read an interview with Toumani Diabate and see another video at this web page.

"La Mer", by Claude Debussy

Watch this video of a performance of La Mer by the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Valery Gergiev, recorded in March, 2007



Compare that version to this one, recorded 29 December 1941, on a Columbia 78rpm Set MM 531 (XCO 32293-32298) by the Cleveland Orchestra, Artur Rodzinski, conductor. This recording is available at The Internet Archive, under a Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0


Now, listen (and download if you'd like,) to Fred Child, host of American Public Media's Performance Today, and Ted Libbey, author of the NPR Guide to Building a Classical Music Library, discuss, "Debussy's most concentrated and brilliant orchestral work, La Mer," what they deem as, "one of the supreme achievements in the symphonic literature."


This is an animation created by Ali Habashi set to 'Dialogue du vent et de la mer'
(Dialogue of the wind and the sea) from "La Mer" by Claude Debussy (1862-1918)
Thomas M. Sleeper, conductor, University of Miami Symphony Orchestra. It's from the Internet Archive. The film is courtesy of the Edward H Arnold Center for Confluent Media Studies at the University of Miami


If you'd like to compare Debussy with the real thing, listen to the sounds from this video (there is no video)

The YouTube Symphony Orchestra

The world's first collaborative online orchestra performed at Carnegie Hall on April 15, 2009. Selected by the YouTube community and several members of the world's most renowned orchestras, the YouTube Symphony Orchestra is made up of over 96 professional and amateur musicians from 30+ countries and territories on six continents and represents 26 different instruments.



Program on the Act One video:
07:15 Johannes Brahms - Allegro giocoso from Symphony No.4 in E minor, Op. 98
17:15 Lou Harrison - Music from Canticle No. 3
27:45 Antonín Dvořák - Music from Serenade in D minor, Op. 44
32:45 Giovanni Gabrieli - Canzon Septimi toni No. 2
38:15 Johann Sebastian Bach - Sarabande from Suite No. 1 in G major, for Cello Solo, VWV 1007 (performed by Joshua Roman)
43:30 Heitor Villa-Lobos - Bachianas brasileiras No. 9
54:00 Richard Wagner - Ride of the Valkyries from Die Walkuere



Program for the Act Two video:
3:00 Sergei Rachmaninoff - Vase from Two Pieces for Pian, Six Hands (performed by Derek Wang, Charlie Liu, Anna Larsen)
07:45 Tan Dun - Internet Symphony Eroica
16:00 Sergei Prokofiev - Scherzo from Concerto No. 2 in G minor for Piano, Op. 16 (featuring Yuja Wang)
23:00 Claude Debussy - Nuages from Nocturnes
32:15 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - Finale from Concerto No. 5 for violin in A major, K. 219 (featuring Gil Shaham)
48:00 John Cage - Aria with Renga (featuring Measha Brueggergosman)
57:15 Mason Bates - Preview of Warehouse Medicine from B-Sides
1:05:30 Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky - Finale from Symphony No. 4

"The Internet Symphony" Global Mash Up


A book was created with photographs from the event - you can see a preview of it at this web page.

Master of the Euphonium

"The euphonium, a tuba-like musical instrument, is rarely heard outside of traditional brass bands. Young euph prodigy Matthew White uses hip-hop rhythms and a wild new vocal technique to bring a fresh sound to this underappreciated horn." link



"White was a finalist in the brass section of the 2008 BBC Young Musicians of the Year competition, and has guested with the legendary Black Dyke Band as the first honoree musician in the band's Young Artist Scheme, a yearlong fellowship. He was Principal Euphonium with the National Youth Brass Band of Great Britain, and also played with the award-winning Leyland Band. He now continues his study of the euphonium at the Royal Northern College of Music." link

The Dutch Philharmonic Orchestra

On the The Dutch Philharmonic Orchestra's web page, you can see and hear about the works they are performing. In this video, conductor Wayne Marshall talks about "L'enfant et les sortileges", describing (in English) how the singers and instrumentalists of the orchestra imitate the characters from the tale and bring a child's fantasies to life trhough Ravel's music. Hay Beurskens (in Dutch) gives guided tour gives along the different instruments and demonstrates the wind machine.…

Click on the arrow to start the video.

The Dutch Philharmonic Orchestra plays L'enfant et les sortileges by Maurice Ravel.

In the column on the right side of the web page, you'll find links to other short videos which talk about works performed by the orchestra: Brahms, Dvorak, Frank, Gershwin, Glinka, Hayden, Khachaturian, Mahler, Mozart, Rachmaninoff, Ravel, Schmidt, Schubert, Schumann, Shostakovitch, Scriabin, and Johann Strauss. All the videos include some English and some Dutch dialogue.

(You can use http://babelfish.yahoo.com to translate the text of the web page.)

The Typewriter Song

We've been using GarageBand in ICT...and there are two typewriters in the room....

The Typewriter Song

String Ensemble

Listen to the first rehearsal of our new String Ensemble!

More about the Icicle Orchestra

In November we wrote about the Icicle Orchestra. Here's a slide show of musicians Terje Isungset and Arve Henriksenat in Lake Shikotsu, Hokkaido, Feb 2007, preparing and playing their ice instruments.


Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

We also found this picture of Terje Isungset "playing on a trumpetlike instrument made of ice at the official opening of the exhibition "Melting Ice - A Hot Topic" at The Nobel Peace Center in Oslo, Tuesday, June 5,2007". (link)

Photo from AP Photo by ERLEND AAS

On this web page you can listen to sample of music from the new album, Hibernations, just released at the Ice Festival Gello, Norway. Here's 30 seconds from one of the tracks:

(If you like the ice music, you can buy his discs at Amazon.fr, Amazon.co.uk, or online at Listen to Norway.)

This video at the Guardian newspaper's web site shows Terje Isungset playing his instruments, talking about making them out of 2500 year old ice, and excerpts from his concerts.

We have a lot of ice around us right now...can you make an ice instrument? How would you hold it? How would you keep it from melting? Can you imagine what kind of sound will it make before you play it?

Interesting Orchestra Collection 2 - The Icicle Orchestra

Go to this page to see the Icicle Orchestra. Pioneering percussionist Terje Isungset plays instruments made from a 2,500 year old glacier; "the instruments belong to nature".

Yo Yo Ma

Explore the music and ideas of Yo-Yo Ma with this video, and the podcast

"My Favorite Things" played by Yo-Yo Ma and Chris Botti, trumpet

Artist Site

More Videos

Interesting Orchestra Collection 1: The Vienna Vegetable Orchestra

 (Photo by Mathias Friedrich, courtesy of the Vienna Vegetable Orchestra)

They are vegetables playing instruments?  Or they are musicians playing vegetables?
Read this story about this unusual group, and watch the video from YouTube:







The Orchestra's homepage is http://www.gemueseorchester.org, where you can hear excerpts from their two CDs
gemise:  ambiente verde excerpt (mp3)     letscho 74 excerpt (mp3)
and
automate:  cut1   cut2   cut3

The New York Philharmonic for Kids

We'd like to direct your attention to a great web site for kids - The New York Philharmonic for Kids. The site includes a Composer's Gallery, a Games Room (with a Minuet Mixer, Orchestration Station, Instrument Frenzy, Noterunner, etc.), Musician's Lounge, Instrument StoreRoom, among several other intriguing "rooms" - just like back stage at a concert hall!

There are also videos of orchestra members talking about their instruments. For example, here is the harpist talking to a young visitor:

You may enjoy 2 other videos in which Jon Deak and Bill Gordh from the New York Philharmonic lead kids through the composing process:

This video is on YouTube, so we can't see it in school.

This video is on YouTube, so we can't see it in school.