Using MMmusing

I've been MM musing for more than six and a half years now, and to what end? It's a pretty good question, and one I've tried to answer for myself many times over the years. The blog has definitely been a great sounding board for my own ideas and it has inspired a wide variety of creations I'd never have imagined before words started piling up here. I even assembled some of the better words into a BIG PDF e-book, complete with embedded multimedia. If you don't mind downloading a 150MB file, here you go.

Anyway, I'm heading off to AMS Pittsburgh this morning, and as I might run into someone and send them here to look around, I figured it might be useful to summarize some ways in which this site might be useful to you, especially if you teach music classes.

Here then are some original MMmusing resources that I use in class fairly often. If you ever find yourself using them and they prove helpful, drop me a line. It's useful to me to know what's useful to you.

This list is by no means complete, and I'm sure I've forgotten some things. You might also find it useful to browse through some of these YouTube playlists. But, for now, see if any of the following might interest you...

[UPDATED for 2014]

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ONLINE INTEGRATED SCORE/AUDIO/ANALYSIS LISTENING GUIDES

These are really prototypes. I'll be working on them much more while on sabbatical this Spring, but I've already found them very useful for navigating large-scale pieces in lectures on form and the like. Included are guides for (these probably won't work well on mobile devices):

• Bach: Cantata No. 4 (least developed)
• Beethoven: Symphony No. 5 (all)
• Beethoven: Symphony No. 3, 1st mvt.
• Beethoven: Piano Sonata, Op.111, 2nd mvt.
• Brahms: Symphony No. 4, 4th mvt.
• Mendelssohn: Violin Concerto, 1st mvt.
• Mozart: The Marriage of Figaro, Act II Finale

GAMES

• Solfèd - a solfège-based bird-feeding game.

SCORE VISUALIZATIONS

The two Bach canon videos have garnered more than 250,000 views combined, which has always kind of astonished me. Someone's using them for something. The Poulenc visualizes the looping quality of his most famous piece, and the Haydn reveals how orchestration turns a D Major scale into something special.

• Bach: Crab Canon
• Bach: Neverending Canon
• Poulenc: Carrousel perpétuel
• Haydn Sunrise

UNEXPECTED CONNECTIONS

• Webern in Mayberry (2nd Viennese School in Hollywood)
• The Rite of Appalachian Spring (Copland owes a lot to Stravinsky)
• A Bach Courante in Duet with its Double (Counterpoint not intended to be heard as such)
• The Rite of Eroica - Stravinsky's chords fit right into Beethoven's musical drama
• The Reich of Spring - Iconic Stravinsky + Iconic Reich = ?
• Somewhere between Beethoven and Strauss - origins of "Somewhere" ?
• The Rite of Stormtroopers - perhaps not so unexpected that Williams borrows some Stravinsky
• A lonely bassoon note links Mendelssohn to Copland (just odd; not really helpful!)

HOW MUSIC WORKS

• Mozart's 3rd, 4th, and 5th violin concertos stitched together seamlessly (?) - reveals patterns common in Mozart's syntax
• Mr. Stravinsky's Random Accent Generator - explores whether Stravinsky's asymmetries are the best asymmetries
• Tchaikovsky's Endlessly Looping Sequence - fun illustration of a sequence in action
• Musical Storyboarding - hearing the big picture in sonata form
• 12-tone Sandbox - building and manipulating 12-tone matrices is fun!
• Backwards Satie - reveals directionlessness of Satie's music
• UPDATE: Gymnopédie style randomized and 12-tone-ized

MORE MASHUPS

• Classical Mashups - YouTube playlist of various musics smashed together

QUICK MUSIC HISTORY LESSON

• The 12 Composers of Christmas

SPORTS + MUSIC

• Atonality on Ice (helps explain how bewildering atonality might be compelling)

IF YOU LIKE WORDS THAT RHYME (on "hot" music industry topics from many years ago)

• The Hatto Sonnets
• Joshua Bell fails to wow them in the subway

PERFORMANCE PRACTICE

• How Slow Can You Go? - Callas and Fleming face off in O mio babbino caro 
• In C Practice - get your students in shape for that inevitable In C read-through with this handy practice video. 
• Sax and Violence - (really should be "sax instead of violins" - exploring the new rage for saxophone ensembles.)

OTHER FUN STUFF

• Testing With the Stars - composers talk back on exams
• J. Peterman sells Schubert & Stravinsky
• Chopin's "Minute" Waltz - in exactly one minute

AWESOME BERNSTEIN LECTURE

• The Infinite Variety of Music - OK, it's Bernstein's lecture, not mine - but I uploaded and annotated it.

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Let me know what you think...