Tag: Erik Satie

  • What Are Your Favorite Songs That Defy Expectations?

    What Are Your Favorite Songs That Defy Expectations?

    In Ep. 48 of Soundfly’s podcast, Carter and Mahea are joined by composer Ryan Lott (of Son Lux) to discuss songs that do “the unexpected.”

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  • What Exactly Is a Nocturne, and How Do You Write One?

    What Exactly Is a Nocturne, and How Do You Write One?

    Despite what many people think, classical music isn’t just a single, monolithic genre of music written by an old, stuffy bunch of dead guys. In fact, European classical music is so diverse that the only common denominator shared amongst pieces in its vast repertoire is that modern Western musical notation was basically invented in order to be…

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  • Sticking to the Beat: 4 Tips to Improve Your Timing

    Sticking to the Beat: 4 Tips to Improve Your Timing

    By Harvey Grant As musicians, we can spend so long trying to improve our technique in terms of scales and “speed” that we bypass one of the most important factors in the success of a piece: timing. Sure, you may say that Glenn Gould didn’t stick precisely to the given measures of Bach’s Goldberg Variations,…

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  • Composer Erik Satie Was So Much Weirder Than You Realize

    Composer Erik Satie Was So Much Weirder Than You Realize

    Erik Satie (1866-1925) is praised by historians for helping to provide the pre-war pathway to minimalism in classical music. His piano compositions, most famously the Gymnopédies suite of 1888 and the Gnossiennes suite of 1893, set the tone for experimentation within the next century of composers. These composers traversed new understandings of tonality, space, and emotion, even as academic trends in…

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