Saturday, December 20, 2014

Best Music Salon Posts of the Year

As the year winds down I will be going out of town on vacation, so I won't be doing a lot of blogging over the next week or so. So I would like to point you to what I consider to be some of the best posts of the year. Here they are, one from each month:

Best Posts of the Year

  1. January: Haydn Adagios, Part 2
  2. February: all the posts reviewing Hilary Hahn's encore project especially the last one.
  3. March: Lots of good stuff in March, especially on Sibelius, but I'm going to pick a post about the typology of music, how we categorize stuff called Musical Style and Genre.
  4. April, lots of possibilities of which I am going to pick a post surveying the String Quartet Since 1900.
  5. May: one post was on Music and Self-Expression.
  6. June was the month I really got into Swedish composer Allan Pettersson and his fifteen symphonies. Here I talk about their Stormy Weather and Lyrical Islands.
  7. In July I put up a post about phrase structure in Baroque, Classical and Modern music called Harmony and Phrase Structure.
  8. In August, I put up a couple of posts about the Greatest Composers Before Bach (and part 2)
  9. In September I put up a think piece on how philosophical talk about music sometimes goes astray. The title was Music Utters the Unutterable.
  10. For October I am going to pick one of my early posts in my Concerto Guide series titled: Origins of the Instrumental Concerto.
  11. In November I talked about some of the failings of music critics in a piece called Music Writing Then and Now.
  12. And just a few days ago I did a post on Mozart's wonderful Sinfonia Concertante.
So go have a look. There were lots of other posts this year that you might have missed.

Here is a piece by one of those greatest composers before Bach, Guillaume de Machaut:


UPDATE: The link to "Harmony and Phrase Structure" was incorrect and has been fixed.

Merry Christmas, Happy Hannukah and best wishes for the holidays.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Love your work Bryan and thanks for all your hard work.
All the best for next year and enjoy your vacation.

Unknown said...

Hello. The link to "Harmony and Phrase Structure" leads elsewhere. Merry Xmas!

Bryan Townsend said...

Thanks Nathaniel! And your comments are also much appreciated.

Thanks Gabriel. Link fixed!

Merry Christmas to all my wonderful commentators.