Quiz: Mystery scores

[Florestan]

The cello pieces I am looking at seem rather nice - unsurprisingly Italianate, vocally singing lines

Were they recorded?

[BWV 1080]

Agree 100%. My favourite times on GMG!

That figured bass looks fun, and full of clues. But I haven't identified it from first looking. Here's a much easier, indeed notorious one, which will be snaffled quickly....but it's a good place to start were this thread to be reborn...

Googled to get it, had not heard of this piece

[Luke]

That's the one. First cluster chord in music history?

[Florestan]

Found it! I can't imagine how he got away with it, but it's true. Here's the beginning:

Get away with what? Writing a succesful aria di sorbetto? That was quite a feat, actually. 

[Luke]

I meant said diva not complaining that she hadn't been given a chance to show off her skills (as she saw them), at the very least. She is restricted in what is all too easily interpreted as the most embarrassing and humiliating way (and, after all, according to your source, he thought very little of her).

[Luke]

Were they recorded?

I have no idea but I doubt it. I'll have a look.

EDIT - found a few amateur home recordings of some little salon piano pieces on youtube. Nothing very exciting.

[Florestan]

I meant said diva not complaining that she hadn't been given a chance to show off her skills (as she saw them), at the very least. She is restricted in what is all too easily interpreted as the most embarrassing and humiliating way (and, after all, according to your source, he thought very little of her).

She was not a diva, only a seconda donna. The conventions gave her an important role in the recitatives (spoken) and ensembles (where her voice would blend with the others) but a solo aria was more than enough. Besides, Ciro in Babilonia is not even an opera proper, it's more like an oratorio for the Lent period during which operatic performances were forbidden.

The past is a foreign country. 

[Luke]

Even so..... 'rude!' as the girls at my school like to say in a huffy mock-shock! 

[BWV 1080]

That's the one. First cluster chord in music history?

I found it here, pretty ridiculous analysis

The resulting chord could be written as C♯dim7(11,13)/D, Dm(♯7, 9, 11, ♭13) or could be understood as a polychord comprising Dm and C♯dim7.

http://flipcamp.org/engagingstudents4/essays/park.html

[Florestan]

Even so..... 'rude!' as the girls at my school like to say in a huffy mock-shock! 

I say a genius of musical pranks on a par with Haydn (whose music Rossini loved and a good many of whose works he knew by heart)

[Luke]

The resulting chord could be written as C♯dim7(11,13)/D, Dm(♯7, 9, 11, ♭13) or could be understood as a polychord comprising Dm and C♯dim7.

!! That sort of thing puts the anal in analysis. There's no point in labelling chords like in that way - it may be 'correct' but it means nothing related to what we hear, it tells us nothing. The point is that Rebel depicts the chaos from which everything emerges by smashing down all the notes of the key at once - we hear everything. Over the course of the movement the violent dissonance that result eases as the various elements (Earth, Air, Water, Fire, all marked as such in the score) gradually separate off from each other. It's actually very effective.

[Luke]

I say a genius of musical pranks on a par with Haydn (whose music Rossini loved and a good many of whose works he knew by heart)

Definitely a great prank, just a bit of a  ish one! I think it's fantastic!

[amw]

Another for you...

This isn't Metamorphoses nocturnes, is it?

[Luke]

The one Florestan thinks looks like barbed wire fences? Yes, it is! Part of the diaphonous web of harmonic glissandi near the end of Ligeti's very snazzy 1st String Quartet, Metamorphoses nocturnes

[Karl Henning]

Disappointed at the echoing void which has received all but one of my recent mystery score excerpts, I can only respond in a like manner:

Strikes me as possibly over-notated.

[Luke]

Strikes me as possibly over-notated.

       you think?

[Luke]

A few more to mop up (I chose interesting ones, I think) and then this Sleeping Beauty of a thread can sink into suspended animation again...

[Florestan]

Definitely a great prank, just a bit of a  ish one! I think it's fantastic!

Well, he was barely 21 at the time. Follies of youth... 

[Luke]

OK, going to reveal the answers to the two that weren't guessed. Extremely eccentric, both of them.

This one contains an astounding and extremely early example of an amazing extended technique which we rarely see: the chords we see are to be played by a solo horn player. One note is played; one is sung; the combination of the two produces the difference tone of the third as if by magic. And the composer - I still find this almost unbelievable: Carl Maria von Weber (his Concertino for Horn and Orchestra). This line of music made me look at him all over again.

 

[Luke]

...and this one is one of those famous pages by Xenakis in which each of the pianist's fingers receives a stave for itself. In other words, the sample is to be played by one person. This is from his marvelously invigorating, pulverising Synaphai, one of my favourite works of his.