Monday, July 2, 2018

July 4/2

I have been trying to find a good bit of music to post on the theme of the idea of the concept of using the letters in Bach's last name to write a motif in a piece of music. I hear some things that sound like B-A-C-H, but research fails to match up with what I am hearing.

Some background - in German music notation they have an "H". That is what we call "B". They call B-flat "B". Confusing, nein? The good news is that allows composers, including Johan Sebastian himself to write music using his last name for four of the notes. Totally excellent. Except it sounds weird. So it would go something like this - start with b, our B-flat, go down a half tone to A, up a third to C, then down a half tone to B. Excellent plan, now all we have to tune up are our ears. When I hear that sequence of interval in a symphonic work I think "Bach" even if it starts on a different note. I should get a grant to do more research.


Here is a short piece with the letters BACH highlighted in the middle.


I swear I have heard better, but I'll keep listening and report back at a future date.

Speaking of date, today is July 2nd and we got another sunrise:


This musical selection is not Bach based, and I have posted it before but I wanted to get cookin' early on this beautiful, hot, sunny July morning - start cookin' guys!

4 comments:

Dad Bones said...

G'mornin DJ Grit. Thanks for the Memphis breakfast. I've eaten breakfast in that town a couple of times long ago.

The Dude said...

Memphis Soul Stew - it's what's for breakfast!

ricpic said...

The music should be Irving Berlin's Heat Wave. Great version by Ella Fitzgerald, mainly because she enunciates so clearly.

We're having a heat wave........

Written in 1933 so global warming goes back aways.

windbag said...

Why does that only have 229K views?