36. Modern Heritage
from The Concert - Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Hosted by Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
Bartók: Sonata for violin and piano No. 1 in C-sharp minor, Op. 21 Hemphill: The Hard Blues Most people have strong musical memories from their childhood: the songs their parents listened to, the music they grew up singing or playing. In this week’s episode, we’ll listen to two composers who took their early roots in music, Hungarian folk songs and the blues respectively, and jumped off to create compositions inspired by, but quite different from, their musical beginnings. Bartók was fascinated by Hungarian folk music, and spent much of his early compositional life collecting, transcribing and setting traditional folk songs. Hemphill was a real revolutionary as a saxophone player, known for his writing for saxophone quartet and, in this case, sextet. The blues tune here definitely has a foot in tradition, but it’s also audaciously modern.
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