Welcome back to Parsons Playlists! Today we’re featuring a playlist to get you into the Halloween spirit curated by Music Library student assistant Nicole (class of 2024).
Spooky Season is here!
Are you excited for Halloween!? Enjoy this playlist as you think about the costume you’ll wear for the 31st!
Editor’s note:Arachnophonia (“Arachno” = spider / “-phonia” = sound) is a regular feature on our blog where members of the UR community can share their thoughts about resources from the Parsons Music Library‘s collection.
One of the big names in classical music, Claude Debussy, has greatly influenced the movement of music and art even past his years. His work is a great way to have a study session and or even to play on a rainy evening to unwind.
There is something so calming about his music. I love to play it when I’m studying and when I’m falling asleep, especially the song “Claire de Lune”. It has been in my playlist since I can remember and has always made me feel like I am part of some Disney movie.
Debussy has been a source of inspiration for many artists. Art is the inspiration of other art, we gather things we like and make them our own. Because of this, we see that Debussy is a very important aspect of the art community. Painters use his music to inspire a story in their artwork, theaters use his music to add emotion to a play, pianists use his music as inspiration for their own pieces. Because art is a cycle of borrow, transform, repeat, we can understand how influential a big musician was to an artist even in the 21st century.
Sometimes when studying, you don’t want to sit in total silence but you also don’t want to listen to Drake’s new album, Certified Lover Boy. Debussy’s music is a great balance of both, it gives you some background noise but will not distract you with lyrics.
Welcome back to Parsons Playlists! Today we’re featuring a collection of cello solo essentials curated by Music Library student manager Brianna (class of 2023).
This playlist includes what I find to be the most essential cello solo music to know by heart. These are some of my favorite pieces written for the cello!
Editor’s note:Arachnophonia (“Arachno” = spider / “-phonia” = sound) is a regular feature on our blog where members of the UR community can share their thoughts about resources from the Parsons Music Library‘s collection.
The Shanghai Quartet is one of my favorite string quartets. After receiving coaching from them, I was not only able to work on my own violin techniques efficiently, but also learned to listen and appreciate string quartet music more actively. This semester, the documentary Behind the Strings, shown at the Richmond International Film Festival featured the Shanghai Quartet, so I got to learn more about each member of the quartet and how they have become so successful today.
One of the attributes of the Shanghai Quartet is their Chinese heritage, which I also share similar experiences with. Therefore, in the documentary, I was especially impressed and attracted to the string quartet arrangement they performed based on a number of traditional Chinese folk songs. It is well known that a string quartet is one of the most prominent and common chamber ensemble arrangements in Western Classical music. Collaborating with Chinese folk music, which is largely based on the pentatonic scale and is very different from Western classical music, Shanghai Quartet’s performance illustrates the best possible way of culture integration, as they infuse the music with their personal experiences and emotions growing up in a different cultural background.
Zhou Long, the composer of the album The Flowing Stream: Chinese Folk Songs and Tone Poems, mentioned that “for many years, I have been devoted to merging Eastern and Western cultures through my music. That has meant, specifically, the combining of ancient Chinese musical traditions and western compositional techniques into a coherent and personal statement”. The Shanghai Quartet shared similar experiences and values with Zhou; therefore, they were able to fully support his compositions through their performances.
Chinese folk songs are valued greatly because of their historical and cultural significance. Based on the album’s description, these songs mirror people’s daily lives, thoughts, and sentiments in Chinese culture. Nowadays, these songs are widely re-created and shared in the global music world. One of the songs that I found being the most representative in this album is “Jasmine Flower.” The lyrics are simple, “Jasmine flower, such a beautiful flower, her sweet scent covers all others in the garden…”. In the 2016 Chinese New Year Gala, Celine Dion performed this song with Song Zuying, a Chinese classical/folk singer. Here is a link to the performance:
Here is a link to the version arranged by Zhou Long, as performed by the Shanghai Quartet:
In this version, the first violin starts the main melody, mimicking the soprano vocal line. Then, all four strings pass the melody to each other, accompanied by pizzicatos in the rest of the voices. This arrangement focuses on the aspect that the texture of Chinese folk music is often monophonic, where only one instrument is playing or one voice is leading. To me, hearing Eastern Music performed on Western instruments always creates a different feeling.
There are also four pieces that are created from poems in the Tang Dynasty. Zhou Long composed these four pieces based on four different poems for string quartet and orchestra. The four poems are:
To me, Zhou Long’s inspirations in these four pieces derived from the original poem verses. He emphasized on the meaning of these verses and added his feelings into his composition. I am able to have visual interpretations from his music. For example, in the first piece – “Hut Among the Bamboo,” the rests between different parts, the pizzicatos, and the shifting harmonics vividly presented an image of being in a bamboo forest alone. Meanwhile, I do find the composition style really similar to some characteristics in Igor Stravinsky’s music, as they are both contemporary pieces.
Welcome back to Parsons Playlists! Today we’re featuring a collection called “Orange” curated by Music Library student manager Allison (class of 2022).
I label my playlists by color and this one is orange. Enjoy! 🙂
Editor’s note:Arachnophonia (“Arachno” = spider / “-phonia” = sound) is a regular feature on our blog where members of the UR community can share their thoughts about resources from the Parsons Music Library‘s collection.
Danny Elfman is such a prolific composer, known for commonly working alongside filmmaker Tim Burton. Arguably, the best and most diverse collection of his work can be found in his music for the 2005 adaptation of Roald Dahl’s “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.” His score explores a variety of styles, from Bollywood to the sugar-pop of the 1960s. While the piano score struggles to capture all of the complex work and sound behind the “Main Titles” (Elfman at his prime, in my opinion), it does an excellent job providing a solid basework for solo playability. The piano adaptation for the “Finale” is perfectly captured and successfully leaves what it intends to bring – a feeling of finality and completion at the end of a wild ride.
This playlist began as a discussion with a friend online a couple months ago. I had shared a song that I’d had stuck in my head and my friend said that it was their least favorite song by the group because (and I quote) “SHA LA LA is a terrible lyric 🙂”. The discussion that followed was all in good fun, but led me to want to research songs that have nonsense syllables in them just to prove that “sha la la” is NOT (necessarily) a terrible lyric.
Vocals like “sha la la” in songs are called non-lexical vocables. Basically, they are nonsense syllables which may or may not be mixed together with meaningful text and they appear in all manner of different musics. This, of course, led to me being extra geeky and having a lot of fun creating a playlist highlighting a variety of different songs that use nonsense syllables in this way. In point of fact, it goes all the way back to at least the middle ages with songs using things like “fa la la” in them – but I decided to stick to more modern examples for playlist purposes. Which means this playlist starts with some scat singing (from circa the 1920s-1940s) and goes on from there.
Your mileage may vary in terms of your tolerance of the non-lexical vocable, but I maintain that sometimes one doesn’t need an actual word to create musical meaning and that non-lexical vocables can be super fun!
Welcome back to Parsons Playlists! Today we’re featuring a collection of popular music from the first decade of the 21st century, curated by Music Library student manager Abby (class of 2021).
Per Abby, here’s some “Popular music from 2000-2009 for all your guilty pleasure jam session needs”:
