Music trivia are bits of information and are a favorite pastime of many individuals from all over the world. It is especially prevalent in America where weekly trivia nights are everyday events for everyone.

Also, music trivia became a favorite part of the English vocabulary in the early 1900’s when Logan Pearsall Smith used the word as a title for his book. However, modern usage of the word and the cultivation of the trivia contest mean something very different today.

The largest trivia contest is in Stevens Point, Wisconsin at the University … Continue Reading

I recently enjoyed a performance of the Yellow River Cantata at The Bushnell Center for the Performing Arts in downtown Hartford, CT.

Big thanks, then, to all who were involved in this production, including the Hartford Symphony Orchestra and its music director, Carolyn Kahn, as well as the Hartford Chorale and its director, Richard Coffey, and the Kang Hua Singers of Greater Hartford, and their director, Chai-lun Yueh.

You can read a good deal about the history of the work here, if you like. We … Continue Reading

Sir Edward William Elgar (2 June 1857 – 23 February 1934)

Edward Elgar is perhaps best known in the United States as the composer of “Pomp and Circumstance,” the tune to which our high school and college graduates regularly march on the way to the podium to receive their diplomas.

More formally, there are six “Pomp and Circumstance Marches,” and the bit used for graduations is the “Land of Hope and Glory” passage … Continue Reading

The history of the piano comes from centuries of stringed keyboard designs. It also gained the approval of well-known composers.

Pianos may be a new instrument from the 1700′s. It’s design and history date back several centuries. Its history also includes innovative ideas from European builders. These builders shaped its modern design and performance.
The Invention of The Piano

Bartolomeo Cristofori is generally regarded as the inventor of the piano.

Cristofori is a … Continue Reading

Harvey Lavan Cliburn Jr. (12 July 1934 - 27 February 2013)

Harvey Lavan (“Van”) Cliburn, a classical pianist who has been world famous since 1958, died on February 27th of this year. We at JustSheetMusic bid him a fond farewell.

Cliburn was in a direct chain of succession from the 19th century master Franz Liszt, a chain with only two intermediate links. Van’s mother, Rildia Bee (nee O’Bryan) Cliburn, had been a student of Arthur Friedheim, who had been a student of … Continue Reading

Bearer of Romanticism’s Torch: Part I

I’ve said a bit about Hector Berlioz now and then since I’ve been writing here. But in this and the next entry I hope to put my Berliozian thoughts together, to offer you the Big Picture as well as the details. Berlioz might actually be the high-point of romanticism. He believed, and his admirers echo him here, that he had taken up music at the point to which Beethoven had carried it, and continued … Continue Reading

Giovanni Battista Pergolesi

An old proverb, dating perhaps to the demise of Richard III at Bosworth in 1485, tells us that the loss of a single horseshoe nail can trigger the fall of a Kingdom.

Chaos theorists tell us that a butterfly, flapping its wings in one way rather than another, can influence the movement of a hurricane across an ocean.

It may be, likewise, that an argument over the performance of a single troupe of comic actors helped create that great shift in … Continue Reading

Discover the best music blogs on the net and find out which one is right for you. Learn what the best music blogs have to offer and what you can expect to see when you visit them.

The last two decades have seen an explosion of indie music and independent musicians self-releasing their own songs and albums. Before, all we had was MTV and the radio to inform us about the newest music, and we were all the poorer for it. Nowadays, though, we have the internet, that most powerful and terrible of tools. Whereas before we had a handful of … Continue Reading

The owner of Puresheetmusic.com contacted me a time ago with the question about adding his sheet music collection to Justsheetmusic.com.

Since I take this mails very serious I always take a very close look on
the website itself and for the website Puresheetmusic.comm, I had a good look
and was astonished.

PurseSheetMusic.com

The first reason I was amazed first of all was the look of the website
which is really … Continue Reading

International Music Score Library Project

If you are a music composer and love to share your music composition with music lovers, then International Music Score Library Project or IMSLP is the perfect place for you.

It is a virtual music library where you can submit your own musical composition as well as enjoy listening to the compositions of other musicians. It is a website where one can easily share musical ideas with like-minded people. It is an excellent platform … Continue Reading