Classical Music Concert Report

Introduction

On February 19, 2019, I attended a show of McGill Baroque Orchestra. The show took place from 7.30 p.m. to 10.00 p.m. The venue of the concert was Redpath Hall. The guest conductor and solo violinist, Hank Knox, made the show to look so special.

Question 1

The McGill Baroque Orchestra was the performing group. The group was made of 15 Musicians with the skills to play baroque strings. The title of the concert was called French Baroque Music. The composers of the songs were Jean-Baptiste Lully and Georg Muffat.

Question 2

All songs and presentations which were conducted in the concert used mix instrumentals. A piano and baroque strings were the most commonly used instruments. The instrumental application made the concert to look magical. All songs were first introduced by some instrumental beats. This action created a joyful atmosphere for performance. Based on Sachs Hornbostel classification, these musical instruments can be categorized in various ways. First, chordophones due to the application of baroque strings. Non-free aerophones instruments such as flute were the second form of classification. Finally, the concert integrated electrophones instruments such as piano and microphones.

Question 3

In the concert, the artists integrated two forms of songs which were from a different historical period. Most of the songs such as 2nd Movement "Romanze" the artists linked in their show were created in the romantic period (1820-1900). The themes of these songs explained how people should handle a relationship. On the other hand, the 20th-century songs such as The Magic Flute were mostly dealing with how people have been affected by technology (Emmerson 37). As such, the difference in transition between the two forms of songs shows how the change from one generation to another.

Question 4

The Marriage of Figaro is one of the most popular songs which was sung during the concert. The song was created in 1786, but it is still relevant up to today. Most of the words that are used in the song described some rival marriage relationship.

The song was a form of a descriptive composition since it illustrates activities that took place in a marriage relationship. This type of song is program music since it attempts to explain a concept using a music style (Choi et al. 36). As such, it engaged music instruments such as piano to create a tone which influences audiences' feelings. In music, the tempo is an essential factor that helps to classify the nature of a song because it is measured based on its pace. The song, the Marriage of Figaro, the beats per minute is 66. Hence, the song takes the larghetto tempo. However, the application of instruments tries to change the tempo since it supplements the beats per second with the instrumental movement (Costa 29). In the music industry, there two major dynamic varieties namely the piano and forte. When the song is sung, the artists use a low tone which makes it be classified as piano. The dynamic variety of a song is mostly influenced by the beats per minutes. A piano was the primary instrument which is used throughout the song. The melody of the song is simple; thus, all people can easily understand. Due to the continuous repetition of phrases, the content can easily be sung.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the concert was one of my best show I have ever visited. The effective integration of songs with various instruments made the show look impressive. The band is well known for its popular artists who have the ability to engage in different contents from various historical period to compose a song.

Works Cited

Choi, Keunwoo, et al. "Convolutional recurrent neural networks for music classification." 2017 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP). IEEE, 2017.

Costa, Yandre MG, Luiz S. Oliveira, and Carlos N. Silla Jr. "An evaluation of convolutional neural networks for music classification using spectrograms." Applied Soft Computing 52 (2017): 28-38.

Emmerson, Simon, ed. Music, electronic media and culture. Routledge, 2016.