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Some English Composers and the Music of Benjamin Britten

15/1/2017

Dear friends,

Here I am, back to my favourite subject, music. Today I will talk about music in Great Britain. As we all know, the UK is the world’s greatest market for music consumers, buying more albums per head than anywhere else. From Glyndebourne to Glastonbury, the UK hosts the world’s greatest music festivals. For instance, at the 2012 London Olympics, the opening and closing ceremonies celebrated major aspects of music as a powerful aspect of British national identity.

Going back to history, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries English musicians had a great reputation in Europe, both for their talent and for their originality. Today there is a revival of interest in these neglected composers. It was their experiments in keyboard music which helped to form the base from which grew most of the great harpsichord and piano music of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries.

William Byrd was the most distinguished English composer of the 16th century, and his name is still widely known. Byrd’s musical stature can hardly be overrated. He wrote extensively for every medium then available except, it seems, the lute. His virginal and organ music brought the English keyboard style to new heights and pointed the way to the achievements of other English composers, such as John Bull, Giles Farnaby, Orlando Gibbons, and Thomas Tomkins.

Photo credit: sinfonica.com.co

In the centuries which followed, England produced no composers of world rank except for Purcell in the 17th and 18th centuries, and Elgar in the 20th century. In the latter, many people believe there has been a reflowering of English music, and the compositions of some contemporary composers will live on after their deaths. The music of Michael Tippett, William Waltonis and, last but not least, Benjamin Britten performed all over the world.

Britten was an outstanding pianist and conductor, the most important British composer of the 20th century. "Composing is like driving down a foggy road toward a house. Slowly you see more details of the house - the colour of the slates and bricks, the shape of the windows. The notes are the bricks and the mortar of the house", he used to say.

Britten’s prodigious musical talent was recognised early on. He left school at thirteen and went to study composition with John Ireland at the Royal College of Music. He also studied piano with Arthur Benjamin and would go on to become one of the finest accompanists of his generation.

He wrote over 100 major works including operas, songs, string quartets and other chamber works, a violin concerto, choral works, incidental music, symphonies and other orchestral works. Of these, he is best known for the Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra, Op. 34 (1934)—a sixteen minute work designed to introduce listeners to the various instruments and families of the modern orchestra.

Photo credit: 50years.library.nd.edu

His operas were considered the finest English operas since those of Henry Purcell in the 17th century. Some of his operas, such as Noyes Fludde (Noah’s Flood) are performed in churches every year, and people from the surrounding area sing and act in them.

Britten’s approach was always to write for a person or occasion; he could not write in a vacuum, isolated from the rest of humanity, in an ivory tower and detached from the treatment and reception of his works by musicians and the general public.

He has been called a “people’s composer” because he composed music, particularly operas and choral works, that can be sung by ordinary people and by children. As performers, he liked children’s simplicity and intensity; as audiences he found them highly receptive, very choosy perhaps.

What’s more, the festival he started in his little home town, Aldeburgh, on the North Sea coast of Suffolk, has become one of the most important musical festivals in Britain. It retains a unique character, largely due to its location in rural Suffolk. It also continues to emphasise the presentation of new music, new interpretations and the rediscovery of forgotten music.

I hope this post will motivate you to discover his music! Enjoy!

Teacher Barbara

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Communicating at work

22/10/2015

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Dear friends,

All of us, at times, are misunderstood by another person or we misunderstand the other person’s message. We use words or phrases that are misinterpreted. Sometimes we create mistrust by what we say, the words we use, or the way we say it.

In our working environment, we need each other in order to achieve our goals and objectives. None of these goals can be achieved without communication. Communication is the basis thread that ties us together. Through communication we make known our needs, our ideas and our feelings. It is arguably one of the most important business skills, no matter what your industry. Yet so many of us haven't been trained in how to communicate with co-workers and clients.

Modern societies and people differ widely in terms of nationality, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, age, education, social class or level of (dis)ability – in other words, in terms of their demographic profile or social background. The countries of world regions (such as Europe) are becoming integrated, their markets and workforces diverse and their organisations international.

At work, therefore, individuals are now likely to interact with a highly diverse range of people as colleagues, subordinates, managers, clients, patients, customers, students, professional advisers and other service providers, sales representatives and other interface workers.

In order to match the dynamic, complex nature of the challenge of communication at work, an equally dynamic and flexible process is needed to address them in the real world of work. The new definition of “successful communication” at work starts with the ability to recognize the patterns of communication and interaction where decisions get made, relationships are built, organizational culture is solidified, and the trajectory for ultimate business outcomes are set into motion.

It is definitely more difficult when we deal with transcultural communication, which typically entails interaction in which one or more of the communicators use a second or third language. Successful transcultural communication requires not only a shared language but also strong intercultural awareness and skills. These include verbal skills such as how and when to use speech and silence as well as non-verbal skills knowing how and when gaze, gesture and body posture may differ across cultures.

In order to work efficiently, bosses (for example) must be able to communicate to their workers what is needed. If they are not clear about what their employees need to do, there will be mistakes that make the company lose time and money.

Photo credit: sherwoodfleming.com

When developing and maintaining a corporate culture, it is vital to keep communication as open and honest as possible. The higher the level of honesty the higher the likelihood to build a strong relationship built on trust. This strongly accounts for the interactions between managers and employees but also prominently between co-workers themselves.

The message to be communicated is usually carried by the three “V elements” – verbal, vocal, and visual. The words we use make up the verbal element. The vocal element includes the tone and intensity of our voice and other vocal qualities. It might surprise you to learn that the most powerful element of communication is the visual. Dynamic visual, nonverbal communication grabs and holds onto the listener’s attention. Effective communication begins with getting the listener’s attention through strong visual, nonverbal elements and then uses powerful vocal and verbal elements to transmit the message.

Photo credit: wehavepotential.com

The listener “receives” the message through a series of filters: his past experiences, his perception of the speaker, his emotional involvement with the message, his understanding of the verbal content, his level of attention, etc. In a sense, he translates the message into his own words, creating his own version of what he thinks the speaker was saying.

Listening is what we do most of when communicating at work, in fact this accounts for 45% of our communication.

Emerging and established leaders must develop a combination of insight, skill, and ability that allows them to examine what they are making, spot the critical moments where something different/better could be made, understand how to create the flexible conditions for change, follow a sequence of steps to re-make unwanted patterns of communication and interaction, and learn to avoid everyday pitfalls that can undermine these patterns and the benefits they bring.

I hope you will remember the three Vs when communicating. They are important elements especially in transcultural communication. Communication is definitely relevant for any environment and above all for the business world.

Enjoy communicating!

Teacher Barbara

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Música y lengua: una forma mutua de comunicar

29/9/2015

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Queridos amigos:

Una vez más, vuelvo a hablar de mi tema favorito: la música, esa mágica combinación de sonidos que nos acompaña en la mayoría de nuestras actividades, a veces por ocio como bailar y cantar y otras por “obligación” cuando la estudiamos profesionalmente. En otras ocasionas la utilizamos inconscientemente como terapia, cuando sentimos fuertes emociones y apetece escuchar algo para acompañar ese estado de ánimo.

Esta cita de Henry Wadsworth Longfellow muestra hasta qué punto la lengua esté conectada con la música. A través de melodías y letras las personas en todas partes del mundo comparten una forma mutua de comunicar. La música es una expresión artística que integra al ser humano consigo mismo y con la sociedad. A lo largo de la historia, la combinación de sonidos y silencios ha servido para plasmar ideas, sensaciones y emociones.

Entender y hacerse entender depende de la capacidad de distinguir sonidos en el nuevo idioma y producir pequeñas diferencias de sonidos similares al propio idioma nativo. Además de la fonética, los idiomas se caracterizan por un nivel básico de prosodia (el ritmo, acentuación y entonación de la palabra). La entonación es la melodía del habla. No existen lenguas sin entonación.

Tanto la música como la lengua son códigos compuestos por elementos que se combinan según unas reglas con la intención de producir un efecto en el receptor. El canal por el que se transmiten también es común: en su forma oral tenemos el sonido y la voz, mientras que en su forma escrita tenemos las letras y los signos de puntuación, las notas, las claves y otros signos de notación musical. Muchas veces estos códigos se solapan como es el caso del habla, el canto y otras formas literarias y musicales.

Dentro de la melodía, los sonidos se organizan en frases musicales. A cada frase musical le corresponde una agrupación con sentido completo en una melodía. Generalmente consta de una pregunta y respuesta formando el ciclo completo de una idea melódica.

A nivel lingüístico, el nivel fonológico del lenguaje corresponde a las características de los sonidos básicos; el nivel sintáctico es equiparable a las reglas por las que se rige la composición musical y la armonía; y el nivel semántico es el significado que se atribuye a las frases musicales, sucesiones de sonidos que dan lugar a una melodía.

Por lo tanto, algunos aspectos del lenguaje verbal resultan, de un modo u otro, musicales, y algunos de la música son lingüísticos. La música puede ayudar al desarrollo de algunas habilidades importantes para la adquisición de competencias verbales, como la destreza de escuchar y recordar con atención, la facultad de pasar sonidos a símbolos y viceversa, controlar la entonación de la voz, etcétera.

Fuente: pensamientolenguajeycreatividad.wikispaces.com

La música y la lengua son a la vez comunicativas y cada una de ellas implica el desarrollo natural de las habilidades receptivas y productivas. El entrenamiento musical puede incluso mejorar las habilidades de alfabetización. Cantar una canción en una lengua nueva puede contribuir a un aumento significativo de la gramática, vocabulario y expresión oral. El aprendizaje verbal puede ser apoyado por la mnemotecnia musical, especialmente en las etapas tempranas del desarrollo y en el aprendizaje de habilidades académicas. Si el texto se combina con una melodía, se puede aprender más eficazmente. De hecho, el aprendizaje de canciones permite acercarse al texto (discurso verbal), comprendiendo éste a través de la dimensión sensible que ofrece el soporte tímbrico, melódico y armónico de la propia música.

Podría seguir mencionando aproximaciones entre la música y la lengua, pero me limitaré a haceros partícipe de mi experiencia como profesora. He trabajado con muchos estudiantes de diversas edades y nacionalidades, y he podido constatar que la mayoría de los estudiantes que estudian música o tocan algún instrumento musical suelen tener una mayor facilidad para aprender un idioma extranjero, una mayor facilidad para reproducir sonidos nuevos e incluso una mayor disposición para el estudio de una nueva lengua. Os animo a interesaros aún más por la música, no importa en qué faceta, no importa si es de manera profesional o aficionada, pero les puedo asegurar que les abrirá muchas puertas en el futuro y una de ellas es indudablemente el aprendizaje de una nueva lengua.

Musicalmente os digo hasta pronto,

Teacher Barbara

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The Wispile Mountain and the Alpine cheese

21/7/2015

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Dear friends,

It is holiday time so I’ve decided that all my posts in July and August will deal with places I went on a trip to in the far or recent past.

Today I will share with you what I did with my little daughter a couple of weeks ago. It was so exciting! We took the Golden Pass train from Montreux to Gstaad (Switzerland). The GoldenPass Line links six lakes and two of the country’s contrasting language regions. It combines timeless tradition in German-speaking Central Switzerland with French flair on Lake Geneva. All in one day! Taking a day trip on the GoldenPass Line is in itself like taking a short holiday. We admired fabulous landscapes and passed through lovely vineyards and country estates.

Once arrived in Gstaad, we had a tour of the village. Gstaad is situated in the Berner Oberland, it is home to one of the largest ski areas in the Alps (220 km (137 mi) of slopes). It is a mountain resort nestled halfway between Zurich and Geneva, an idyllic village that appears plucked from the pages of a storybook (much like Zermatt) marked by 17th-century chalets, cheese shops, bakeries, wine stores – and a promenade riddled with boutiques like Gucci and Louis Vuitton. Money attracts money, and there's certainly a lot of it here. Mere mortals can indulge in exquisite meals, skiing, and overnight stays in paradise.

Then, we took the cable car to Gstaad’s local mountain, the Wispile, which is a paradise for families and children. In winter it attracts families with its splendid ski slopes and in summer, it’s the starting point for exhilarating high-level hikes to the legendary Lake Lauenen.

The trip was incredible, a really great experience for a child but also for me as an adult. After 15 minutes of amazing panoramas, breathless emotions, we reached the cosy Wispile Mountain. We were at 1915m altitude. The Wispile was the centre of attention for walkers, paragliders, day trippers and dog walkers. The superb weather had brought people out to enjoy the scenery in optimum conditions.

Have a look at this video. I hope you will enjoy the panorama as much as we did.

Where does the mountain take its name from? The name Wispile comes from the Celtic language and translates as “good pasture” (Alpine pasture) (celt., see also Visp, Pillon). In 1270, it was still called Vespilon, in 1312 Wispiliona, in 1494 Wispillen, and in 1680 auf der Hochen Wispillen.

We also learnt about cheese-making, which dates back to the Neolithic Age in Central Europe. Unique Alpine cheese from the Saan region is produced there where cows graze on lush Alpine meadows during the night, and the herdsman lovingly and skilfully turns the fresh, rich Alpine milk into cheese in the early morning.

Since 1548, the cheese has been made exclusively on the Alpine pasture over an open fire during the summer months. The flavour varies depending on the geography of the Alpine pasture. “Berner Alpkäse AOC”. This is the name of the certified Alpine cheese that is made by 92 producers in the Saan region and is also allowed to bear the label “Gstaad Authentique”. A visit to the Alpine farmers will give you a glimpse of their hard but beautiful life in the Alps.

Coming back from the mountain, we took the Golden Pass again and had a stop in Montreux, just the time for a walk. It was so hot, we could not stand it anymore, but we wanted to listen to some music. Every year in July Montreux hosts one of the most famous jazz festivals in the world, but definitely not affordable to all.

To sum up, it was a wonderful trip, I enjoyed visiting Gstaad again and going up to the Wispile mountain I had never been to before.

Teacher Barbara

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Daydreaming: A window to Creativity

25/6/2015

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Dear friends,

Today I’ll talk of day-dreaming, generally viewed as an impractical, wasteful activity: one should be doing something useful, not just sitting or walking around with “one’s head in the clouds”.

The student’s eyes drift to the classroom window and the teacher’s voice fades from consciousness. The daydream begins. It’s a familiar scene, one we have likely both experienced as students and struggled against in our students as teachers.

In a culture obsessed with efficiency, mind-wandering is often derided as useless—the kind of thinking we rely on when we don’t really want to think. Freud, for instance, described daydreams as “infantile” and a means of escaping from the necessary chores of the world into fantasies of “wish-fulfillment.”

Photo credit: lovethispic.com

But daydreaming is not what it might seem. Rather than being of little worth, the capacity to fantasize is a priceless skill, a thoroughly useful tool, a tool for all seasons.

Recent research in both psychology and neuroscience makes clear that daydreaming is an essential part of mental processing, reasoning and, yes, even learning.

Daydreaming and playing for instance are crucial for children to develop the kind of creativity many say should be a focal point of a modern education system. Educators often consider the kids who can’t sit still in class to be troublemakers, constantly distracting other children from their work. Sometimes these kids are diagnosed with ADHD and prescribed drugs to help them focus. But the same kids who have a hard time focusing in school could be tremendously creative elsewhere.

Nowadays, day-dreaming or fantasizing is discouraged in children, so that by the time they are adults it has been completely removed. It should be just the opposite. Creativity comes out of the unusual and needs space, in fact lots of space, to develop.

Fortunately, the die-hard day-dreamers/creators manage to struggle through. My husband does not believe me when I tell him that I cannot stop thinking. But it turns out that even when we think we’re zoning out or taking a mental break, the brain keeps going—it’s impossible to turn it off.

In companies, I believe day-dreaming can be beneficial in many ways and, ironically, can actually boost the productivity of employees. Plus, it's something almost everyone does naturally. Psychologists estimate that we daydream for one-third to one-half of our waking hours, although a single daydream lasts only a few minutes.

For some of us, coffee shops, pubs or public places where people are moving around are ideal spots for day-dreaming. Or, indeed, somewhere where there is running to stimulate thought and ideas in a way that perhaps a library or the solitude of a study does not.

Photo credit: screenwritinggoldmine.com

So, is day-dreaming an innate ability or something that can be taught? While I personally am prepared to accept that inheritance of ability does play a significant role in the process, I am more inclined to the idea that the environment, and perhaps chance, play a much greater role. It is said that genius is in 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration.

I hope you will share my thoughts.

Teacher Barbara

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Welcome to Teacher Barbara's blog

Some English Composers and the Music of Benjamin Britten

Communicating at work

Música y lengua: una forma mutua de comunicar

The Wispile Mountain and the Alpine cheese

Daydreaming: A window to Creativity

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