 Book cover, first edition | |
| Author | Harold Barlow, Sam Morgenstern |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Crown Publishing Group |
Publication date | 1949 |
| OCLC | 232891 |
A Dictionary of Musical Themes (New York: Crown, 1949) is a music reference book by Sam Morgenstern and Harold Barlow.
| Book cover, first edition | |
| Author | Harold Barlow, Sam Morgenstern |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Crown Publishing Group |
Publication date | 1949 |
| OCLC | 232891 |
A Dictionary of Musical Themes (New York: Crown, 1949) is a music reference book by Sam Morgenstern and Harold Barlow.
The book collects 10,000 musical themes (mostly classical works) and indexes them using a notation index based on transposing the pitches to C major or C minor (so that God Save the Queen / America, for instance, would come out as CCDBCDEEFE). It was followed a year later by A Dictionary of Vocal Themes (1950), including themes from songs and opera.
Sam Morgenstern (1906-1989) was a teacher at Mannes College of Music in Greenwich Village, New York, and the conductor of Lower Manhattan's Lemonade Opera Company, which gave the US premiere of Prokofiev’s Duenna in 1948. He composed two short operas, along with Warsaw Ghetto (setting a spoken word poem by Harry Granick to background music), which premiered at Carnegie Hall on February 10, 1946. He composed a choral cantata The Common Man, and the Latin-tinged piano piece Toccata Guatemala. Although no recordings of his work exist, a radio disk transcription of the second performance of Warsaw Ghetto exists, made in the studio a week after the premiere. [1] Morgenstern’s other books included the anthology Composers on Music (1956). [2]
Harold Barlow (1915-93) devised the notation scheme. He was a popular song composer who studied violin at Boston University and became a bandleader during World War II. [3] He wrote the comedy song I’ve Got Tears in My Ears in 1949 (recorded by Homer and Jethro), [4] and the lyrics to the 1960 Connie Francis hit Mama. Barlow became better known later in his career as a consultant on plagiarism, most famously defending George Harrison’s "My Sweet Lord" against accusations that it was copied from the Chiffons’ hit He’s So Fine. (Harrison lost the case). [5] Barlow also worked on cases involving Bob Dylan, Elvis Presley, Elton John, Dolly Parton, and Billy Joel. [6]
A new attempt at classifying tunes was published in 1975 by Denys Parsons. The Directory of Tunes and Musical Themes used the contours of a melody, avoiding the need for transpositions (which involves some musical knowledge). Using the letters U, D and R to denote up, down and repeat, and an asterisk for the first note, “God Save the Queen” comes out as *RUDUU URUDDD UDDU. Parsons covered around 15,000 classical, popular and folk pieces in his dictionary. In the process he found out that *UU is the most popular opening contour, used in 23% of all the themes, something that applies to all the genres. [7] The book was reissued in 2008 as the Directory of Classical Themes. [8]
Denys Parsons (1914, died circa 2000) was the grandson of actor Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree. [9] [10] He was the father of Alan Parsons, the producer of Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon and leader of the Alan Parsons Project.
Website search services employing the Barlow method [11] and the Parsons method [12] are available. Today audio files can be plugged into music recognition services such as Audiggle, Gracenote, Shazam and SoundHound. [13] Google's "Hum to Search" feature, introduced for mobile phones in 2020, uses artificial intelligence models and is based on Google's music recognition technology. [14]
Music is the arrangement of sound to create some combination of form, harmony, melody, rhythm, or otherwise expressive content. Music is generally agreed to be a cultural universal that is present in all human societies. Definitions of music vary widely in substance and approach. While scholars agree that music is defined by a small number of specific elements, there is no consensus as to what these necessary elements are. Music is often characterized as a highly versatile medium for expressing human creativity. Diverse activities are involved in the creation of music, and are often divided into categories of composition, improvisation, and performance. Music may be performed using a wide variety of musical instruments, including the human voice. It can also be composed, sequenced, or otherwise produced to be indirectly played mechanically or electronically, such as via a music box, barrel organ, or digital audio workstation software on a computer.
Robert Schumann was a German composer, pianist, and music critic of the early Romantic era. He composed in all the main musical genres of the time, writing for solo piano, voice and piano, chamber groups, orchestra, choir and the opera. His works typify the spirit of the Romantic era in German music.
Musical composition can refer to an original piece or work of music, either vocal or instrumental, the structure of a musical piece or to the process of creating or writing a new piece of music. People who create new compositions are called composers. Composers of primarily songs are usually called songwriters; with songs, the person who writes lyrics for a song is the lyricist. In many cultures, including Western classical music, the act of composing typically includes the creation of music notation, such as a sheet music "score", which is then performed by the composer or by other musicians. In popular music and traditional music, songwriting may involve the creation of a basic outline of the song, called the lead sheet, which sets out the melody, lyrics and chord progression. In classical music, orchestration is typically done by the composer, but in musical theatre and in pop music, songwriters may hire an arranger to do the orchestration. In some cases, a pop or traditional songwriter may not use written notation at all and instead compose the song in their mind and then play, sing or record it from memory. In jazz and popular music, notable sound recordings by influential performers are given the weight that written or printed scores play in classical music.
Nikolai Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov was a Russian composer, a member of the group of composers known as The Five. He was a master of orchestration. His best-known orchestral compositions—Capriccio Espagnol, the Russian Easter Festival Overture, and the symphonic suite Scheherazade—are staples of the classical music repertoire, along with suites and excerpts from some of his fifteen operas. Scheherazade is an example of his frequent use of fairy-tale and folk subjects.
Sheet music is a handwritten or printed form of musical notation that uses musical symbols to indicate the pitches, rhythms, or chords of a song or instrumental musical piece. Like its analogs – printed books or pamphlets in English, Arabic, or other languages – the medium of sheet music typically is paper. However, access to musical notation since the 1980s has included the presentation of musical notation on computer screens and the development of scorewriter computer programs that can notate a song or piece electronically, and, in some cases, "play back" the notated music using a synthesizer or virtual instruments.
In music, a whole-tone scale is a scale in which each note is separated from its neighbors by the interval of a whole tone. In twelve-tone equal temperament, there are only two complementary whole-tone scales, both six-note or hexatonic scales. A single whole-tone scale can also be thought of as a "six-tone equal temperament".
Howard Harold Hanson was an American composer, conductor, educator, music theorist, and champion of American classical music. As director for 40 years of the Eastman School of Music, he built a high-quality school and provided opportunities for commissioning and performing American music. In 1944, he won a Pulitzer Prize for his Symphony No. 4, and received numerous other awards including the George Foster Peabody Award for Outstanding Entertainment in Music in 1946.
The Voice of Firestone was a radio and television program of classical music. The show featured leading singers in selections from opera and operetta. Originally titled The Firestone Hour, it was first broadcast on the NBC Radio network on December 3, 1928 and was later also shown on television starting in 1949. The program was last broadcast in 1963.
Joseph Guilherme Raposo, OIH was an American composer and songwriter, best known for his work on the children's television series Sesame Street, for which he wrote the theme song, as well as classic songs such as "Bein' Green", "C Is For Cookie" and "Sing". He also wrote music for television shows such as The Electric Company, Shining Time Station and the sitcoms Three's Company and The Ropers, including their theme songs. In addition to these works, Raposo also composed extensively for three Dr. Seuss TV specials in collaboration with the DePatie-Freleng Enterprises: Halloween Is Grinch Night (1977), Pontoffel Pock, Where Are You? (1980), and The Grinch Grinches the Cat in the Hat (1982).
The Parsons code, formally named the Parsons code for melodic contours, is a simple notation used to identify a piece of music through melodic motion – movements of the pitch up and down. Denys Parsons developed this system for his 1975 book The Directory of Tunes and Musical Themes. Representing a melody in this manner makes it easier to index or search for pieces, particularly when the notes' values are unknown. Parsons covered around 15,000 classical, popular and folk pieces in his dictionary. In the process he found out that *UU is the most popular opening contour, used in 23% of all the themes, something that applies to all the genres.
Hans Krása was a Czech composer. He was killed during the Holocaust at Auschwitz-Birkenau. He helped to organize cultural life in Theresienstadt concentration camp.
In music, transcription is the practice of notating a piece or a sound which was previously unnotated and/or unpopular as a written music, for example, a jazz improvisation or a video game soundtrack. When a musician is tasked with creating sheet music from a recording and they write down the notes that make up the piece in music notation, it is said that they created a musical transcription of that recording. Transcription may also mean rewriting a piece of music, either solo or ensemble, for another instrument or other instruments than which it was originally intended. The Beethoven Symphonies transcribed for solo piano by Franz Liszt are an example. Transcription in this sense is sometimes called arrangement, although strictly speaking transcriptions are faithful adaptations, whereas arrangements change significant aspects of the original piece.
Henry Jay Lewis was an American double-bassist and orchestral conductor whose career extended over four decades. A child prodigy, he joined the Los Angeles Philharmonic at age 16, becoming the first African-American instrumentalist in a major symphony orchestra and, later, the first African-American symphony orchestra conductor in the United States. As musical director of the Seventh Army Symphony Orchestra, he supported America's cultural diplomacy initiatives in Europe after World War II.
Alan Parsons is an English audio engineer, songwriter, musician and record producer.
Comedy music or musical comedy is a genre of music that is comical, comedic or humorous in nature. Its history can be traced back to the first century in ancient Greece and Rome, moving forward in time to the Medieval Period, Classical and Romantic eras, and the 20th century. Various forms of comedic musical theatre, including "musical play", "musical comedy", "operetta" and "light opera", evolved from the comic operas first developed in late 17th-century Italy. Popular music artists in the 20th century interested in comedy include Allan Sherman, Frank Zappa, Tiny Tim, Barenaked Ladies, Randy Newman, and "Weird Al" Yankovic. Artists in the 21st century include Tenacious D, Flight of the Conchords, The Lonely Island, Ninja Sex Party and The Axis of Awesome.
Antar is a composition for symphony orchestra in four movements by the Russian composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. He wrote the piece in 1868 but revised it in 1875 and 1891. He initially called the work his Symphony No. 2. He later reconsidered and called it a symphonic suite. It was first performed in March 1869 at a concert of the Russian Musical Society.
Harold Barlow was an American songwriter, and later a consultant on plagiarism.
Music plagiarism is the use or close imitation of another author's music while representing it as one's own original work. Plagiarism in music now occurs in two contexts—with a musical idea or sampling. For a legal history of the latter see sampling.
Robert Orlando Morgan was an English music teacher, composer and musicologist. He is best remembered as an influential teacher at the Guildhall School of Music in London, where he taught for 64 years, from 1887 to 1951, as Professor of Pianoforte and Composition. His pupils included the composer Benjamin Frankel and the pianist Dame Myra Hess.
Théodore Jean-Baptiste Weckerlin or Wekerlin was a French composer and music publisher from Alsace.