Instruments

Yesterday I watched the second lecture from the course Listening to Music. It had to do with musical instruments and genres. There was nothing too technical in the lecture and it just gave basic introduction to different types of instruments such as string, brass and woodwind and how do they produce sound. A couple of musical genres were discussed. Symphony, having four movements and Concerto having three. Besides this, the idea of motif and theme was introduced. We listened to a couple of pieces where we started from recognising the instruments that were playing, which instrument had the melody and whether the particular movement started with a motif or a theme. Overall, it was a good high level discussion and the lecture seemed to fly by.

As far as my practice is concerned, I continued to work on Minuet in D. I am still on the first half of the piece but I am making progress. There is a tough part where there are sixteenth notes, hand position changes and then staccato right after. So I am tackling those one at a time and then trying to incorporate them with the previous measure. Here’s the piece being played by someone else, just to show what I am working on.

I am hoping for considerable progress by the end of this week. Let’s see how it goes.