Leslie Van Houten

The Melting Pot I choose the “Arabian Waltz” by the Silk Road Ensemble as my song. This group is composed of “distinguished musicians, composers and performing artists from more than 20 countries around the world to celebrate, explore and experiment with a wide variety of cultural approaches to musical performances” (The Silk Road Ensemble with Yo-Yo Ma: Live from Tanglewood). At the beginning of the piece I felt very serene with just a couple of instruments playing. However, when all the…

Arcangelo Corelli is an impressionable Italian composer and violinist who exercised a wide influence on his musical peers and on the succeeding generation of composers. Arcangelo Corelli is the 5th child of very prosperous landowners. He was born on February 17 1653 in Fusignano near Bologna, Italy to Santa Raffini who was recent left a widow after his father died just five weeks before his birth. His mother named him after his deceased father Arcangelo. His first teacher is thought to be the…

Eugéne Delacroix was born on April 26 in Charenton, France in the year of 1798. He lived for 65 years before he died on August 13, 1863. He didn’t grow up with a lot of money and his painting career never paid him a well enough. He also tended to try and push the boundaries in some of his paintings, more so in his religious pieces. He was a romanticism artist. The romanticism style was an emphasis on emotion and drama of the subject that was depicted in the painting. He didn’t start out in the…

The use of line is used widely through one of his most famous pieces, The Starry Night. Referred to as “the visible path of a moving point (Understanding Visual Artforms in Our World, Anderson and Carson, 2014, pg.30)”, line defines every visible object in the night depicted in the painting. In deep examination, I notice that the sky is completely composed of wavy lines. As said in the text, lines are sometimes used to bring out a certain emotion. The swirls and waves of the light around the…

The flute originates from Germany. No one knows specifically when in the prehistoric times but evidence has shown that a flute which was found in pieces was about to be 38,000 years old. Non like the violin it did not evolve from another instrument, it is said that many pieces of the flute were found in a cave in Germany called the Geißenklösterle Cave. Sound is produced from a flute by blowing onto a sharp edge, causing air enclosed in a tube to vibrate. The flute used to be an instrument made…

Johannes Brahms’s Piano Concerto No.1 in D Minor is split into three movements of varying texture and feel. Full of tension and release, the piece reflects both Brahms’s other works and his life during the time of its composition. Although initially received in 1859 to an overwhelmingly negative reaction, (Lunday 127) the concerto grew in popularity with the help of Clara Schumann and remains a popular composition to this day (Staines 97). Throughout the piece, the delicate balances of…

“With a tense melodic line and taut harmonies, the composition is considered by many to be the most popular of all 20th-century orchestral works,” NPR Music. Adagio for Strings, was written by Samuel Barber in 1936. Originally written as the second movement of Barbers String Quartet, Op. 11, Adagio for Strings has been used frequently in times of mourning. The beauty of this piece is the strong emotions that it invokes from those that hear it. Written during a time, when the world was in a…

Franz Peter Schubert was born around January 31, 1797, in Himmelpfortgrund what was near Vienna. He was an Austrian composer and also wrote something has much as six or seven hundred romantic songs. His works included operas, symphonies, sonatas and many other works through his life time. As a young boy he was mainly focused training his voice and becoming a vocalist but he was skilled in many other things as well. he rarely played his music in the public eyes. He died in November 19,1828, at…

Caravaggio and Caravaggisti in 17th-Century Europe Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio was one of the most imitated artists in history. A lot of artists from around the world considered themselves to be his followers. Caravaggio never liked the imitation of his style but he was unable to stop it from happening. Artists like Baglione, Carlo Saraceni, and Guercino imitated his style for only a short period of their careers while others dedicated their lives to imitate him. The quality of his work…

In the past, I want to firstly address that I personally have attended some music concerts on Sacramento State’s campus. However, I had never before attended to a symphonic wind ensemble concert. Before the concert began, I had noticed a large amount of chairs on stage as I found this quite interesting. As it was about to begin, a large amount of musicians wearing black appeared on the stage and were performing a small warmup. As performers, they were a guest group. Once the lights were turned…