Music

People have always wondered about the origin of music, from Plato to Rousseau and Darwin, and many have tried to find an answer. Darwin, for example, hypothesised that music is the evolution of a natural behaviour linked to courtship, so the better a specimen can sing, the more chance it has of reproducing, but is it really that simple?

Of all human advances and inventions, one has been chosen as the symbol dividing humanity's timeline into prehistory and history: writing.

Every piece of music, whether classical or popular, is composed according to a starting structure that we call "musical form". In addition to the forms discussed below, there is the simple form called Lied, that is that of a song, in fact takes this name from the German language and is structured in two or three parts: A, A-A', AB or ABA where B does not have a development and is therefore a new section.

In 1600, a new theatrical and musical genre was born in Italy: Opera, which was destined to occupy theatre seasons and bring people together in a single hall to this day. Italian opera was born in the courts, moved to the theatre, changed its form and became one of the most beloved and profitable genres in the history of music. Among the greatest masterpieces are Verdi's Traviata, Puccini's Madama Butterfly, Boheme and Turandot, Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro and Così fan tutte, Mascagni's Cavalleria rusticana, Rossini's Il barbiere di Siviglia etc..

Through the works of Claudio Monteverdi it is possible to get to know the history of the madrigal which, despite the magnificent fruits of the composer from Cremona, suffered an unstoppable disappearance in the mid-seventeenth century. In fact, at the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries, important changes took place, changing the way music was produced and enjoyed, stylistic choices and the transition from the modal to the tonal system began.

In the musical landscape of the late Baroque, a great composer emerged: the german Johann Sebastian Bach. Although he led a sedentary life, always including permanent assignments at courts or religious institutions, he had the ability to introduce the novelties of the changing atmosphere into his music while remaining tied to his own German tradition.

Händel was a composer and musician of the Baroque period who, unlike Bach, changed many residences and led a rather eventful life. There is no real justification for this, but it is probably due to an intolerance of stable jobs (such as Kantor or Kapellmeister) together with a strong drive towards an international career at ever higher levels.

In 1643 King Louis XIII died and was succeeded by his son Louis XIV with a small problem: he was only 5 years old and so in his place ruled his mother Anne of Austria and Cardinal Julius Mazarin. Mazarin was an Italian who had served at the court of Antonio Barberini in Rome where he had seen Italian works such as stefano landi's Saint Alexis.

“The Path to the New Music” is the title given by Anton Webern to a series of sixteen lectures he gave in a private house in Vienna in 1933 in which the composer wanted to illustrate the process that led Schönberg to the theorisation of dodecaphony.

We are always surrounded by sounds that change from place to place, from time to time, from season to season, we are not used to paying attention to them and we mostly hear them passively. On the contrary, a composer would like his music to be listened to actively and with maximum concentration, but there is music that is created specifically to be ignored and this, in some ways, is absolutely brilliant.