This education blog shares various horizons of music in order to promote sustainable development of music education. Being devoted to music education for 19 years, Carol Ng has established her private studio at Adelaide, South Australia with an examination-standard Yamaha grand piano. In addition, Carol is keen on enlightening the next generation and advocating continuous advancement of music industry.
If you haven’t seen Kodi Lee’s May 28 performance on “America’s Got Talent,” it’s worth a watch.
The 22-year-old Lee is blind and has autism. His rendition of Leon Russell’s “A Song for You” brought the crowd to its feet – and thrilled viewers at home.
“Loved this moment so much! Stood up and cheered in my living room!” Oprah tweeted.
Much of the media coverage portrayed Lee as someone who, in developing his musical ability to such a high level, overcame all odds – a common though sometimes troublesome trope used to describe people with disabilities who achieve any measure of success.
Lee is certainly an exciting talent. But as someone who teaches a course on the intersection of disability and music, I was moved by other aspects of Lee’s performance as well.
畢業後在原校擔任教職的霍納，深受電影《2001太空漫遊》（2001: A Space Odyssey）中的古典音樂的啟發，並在1982年得到與90多人編制的交響樂團合作共譜《星艦迷航記II：星戰大怒吼》（Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan）的機會，又以本片遼闊，壯麗的交響樂風格打響名號。
無論是傳統好萊塢電影音樂的古典交響樂、追求時尚酷炫快感的電子樂、《天生小棋王》（Searching For Bobby Fischer）中簡單的鋼琴獨奏，《愛國者遊戲》（Patriot Games）咄咄逼人的打擊樂器，《風雲際會》（Willow）裡風聲鶴唳的日本長笛尺八，《神鬼尖兵》（Sneakers）的耍酷爵士樂，在《夢幻成真》（Field of Dreams）摻點田園民謠，《真愛一世情》（Legends of the Fall）揉合鋼琴、民謠、圓舞曲，乃至《綁票通緝令》（Ransom）與搖滾樂團Smashing Pumpkins吉他手Billy Corgan過招，抑或是襯托影片裡世界各地的民族音樂，詹姆斯‧霍納的電影音樂擺盤多樣，創造了影音聽覺的無限想像。
霍納在2014年11月，於利物浦發表費時4年完成的大提琴與小提琴協奏曲〈雙人舞〉（Pas de Duex），這是他自80年代以來再度回歸古典音樂領域的力作，可惜就在他重新點燃古典音樂的創作熱情之際，一場墜機意外卻讓這一切劃上了休止符！
Thirty years ago, Derek Paravicini was within a heartbeat of death. No other baby born in the Royal Berkshire Hospital 14 weeks prematurely had ever survived. His twin sister was dead at birth.
When Derek came along a few minutes later, the doctor presumed that he, too, could not possibly live. And yet, and yet... just when his mother Mary Ann had given up hope, she heard the faintest of whimpers, the tiniest of muffled squeaks. He had made it.
Three decades on, Derek no longer makes muffled squeaks. Instead, he brings a rapt audience in St George’s concert theatre, Bristol, to their feet again and again, with a dazzling range of music — an Oscar Peterson arrangement of Greensleeves, his own version of Bach’s Air in the key of G, a jaunty ragtime taste of Debussy.
Piano virtuouso: Derek Paravicini, playing at the St George's concert hall in Bristol, was born blind and autistic
You’ll have heard of perfect pitch. Well, Derek has absolute pitch — a rare gift, meaning that, when he hears a chord with ten notes in it, he can identify every one. Most professional musicians can get about five.
He can master any melody on earth, has a databank of thousands of songs in his head and can play any one of them at will, improvising as he goes.
One member of the audience asks him to play Ain’t No Sunshine. Another suggests that he play it in B major. And another, that it’s done in ragtime. No problem — without a pause, his fingers flutter across the keyboard in a hummingbird blur of staggering virtuosity.
‘Goodnight Sweetheart,’ shouts out someone from the back row. In C sharp, in the style of theatre composer Jerome Kern. And so it goes on, for two hours of riotous shared joy, the latest chapter in an uplifting tale of rare talent locked in a damaged brain.
Because he was born so early, Derek is blind. The oxygen used to revive him at birth caused certain vessels in his eyes to grow abnormally, damaging his retinas, in a condition called retinopathy of prematurity.
As he is blind, he cannot read music — he can’t even read Braille. The whole of tonight’s performance — his and the orchestra’s — is encapsulated entirely within his head.
Despite his music gift, Derek’s verbal skills are limited. His English is well-spoken, clear and loud, but his capacity for thought does not stretch far.
He is an echolaliac, meaning that he echoes what you say to him, turning your question into a statement.
‘Do you know Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, Derek?’ I ask.
‘Yes, I know Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, Harry.’
‘Are you looking forward to playing in London?’
‘Yes, I am looking forward to playing in London, Harry.’
There are flashes of humour. At a recent recital in 11 Downing Street, hosted by Alistair Darling, Derek launched, unbidden, into a version of Big Spender. At an earlier concert at No10, he coaxed Cherie Blair into singing along to The Beatles’ When I’m 64.
Usually, though, Derek’s thoughts dwell on the immediate future and no further. ‘Where will we go after the concert, Adam?’ he asks Adam Ockelford, the Professor of Music at Roehampton University, who has taught Derek for 26 years. ‘Can we have fish and chips?’
Derek - the Duchess of Cornwall's nephew - has been nicknamed The Human iPod because he can recite any piece of music he has heard just once
This short-term view of life means he barely suffers from nerves. Half an hour before tonight’s concert started, he asked Roger Huckle, the artistic director of the Emerald Ensemble, what they were going to do that evening. On being told that he was going to play a concert, he said calmly: ‘Yes, let’s do a concert.’
For someone so handicapped, it is a godsend that his hidden talent was unleashed at all. Much of the credit goes to his nanny, Winifred Daly, who died 12 years ago.
She had looked after several generations of Derek’s mother’s side of the family — the Parker Bowleses, as in Camilla. Derek’s mother, born Mary Ann Parker Bowles, is sister to Andrew Parker Bowles, the Duchess of Cornwall’s ex-husband. It was Winifred Daly who first spotted something unusual in Derek.
Looking for a diversion to occupy the blind 20-month-old, she dragged down a small electric organ from the attic of the Paravicini home in Berkshire; the organ had belonged to Derek’s grandfather, Derek Parker Bowles, after whom he was named.
To begin with, Derek used a jumble of fists, palms and knuckles to knock the living daylights out of the keyboard. Gradually, though, with no tuition, he started moving his hands in synch, up and down the keys. Soon he was forming chords, until one day, his older sister, Libbet, came rushing into her parents’ sitting room and announced: ‘Quick, quick, come and see, Derek’s playing that hymn we sang in church.’
What had happened? How had he magically summoned up the capacity to produce music from within his damaged brain? ‘His fascination with abstract patterns of sound, those thousands of hours spent simply listening during the first 20 months of his life, largely uncontaminated by understanding, had caused millions of special neuronal connections to form,’ says Professor Ockelford. ‘And it was those connections that now lay behind the emergence of a precocious musicality.’
If it was Winifred Daly whose love — and repeated singing and talking in the nursery — sparked off Derek’s talents, it was Professor Ockelford who harnessed them and moulded them into concert-worthy form.
‘The man is a saint,’ says Derek’s father, Nic Paravicini, a banker who now lives in Wales. ‘I tried to pay him and he refused. I had to force petrol money on him.’
They first met at Linden Lodge — the school for the blind attended by the celebrated jazz pianist George Shearing in the 1920s. Professor Ockelford taught Derek conventional musical techniques and untaught his unconventional ones — in particular his desire to play music as loudly as possible.
Still today, in Bristol, the professor is at Derek’s side, gently cueing his intros and tapping him on the back, encouraging him to take a bow when the audience erupts once more.
In time, news of Derek’s exceptional talent spread. At seven, he gave his first concert in Tooting Leisure Centre in South London. At nine, he was on the Wogan show.
At ten, he was presented with a Barnardo’s Children’s Champion Award by Diana, Princess of Wales. She was unruffled by the fact that he was Camilla Parker Bowles’s nephew, even though her marriage was on the rocks at the time. When Derek suggested playing Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off, she laughed uproariously.
Derek first used an electric organ when he was 20 months old and gave his first concert at the age of seven
In recent years, he has played at Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club, Las Vegas and has accompanied Jools Holland. He has appeared in two documentaries about genius savants, and the show I attended was being filmed by the popular American show 60 Minutes, on CBS. Now he is embarking on his first tour with a 20-piece orchestra.
After 26 years of tuition, Derek’s playing style is much more traditional. But still Professor Ockelford is trying to work out exactly how his genius works. ‘Recent research has revealed that only one in 10,000 babies who are born at term have absolute pitch, but 40 per cent born prematurely have it,’ says the professor. ‘So there is a link. And it seems that all the brain capacity that would have gone elsewhere, into verbal reasoning or social skills, is transferred to music.’
Certainly, Derek’s emotional capacity is limited. When his beloved nanny Winifred Daly was on her death bed, she said to Professor Ockelford: ‘He won’t miss me, you know.’
She appears to have been largely right. He remembers Winifred, but has not cried over her. He very rarely cries — and then it will be over physical pain — and he has no self-indulgence. ‘He never says he’s ill,’ says his stepmother, Suki Paravicini (Derek’s parents divorced when he was five, and have each since remarried.) ‘All he’ll say, very politely, is: “Can I have a Lemsip?”’
His playing, though, has grown more emotional. Professor Ockelford has determined that Derek is not just a human iPod who can replay exactly what he has heard after listening to it once. Instead, he initially recreates pieces by recalling crucial fragments and reassembling them as he plays.
If a piece is too long or complicated for him to absorb at one sitting, he is inventive when he plays it back, reordering the snatches that he can remember, borrowing snippets from pieces with a similar stylistic pedigree or making up new material.
Whatever magic is going on in his head, certainly it is when he is at the piano that he is most at ease. As he comes on stage, led by Professor Ockelford, his steps are hesitant. His hands clutch at his trousers, fingers twisting the cloth.
And then, as he sits down, his hands reach out for the keys. As soon as his fingers hit the ivories, the hands relax. His head sometimes sways with the music, much like those other blind pianists Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles.
At other times, his head is still, his sightless gaze fixed in the direction of the hammers of the Steinway, furiously striking away to Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story. He is doing what he was born to do. from "Mail Online" (5/6/2009)
杜替耶留下的作品雖然數量不多，但卻都是對樂壇有重要影響的曲目。最出名的作品當屬1970年，俄國大提琴家羅斯托波維奇（Mstislav Rostropovich）委託他創作的大提琴協奏曲《相隔如此遙遠》（Tout un monde lointain）。其他經常被演奏的曲目還包括由小提琴家艾薩克·斯特恩（Issac Stern）委託創作的小提琴協奏曲《樹之歌》（L'arbre des songes），以及2007年為了女高音芮妮·弗萊明（Renée Fleming）所寫的《時鐘的時間》（Le temps l'horloge）。
Hogwood founded the Academy of Ancient Music in
1973
British conductor Christopher Hogwood has died aged
73.
He died at his home in Cambridge following an illness lasting several months,
a statement on his website said.
It added his funeral will be private, with a memorial service to be held at a
later date.
Hogwood worked with many leading orchestras around the world and was
considered one of the most influential exponents of the early-music
movement.
The conductor founded the Academy of Ancient Music (AAM) in 1973 and directed
the academy across six continents for some 30 years.
The AAM also made more than 200 CDs, including the first-ever complete cycle
of Mozart symphonies on period instruments.
Among his most famous recordings include the 1980 version of Handel's Messiah
with Emma Kirkby and Carolyn Watkinson, which was named by BBC Music Magazine as
one of the top 20 recordings of all time.
Hogwood studied keyboard at Cambridge University with Rafael Puyana and Mary
Potts and later with Zuzana Ruzickova and Gustav Leonhardt.
His first positions were as a keyboard player and musicologist with the
Academy of Saint Martin-in-the-Fields under Sir Neville Marriner, and was a
founder member of the Early Music Consort of London.
He was the artistic director of the King's Lynn Festival and Boston's Handel
and Haydn Society. He was also a tutor at Harvard University, honorary professor
of music at the University of Cambridge and a professor-at-large at Cornell
University in the US.
"Christopher had extraordinary generosity of spirit," Christopher Purvis,
honorary president of the AAM, said.
"He was a great ambassador for historically informed music, the movement of
which he was a founder. And he was happy to see the orchestra he founded develop
and grow after he stepped down as director."
The AAM's music director Richard Egarr added: "I am deeply saddened by the
news of Christopher's passing. Christopher provided a fantastic legacy for me to
build upon when I joined in 2006 and I know he will be greatly missed by all who
knew and worked with him."
Speaking to Sean Rafferty on Radio 3's In Tune, soprano Dame Emma Kirkby
said: "Some of the best players that now lead orchestras all over the world,
they started with him.
"Chris was a natural academic, an incredibly clever man. He had an amazing
capacity to absorb information of all kinds and a really sure sense of how
things would be if he really tried to reproduce conditions... a very genial
person."
David Thomas from Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, London
added: "He always said I want the music to speak for itself because it can, it's
good enough, it will… a very pleasant and lovely man."
from BBC News (24 September 2014Last updated at 16:16) London: Music under the shadow of Handel - Professor Christopher Hogwood CBE
