Music Monday: Eckhardt-Gramatté: Bassoon Concerto

Christened Sofia Fridman-Kochevskaya, Sophie-Carmen Eckhardt-Gramatté was born in Moscow in 1899 to a rather well-off family (her mother worked as a governess in Leo Tolstoy’s household), but she didn’t live there long. Her family moved to a commune in England, and Eckhardt-Grammaté entered the Paris Conservatoire at the age of eight to study violin and piano. She had already made her public debuts in Berlin and Paris by the age of eleven, frequently playing both instruments on the same concert program. She was already interested in composition, but her teachers at the Conservatoire discouraged her from pursuing that path, presumably because sexism.

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Music Monday: Williams: The Five Sacred Trees

We've come to that rarest of rare things: A living composer that almost everyone has actually heard of! It's May the Fourth, and to celebrate, today we're featuring a work by John Williams, the man who wrote the music for the Star Wars movies. The most fitting thing, I suppose, would be to feature some selections from those scores, but one of the purposes of these posts is to help get the word out about music that you might not have heard, and honestly Star Wars doesn't need my help to boost its popularity. (If you are one of today's lucky 10,000 and haven't seen Star Wars yet, I highly recommend getting one of your friends to show you Episode IV at least. Even outside of the quality of the film itself, there are so many references to it in popular culture that will suddenly make a lot more sense. It's iconic.)

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