The pea soup and gingerbread whoopie pie experiments look promising. More importantly, we are up to link five!
The pea soup and gingerbread whoopie pie experiments look promising. More importantly, we are up to link five!
For this we head to Romantic 19th century France and present Berlioz' L'enfance du Christ. The most famous bit is a choral excerpt often performed alone titled "L' adieu des bergers", or "The shepherd's farewell". If you wish to skip a bit, brother, it starts around 49:20. This excerpt is particularly known for the dynamic marking in the score where Berlioz indicates it should be played/sung pppp. Let me explain.
How loudly or softly you play/sing is indicated by markings of p for "piano", meaning softly, or f for "forte", meaning loudly. That can be given a relative scale of p=softly, pp=very softly, ppp=extremely softly, pppp=barely audible. Reality checks would indicate that 4p is essentially purely theoretical. It's particularly so with an attempt to sing words; you really can't enunciate anything at that putative volume. And yet. (This would also apply to the theoretical 4f, which is a volume really not producible by the human vocal instrument, and probably not a lot of other instruments, either. It's a sort of barely controlled cacophony. Something I have also seen written in a score, but not this one.)
Every choir and orchestra ever has given it the old college try, though. Actually, a lot of them give up and just go for hopefully atmospherically soft or a nice 3p. It's still a lovely, lilting piece of music. And yet another example of how many shepherds seem to have played the oboe (this is slightly sarcastic music humor).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDEIoNzdqeM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDEIoNzdqeM
For this we head to Romantic 19th century France and present Berlioz' L'enfance du Christ. The most famous bit is a choral excerpt often performed alone titled "L' adieu des bergers", or "The shepherd's farewell". If you wish to skip a bit, brother, it starts around 49:20. This excerpt is particularly known for the dynamic marking in the score where Berlioz indicates it should be played/sung pppp. Let me explain.
How loudly or softly you play/sing is indicated by markings of p for "piano", meaning softly, or f for "forte", meaning loudly. That can be given a relative scale of p=softly, pp=very softly, ppp=extremely softly, pppp=barely audible. Reality checks would indicate that 4p is essentially purely theoretical. It's particularly so with an attempt to sing words; you really can't enunciate anything at that putative volume. And yet. (This would also apply to the theoretical 4f, which is a volume really not producible by the human vocal instrument, and probably not a lot of other instruments, either. It's a sort of barely controlled cacophony. Something I have also seen written in a score, but not this one.)
Every choir and orchestra ever has given it the old college try, though. Actually, a lot of them give up and just go for hopefully atmospherically soft or a nice 3p. It's still a lovely, lilting piece of music. And yet another example of how many shepherds seem to have played the oboe (this is slightly sarcastic music humor).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDEIoNzdqeM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDEIoNzdqeM
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