Yonatan Zunger’s Blog

Thanks to a number of music-loving friends, and their friends as well, the mysterious music has been identified. It’s Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in D. The mysterious theme I remembered was the entry of the full orchestra at measure 127 of the first movement.

Victory!!

I really wish there were some systematic way to identify music that you can partially remember.

I’ve got a bit of music that’s been stuck in my head, quite literally, for several years. It’s symphonic, with strings leading the melody and some fairly serious horns backing them up. I’m fairly sure it’s late 19th- or early 20th-century Russian; it’s fairly classical in its style, but has that special bombast of Russian nationalist music. More Tchaikovsky than Rachmaninoff. It sounds like the final movement of a string concerto or (more likely) a symphony, but I’m not sure if it’s the main theme or a secondary theme. It’s in a minor key — I think f minor, but I don’t really trust my ability to remember an exact pitch after this many years.

Now the question is… given all of this, and the ability to hum the melody (or even transcribe it, I suppose)… how the hell can I figure out what piece it is?

(I’ve tried going to Amazon and listening to as many samples of pieces as I could find that might match this. Not much luck. There’s a lot of music out there.)

Anyone have any ideas?

The Leningrad Cowboys and the Red Army Choir singing “Sweet Home Alabama.”

Copied from sirreality — a good way to kill some time on a Thursday evening.

Rules
1. Put your playlist on shuffle.
2. Post the first lines to the first 25 songs to come up (along with these instructions).
3. Have people guess the songs and artists in comments to the post.
4. Post the answers to the ones people guessed correctly. A couple of days later, post the first two lines of the ones no one got and get people to guess again.
5. Repeat, adding the next line to the unguessed songs each time, until they’re all guessed/you’ve posted the whole song/you’ve gotten bored/no-one’s going to get the damn thing if you don’t tell them.

For sanity’s sake, I’m deleting anything with the title in the first line, as well as anything in a language I can’t easily type at this keyboard. So there’s a bit of artist clustering.

My code debugging mix, be warned

So half an hour of sitting and futzing with the piano has produced a pretty neat cadenza for the end of Chopin’s Nocturne Op. 9 No. 2. (Based rather loosely on some notes of Chopin that are reproduced in the back of my edition of the music, together with a rather unhelpful explanation in German, which – after deciphering it with the aid of a German-speaking friend – turns out to be almost completely incomprehensible in any language.)

And I just realized that it’s only 9:30, so I can spend some time working more on this without waking my neighbors.

BTW, if anyone’s been trying to reach me over e-mail today – my e-mail server seems to have been mostly down since this morning, so I haven’t gotten any messages. No, I’m not ignoring you. 🙂

So – back to the piano with me! Wahahaha!

I just spent an hour or so coding to the tune of Rossini’s Stabat Mater Dolorosa. Excellent music, but very clearly liturgical music. Catholic liturgical music, to be precise.

That leaves one in a strange frame of mind.