The Music Lounge

The Music Lounge The Music Lounge

Welcome to the Music Lounge

Grand Piano

Come in... sit down, close your eyes, open your ears and enjoy the melodic world of classical music. I have always a person who has been influenced by music. Been playing the piano since I was eight years old. Unfortunately I had to end my studies in piano because of my heavy load in school work. Only got up to the eighth level for piano *sigh* ... maybe one day when I have time again I will pick up on piano again. I haven't totally given up on the piano and left it there to collect dust. You can still find me some times sitting behind it, playing away on some nice tune. I usually like sad and depressing tunes. To me, it's usually more vibrant and alluring. That's why out I like the music in the Classical and Romantic era. Me guess me is a classical, romantic type of gal after all ... *giggle* Oh! Finally got around to searching for some of the lovely music these wonderful composer did. Just click onto them to sample a bit of my favoriate tunes.

The Baroque Era
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)
"The aim and final reason of all music should be nothing else but the Glory of God and the refreshment of the spirt."

He is the culmination figure of the Baroque style and one of the giants in the history of music. Bach was one of the greatest religious artisits. He believed that music must serve "the Glory of God." His music to me was always more logical and quite calculative. Bach's position in history is that of one who consummated existing forms rather than one who origninated new ones. His sheer mastery of the techniques of composition has never been equaled.

Prelude and Fugue No. 1 in C Major

Eighteenth-Century Classicism
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
"Freedom above all!"

Beethoven belonged to the generation that received the full impact of the French Revolution. He created music of a heroic age and, in accents never to be fogotten, proclaimed its faith in the power of man to shape his destiny. I admirer his strong will to withhold his dreams in this art. Due to the lost of hearing in his late twenties, most of his music are always full of strong dynamic contrasts, explosive accents and rhythmic energy. His goal throughout was poiwerful expression rather than elegance. He was the supreme architect in music.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
"People make a mistake who think that my art has come easily to me. Nobody has devoted so much time and thought to composition as I. There is not a famous master whose music I have not studied over and over."

To me, something miraculuously always hovers about music of Mozart. His masterful melodic writing, his elegance of style, and his rich orchestral colours sound effortless. This deceptive simplicity is indeed the art that conceals art. He was a remarkable man with an extraordinary gift of music. A prodigy who has composed many wonderful masterpieces in his short span of life. He is one of the supreme artists of all times.

Nineteenth-Century Romanticism
Frédéric François Chopin (1810-1849)
"My life ... an episode without a beginning and with a sad end."

A composers of my heart who belonged in the Romanticism. His style was so entirely his own that there is no mistaking it for any other. He has been called the "poet of the piano." The title is a valid one, since he was the only master of the first rank whose creative life centered about the piano. "Everything must be made to sing," he told his pupils. To me everything he's ever written does, for it sings well into the core of every living soul and brings out the harmonic tune of the living breath.

Franz Peter Schubert (1797-1828)
"When I wished to sing of love, it turned to sorrow. And when I wished to sing of sorrow, it was transformed for me into love."
Schubert marks the confluence of the Classical and Romantic eras. His symphonies look back to the eighteenth century in their clear form. But in his Lieder and piano pieces, Franz Peter Schubert he was wholly the Romantic. His melodies have a tenderness, a quality of longing that matched the Romantic quality of the poetry to which they are set. This magical lyricism prompted the composer Franz Liszt to call him "the most poetic musician that ever was." Schubert was not a practical man of the world. He often gave away songs that in time sold in the hundreds of thousands for a price of a meal. A Romantic artist at heart, full of tragic loneliness and suffering, which made him comprehend new depths of awareness: "My music is the product of my talent and my misery. And that which I have written in my greatest distress is what the world seems to like best."

Peter Iilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)
"Truly there would be reason to go mad were it not for music."

Few composers typify the end-of-the-century mood as Tchaikovsky does. He belonged to a generation that saw its truths crumbling and found none to replace them. He expressed above all the pessimism that engulfed the late Romantic movement.

How can one express the indefinable sensations that one experiences while writing an instrumental composition that has no definite subject? It is a purely lyrical process. It is a musical confession of the soul, which unburdens itself through sounds just as a lyric poet expresses himself through poetry ... As the poet Heine said, "Where words leave off, music begins."

Miscellaneous Composers