New Music

One of the great benefits of being in music school again,

is that I'm taking amazing classes and learning about TONS of music.

I mean, I listened to a whole opera this afternoon with an open score in front of me, the libretto in my hand, and my jug of water on the table next to us... ahhhhhhh love it.

I'm in a 20th and 21st Century Vocal Literature class that I am LOVING.

So much has happened in the last century; wars, economic crises, the rise of chemical warfare; the world got smaller as countries began to take more interest in each other's wars and trade. It's ironic to me that so much amazingly beautiful music can come from such horrific circumstances, like the Holocaust and World Wars.

So I'm linking some really neat songs for you to listen to, if you'd like.

Here are a few songs by Osvaldo Golijov.

Dawn Upshaw is the fantastic soprano.

This collection of pieces, titled "Ayre," was written as if the composer was

traveling around the European Souther Coastline- everything from arabic spanish to yiddish.

A girl put these Youtube videos together, so you might want to ignore the picture- I find it kind of disturbing and distracting.

And here's another I just found, so heart-wrenchingly beautiful:

Symphony No. 3, Op. 36 of Gorecki's

Third Symphony - Symphony of Sorrowful Songs -

inspired by the prison grafitti of people detained

by the Gestapo in Poland during the Second World War.

Pretty amazing, isn't it.