Hayes Music blog

This piece of music is called The Door, from the haunting soundtrack of the HBO / Sky UK mini-series, Chernobyl (age rating 15). The five-episode series dramatises the true story of the 1986 nuclear disaster at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, near the city of Pripyat in the north of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, Soviet Union. The mini-series is based in large part on the recollections of Pripyat locals, as told by Svetlana Alexievich in her book Voices from Chernobyl.

The score was composed by Hildur Guðnadóttir (born 1982). Hildur is an Icelandic musician and composer. She has gained international recognition for her film and television scores.

Every sound heard in the Chernobyl score was captured from field recordings at an actual power plant including pumps, reactors and turbines. Hildur describes the process here:

“I recorded the building blocks for the soundtrack with field-recordist Chris Watson and score-producer Sam Slater at the Ignalina Power Plant in Lithuania, a decommissioned nuclear reactor in which the show was filmed. The vastness of the site directly influenced the score: ultimately no classical instruments were used, and instead the recordings were turned into music, where the only traditional instrumental element was my voice, which was subsequently processed using Impulse Responses recorded on the site. The show itself portrays the disaster with respect and realism, and I was adamant the score reflects this. I wanted to show the viewer how it would feel to be there, and to tell this story of fear, loss and, ultimately, human error.”

Hildur Gudnadóttir’s tense, eerie soundtrack plays an integral role in the success of the series.

Adagio for Strings is a work by Samuel Barber composed in 1936 and arranged for string orchestra from the second movement of his String Quartet, Op. 11.

Samuel Barber ( 1910- 1981) was an American composer of orchestral, opera, choral and piano music.

The piece builds on a melody that first ascends and then descends in a stepwise fashion.

The Adagio for Strings is arguably Barber’s best known work and has been performed on many public occasions, especially during times of mourning. It can also be heard on many film, television and game soundtracks. The work is extremely popular in the electronic dance music genre, notably in trance. Here is one such arrangement:

Hymn to St Cecilia, Op. 27 is a choral piece by Benjamin Britten (1913–1976), a setting of a poem by W. H. Auden written between 1940 and 1942. Britten had wanted to write a piece dedicated to St Cecilia for a number of reasons. Firstly, he was born on St Cecilia’s day; secondly, St Cecilia is the patron saint of music; and finally, there is a long tradition in England of writing odes and songs to St Cecilia.

Edward Benjamin Britten (1913 – 1976) was an English composer, conductor, and pianist. He was a central figure of 20th-century British music and composed a range of works including opera, other vocal music, orchestral and chamber pieces. 

Britten composed the piece as three contrasting movements which are described here:

The three ‘movements’ are completely different from each other. The first has a kind of ‘ground bass’ moving through it started by the tenors in the first bar and passing between them and the basses. Over this bass, the upper parts sing flowing compound time phrases which are almost hymn-like. The refrain at the end of the verse is a unison version of the initial flowing melody sung by the sopranos.

The second section is a scherzo which gives Britten his ‘middle movement’ contrast. This is marked to be sung extremely quickly. A feeling of the ‘ground bass’ from the first section returns as a binding motif throughout this section in long notes.

The final section is more extended and begins with an ostinato bass which feels slightly menacing. Over this, Britten builds contrapuntal phrases in the upper parts with longer note values. Four solo voices are featured in the next section. The final refrain uses the familiar melody from the opening and brings the work to its quiet end.

Rodrigo y Gabriela (Rodrigo and Gabriela) are a Mexican acoustic guitar duo whose music is influenced by a wide variety of genres (types of music) including modern flamenco, rock, and even heavy metal. The duo’s recordings consist largely of instrumental duets on the flamenco guitar like in today’s clip.

Flamenco is specific to southern Spain and the region of Andalucia. It has a range of influences which include Romani and northern African. The music always features a guitar and may also have singing and very complicated clapping patterns.

Listen to more flamenco music on the blog here.

Here is a five-minute jazz improvisation played on two pianos by Oscar Peterson and Andre Previn. Oscar Peterson (1925 – 2007) was a Canadian jazz pianist, virtuoso and composer. He is considered to be one of the greatest jazz pianists and played thousands of concerts worldwide in a career lasting more than 60 years. André Previn (1929 – 2019) was a German-American pianist, composer, arranger, and conductor. He is described by many as one of the most charismatic and versatile musicians of his generation.

Jazz is a style of music which emerged in America around the turn of the 20th century. Jazz can be characterised by improvisations, syncopation and swing rhythms.

What to listen out for:

Improvised playing – this is a way of performing music that is not based on a written score. It is created spontaneously, but will often involve elements of prior preparation and planning. Both pianists are improvising over a repeated 12 bar chord pattern.

Syncopation – this is rhythm patterns where stressed notes are placed off the beat. Improvisations are often syncopated to make them feel jazzy.

Jazz often makes use of triplets and dotted rhythms to help the melodies flow as well as ornaments (short added notes) and accents (emphasising certain notes) to add interest.

The walking bass line – this is when the performer plays crotchets either ‘walking’ up the blues scale or arpeggio.

Kate Victoria Tunstall (born 1975), known professionally as KT Tunstall, is a Scottish singer-songwriter and musician.  It is said that she had only 24 hours to prepare for the performance on today’s clip, having been asked to step in at short notice after the American rapper Nas cancelled.

Tunstall said of the song:

“Black Horse and the Cherry Tree” is inspired by old blues, Nashville psycho hillbillies & hazy memories. It tells the story of finding yourself lost on your path, and a choice has to be made. It’s about gambling, fate, listening to your heart, and having the strength to fight the darkness that’s always willing to carry you off.

The song featured on her 2005 debut album, Eye to the Telescope and it is one of many songs that reuses the famous Bo Diddley beat from the influential 1955 song Bo Diddley.

Listen out for this Bo Diddley beat as well as how she performs her song as a one-person band using a guitar, a tambourine, and a loop pedal.

Live looping is the recording and playback of a piece of music in real-time. Live looping has become increasingly popular as it offers the ability for a single musician to create multiple layers to their live music, resulting in a sound close to that of a “full band”.  You will have seen Ed Sheeran perform with a loop pedal, but today’s clip shows Tunstall doing this over 15 years ago.

This unusual performance is an old Chinese tune called Sai Ma (Horse Race) composed by Huang Haihuai. Lang Lang is playing the piano and his father is playing an Chinese instrument called an erhu. The erhu is a two-stringed bowed musical instrument, sometimes known as the Chinese violin or a Chinese two-stringed fiddle.

The erhu is used as a solo instrument as well as in small ensembles and large orchestras. In China it is used in both traditional and contemporary music arrangements (including pop, rock and jazz).

Clara Schumann (1819 – 1896) was a German pianist, composer and piano teacher from the Romantic period of music.

Although she was not widely recognised as a composer for many years after her death, she made a lasting impression. She was one of the first pianists to perform from memory, making it the standard for concerts ever since. She also promoted the works of her husband, Robert Schumann, tirelessly throughout her life.

A concerto is a piece for a solo instrumentalist and orchestra. This concerto was written for piano solo, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, trombone, timpani, violins, violas, cellos, and basses. This orchestration was typical of early Romantic music. It was first performed in 1835 in Leipzig, Germany.

Isata Kanneh-Mason, the soloist in today’s extract said this about Clara:

“The more I read about Clara, the more inspiring she was to me. I like to think of her as the Beyoncé of her day: a successful artist, capable of balancing motherhood with touring, married to a fellow musician and a truly independent woman! What I found most astonishing was her strength … Clara’s music is for everyone and I hope it continues to be played by men and woman alike. She is a towering figure in classical music history and deserves to be heard more”.

Learn more about Clara’s extraordinary life here.

We first heard the music of Sibelius on the blog back in April. You can remind yourself of it here. Today’s extract comes from a longer piece called Karelia Music which was written for a student group at the Imperial Alexander University in Helsinki, Finland, and premiered in 1893. Sibelius was passionate about the importance of the Karelia region of Finland as it was said to be the home of the oldest and most respected aspects of Finnish culture.

The Karelia Suite is one of his most popular works, and has its roots in folk music. Today’s extract is from the Intermezzo movement. It has been described as ‘a jaunty movement intended to depict the procession of Karelian workers paying taxes to Duke Narimont of Lithuania’. Listen out for the march-like theme which reflects this.

Elena Kats-Chernin (born 1957) is a Soviet-born Australian pianist and composer. She was born in Tashkent (now the capital of independent Uzbekistan, but then part of the Soviet Union) and migrated to Australia in 1975.

She has written operas, ballets, vocal music, orchestral scores and film scores. Today’s piece is her musical meditation on the unsent love letters of the avant-garde French composer Erik Satie. When Erik Satie died, friends found dozens of unsent love letters in his Paris apartment.

You may have already heard Kats-Chernin’s music on TV and at the cinema with the long-running Lloyds TSB advertising campaign ‘For the journey…’ which uses the Eliza Aria from her ballet Wild Swans.