Hayes Music blog

This song was written in 1972 by David Bowie for his album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. The album is very loosely a concept album, where Bowie’s alter ego Ziggy Stardust brings messages from extra-terrestrial beings. Starman brings a message of hope to the youth of Planet Earth.

This piece was written in 1904 by Italian composer Vittorio Monti. It is based on the Hungarian folk dance the czárdás, which starts slowly and gradually gets faster. In Monti’s Czárdás, the sections alternate between slow and accelerando, and major and minor keys. From 2:56 you can hear the violinist playing stopped harmonics, where you press down normally on the string, but also (with a different finger) 5 semitones above, creating a note 2 octaves higher with a ‘ghostly’ tone.

Blue Suede Shoes was written by Carl Perkins in 1955, and recorded by Elvis Presley in 1956. It was one of the first rockabilly records, combining elements of blues, country, and the pop music of the time. It was also recorded by Buddy Holly and Eddie Cochran.

This is one of the dances from Leonard Bernstein’s 1957 musical, West Side Story, which is a retelling of Romeo and Juliet set in New York, with rival Puerto Rican and white gangs. The mambo originated in Cuba in the 1940s. This is possibly the most fun that you could ever have in an orchestra!

Here is a video showing the choreography for the Mambo, from the 2009 Broadway production of West Side Story:

This song was written in 1967 by John Lennon for a TV broadcast called Our World, which was the first ever live, international satellite TV arts broadcast. The 2 hour programme had segments from different countries, featuring opera star Maria Callas and painter Pablo Picasso. The Beatles were the UK contribution.

The song features quite a few musical quotations. It begins with the opening of La Marseillaise, the French national anthem, and also includes Glenn Miller’s In The Mood, the traditional song Greensleeves, Bach’s Invention No.8 in F, and the Beatles’ own song She Loves You. 

Perhaps one of the most famous openings of any classical piece, Also sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spake Zarathustra) was written in 1896 by Richard Strauss. The piece is a tone poem based on a book by Nietzsche. The complete piece lasts for an hour, but is not nearly as well known as its opening, which represents the sunrise. This performance features some particularly flamboyant cymbal playing!

It became famous for its use in Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and is now forever associated with space:

There is also this awesome jazz version:

Louis Armstrong (1901-1971) had a remarkable career as a jazz musician right from its beginnings in New Orleans in the 1920s up until the 1960s. Nicknamed ‘Satchmo’ (short for Satchelmouth owing to his particular way of playing the trumpet), Armstrong was a trumpeter, singer and actor and was at the forefront of lots of new ideas, for example scat singing, which you can hear him doing in this video:

This piece was written by Finnish composer Jean Sibelius in 1915. Sibelius is a hero of the Finnish people for giving them a national musical identity, and his birthday is a national holiday.

The epic theme played by the french horns at 1:12 was said to be inspired by the sight of a flight of swans. HOLD ON for one of the most monumental key changes in all music at 2:05!!

Just as the tango is the musical blood of Argentina, bossa nova is part of Brazil’s musical soul. Garôta de Ipanema, or The Girl From Ipanema, is sung here by Astrud Gilberto mostly in Portuguese. If you want to know why Brazilians speak Portuguese when most of South America speaks Spanish, click this link.

So this is what life is like for the musicians providing the music for a West End show. In a show like Hamilton, which is through-sung (i.e. there is no spoken dialogue), the musicians are playing all the time during the show. This is a feat of concentration and musical stamina, especially when there are 8 performances every week.

Notice a few things about the technology they are using: their sheet music is on big iPad-like screens where pages will turn automatically or with a foot switch. The keyboard player has different things plugged into their keyboard which gives them the ‘patches’ or different sounds they will need.