Throw me a life preserver!

tmcw — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 11:10:53 -0800

Where can I find a score or a recording of Handel's Water Music Suite - except, the arrangement by Hamilton Hardy? I need to analyze a performance that I've already seen and need to refresh my memory, but all I can find is of other arrangements. I'm willing to pay a bit if it's only on an MP3 / other site - and just an outline of the structure of that arrangement or information about it would be great too!

Learning to Sing Handel's Messiah

storybored — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 21:04:25 -0800

Need some help in singing Handel's Messiah! Just attended for the very first time, a choral singing of the Messiah. What a total blast! But I'm so new at this i need help. Are there recordings of the different parts separated out? I'd like to be able to hear the baritone part by itself. (real voice rather than midi preferred!)

Source of G.B. Shaw quote defining "style"

bmckenzie — Thu, 16 Feb 2006 06:46:22 -0800

"It was from Handel that I learned that style consists in force of assertion." Help me find the source of this G.B. Shaw quote. As not everyone knows, George Bernard Shaw began his journalism career in 1890s London writing witty music reviews under the name Corno di Bassetto. I think the passage quoted at length below, all I could find via Google, comes from a talk given, after Shaw achieved fame as a playwright, to a French learned society.

"It was from Handel that I learned that style consists in force of assertion. If you can say a thing with one stroke unanswerably you have style; if not, you are at best a marchand de plaisir; a decorative litterateur, or a musical confectioner, or a painter of fans with cupids and cocottes. Handel has this power. When he sets the words "Fixed in his everlasting seat," the atheist is struck dumb; God is there, fixed in his everlasting seat by Handel, even if you live in an Avenue Paul Bert and despise such superstitions. You may despise what you like, but you cannot contradict Handel. All the sermons of Bossuet could not convince Grimm that God existed. The four bars in which Handel finally affirms "the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace," would have struck Grimm into the gutter, as by a thunderbolt. When he tells you that when the Israelites went out of Egypt, "there was not one feeble person in all their tribes," it is utterly useless for you to plead that there must have been at least one case of influenza. Handel will not have it: "There was not one, not one feeble person in all their tribes," and the orchestra repeats it in curt, smashing chords that leave you speechless."

from http://mynptv.org/musicFeat/composer/cmhandel.htm
-- no publication source given.

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Throw me a life preserver!

Learning to Sing Handel's Messiah

Source of G.B. Shaw quote defining "style"