It's all about the classical music composers and their works from the last 400 years and much more about music. Hier erfahren Sie alles über die klassischen Komponisten und ihre Meisterwerke der letzten vierhundert Jahre und vieles mehr über Klassische Musik.
Meanwhile, songs like Adele’s ‘Someone Like You’ and Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ saw the lowest level of response.
Scientists at the Institute Marques in Barcelona studied the mouth and tongue movements of over 300 unborn babies, aged between 18 and 38 weeks.
The foetuses were exposed to a range of 15 songs which fell into the following categories: classical, traditional world music, and pop or rock.
Classical music caused the greatest level of reaction (84 per cent), followed by traditional music (79 per cent) and pop or rock music (59 per cent).
Researchers said it is very unusual for these movements to happen during the second and third trimesters of pregnancy without a stimulus such as music.
Unborn babies don’t react well to Adele’s ‘Someone Like You’. Picture: Getty
The study proves that music is capable of stimulating neurological activity, triggering areas of the brain linked to language and communication.
Dr. Marisa López-Teijón, Director of Institut Marquès, told The Telegraph: “Music is a form of ancestral communication between humans, the communication through sounds, gestures and dances preceded the spoken language.
“The first language was more musical than verbal, and it still is; we still tend instinctively to speak in a high pitched voice, because we know that newborn perceive those better, and this way they understand that we want to communicate with them.”
Dr López-Teijón’s team also tried playing classical music to embryos which have undergone IVF fertilisation.
They said it increases chances of success by up to five per cent.
Fact: Beyoncé is actually an insanely good operatic mezzo-soprano in disguise
By Daniel Ross, ClassicFM London
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Beyoncé Knowles is an uncompromising vocal actress who has been using operatic techniques throughout her career - and this is how she does it.
When we think of Beyoncé, we think of the voice. Pure, powerful, aggressive when necessary and plaintive when wounded. This is not a revelation - people have been nuts over her voice for years.
What’s surprising is that, whether she’s conscious of it or not, Beyoncé’s voice is an almost perfect opera soprano - it’s just that she’d probably never use it for opera. Let’s take a look at some examples of how Bey’s voice actually has its roots in the classical tradition:
Character
One of Beyoncé’s strongest traits is her commitment to character. No matter the size of the venue, she maximises every emotional gesture, and not just in her voice. She’s playing to every seat in the house, fully aware that there’s a whacking great LED screen projecting her image to anyone with eyeballs.
Here she is singing ‘1+1’ live on telly in America, absolutely embodying her character - it’s essentially a one-sided love duet, during which she KNEELS ON THE PIANO LIKE A LEGEND:
You know else embodies their characters like this? The greats:
Range
Queen B’s range is really something, and we’re used to hearing her rocketing up to the very limits of her soprano range. But what about the very bottom end of it? In the opening verse of ‘Halo’ she effortlessly shoots down to a low C sharp as if it’s nothing:
At the other end of the scale, listen to how Cecilia Bartoli supports herself at the extremes of her register:
Stagecraft
When you’ve got fireworks going off, dozens of TV cameras pointing at you and co-stars to interact with, most of us would probably forget to sing. Or, more accurately, curl up under the stage and do a solid hour of fear-crying. But not Beyoncé - here she is literally in formation as she performs ‘Formation’ for a TV audience of approximately everyone on Earth who ever lived:
So in Puccini’s La Bohème, this set-piece from the end of the second act uses the exact same skills. All the singers integrate with dozens of extras, a whole marching band and complex ensemble singing without breaking a sweat.
Attitude
This is a more nebulous one, and it’s an absolute cop-out to put it down to ‘star quality’ or ‘the x-factor’, but Beyoncé has what Maria Callas has, what Joyce DiDonato has, what Montserrat Caballé has - attitude. The kind of attitude where you can headline Glastonbury while pregnant, where your voice sounds as slick on record as it does when someone’s filming you on their phone.
Here’s Joyce DiDonato still performing WITH A BROKEN LEG:
So, Beyoncé, we salute your technique, your voice and, most of all, your attitude. You’re already doing what so many operatic sopranos should be doing already.
Who was Marni Nixon, the ‘ghost singer’ behind Hollywood’s famous actresses?
By ClassicFM London
Marni Nixon dubbed the voices of Deborah Kerr in The King and I, Natalie Wood in West Side Story and Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady. Picture: Rex Features
By Maddy Shaw Roberts
5K
Marni Nixon was Hollywood’s great unsung singer. She dubbed the voices of Audrey Hepburn in 'My Fair Lady', Deborah Kerr in 'The King and I' and Natalie Wood in 'West Side Story'. But for most of her career, no one knew who she was.
Classically trained American soprano Marni Nixon was one of the best-loved voices of the 1950s and 60s. But while Hollywood’s leading ladies took all the credit, it was Nixon who sang the songs.
Hollywood’s best-acclaimed ‘ghost’ singer, Marni Nixon was hired, often unbeknownst to the stars themselves, to do the singing for actresses including Deborah Kerr in The King and I, Natalie Wood in West Side Story and Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady – all Oscar-winning movie musicals.
In 1956, Deborah Kerr was nominated for an Academy Award for her role as Anna in The King and I. The film’s soundtrack album sold hundreds of thousands of copies.
And Nixon? She was paid just $420 for her singing work and her name was left out of the credits. Here's her story.
How did Marni Nixon become a ‘ghost’ singer?
In 1930, Margaret Nixon McEathron was born in Southern California, US. She sang in professional choirs as a child, before training to be a classical soprano in her late teens.
At this time, Nixon also worked as a messenger for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM). They soon became aware of Nixon’s impressive singing voice (she had perfect pitch and a four-octave range, no less) and decided to hire her as a ‘ghost’.
It was common practice back then for Hollywood to cast established film stars over trained singers, when the film called for singing.
In Nixon’s first job, she dubbed the singing voice of child actor Margaret O’Brien in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden (1949). Four years later, she sang the high notes Marilyn Monroe couldn’t quite reach in ‘Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend’ in the 1953 movie Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.
She was threatened into silence
Marni Nixon was hired to work alongside some of the greatest players in the film industry – but if she told anyone about it, she was told she’d never be hired again.
“You always had to sign a contract that nothing would be revealed,” she told the ABC News program Nightline in 2007. “Twentieth Century Fox, when I did The King and I, threatened me. They said, if anybody ever knows that you did any part of the dubbing for Deborah Kerr, we’ll see to it that you don’t work in town again.”
But sure enough, Nixon’s ghosting abilities soon became what The New York Timesdescribes as Hollywood’s ‘worst kept secret’.
Marni Nixon at TCM Classic film Festival on April 28, 2011. Picture: Getty
Only it wasn’t Nixon who leaked her identity – it was actress Deborah Kerr
Kerr casually dropped Nixon’s name into an interview with The Mirror in 1956, the year she won the Oscar for The King and I.
“She’s a wonderful woman, this Marni Nixon,” Kerr said. “We split [the songs]. I would lead into them and in the middle of the song, when I couldn’t go any further, Marni would take over.”
Her working relationship with Kerr seemed professional and co-operative. Nixon would work beside the actress, imitating her movements in order to create the perfect illusion.
“She wanted to also look like she was really singing and wanted to be using the same muscles and the same stretches you do in expressions,” Nixon told The Washington Post.
‘The ghostess with the mostest’
By the 1960s, newspapers had caught wind of the extent of Nixon’s ‘ghost’ singing. A 1964 article in Time Magazine referred to her as ‘the ghostess with the mostest’ – a nickname which presumably grated on Nixon while film companies continued to leave her name off the credits.
She also appeared on To Tell the Truth and was the answer to several clues on Jeopardy!, Trivial Pursuit and at least one New York Times crossword puzzle.
So, by the time My Fair Lady with Audrey Hepburn came out in 1964, people were already aware of Marni Nixon and the process of ‘ghosting’. Nixon’s name even became a by-word for behind-the-scenes vocal dubbing.
But not every actress was happy about it
When Nixon was brought in to sing for Natalie Wood as Maria in West Side Story, Wood thought she’d just be filling in a few high notes.
“In the case of Audrey Hepburn,” Nixon told The Washington Post, “She was very smart and could say, ‘I know this is not good enough, I want to keep trying myself,’ but she had to accept that it wasn’t quite what it should be.
“But I don’t think that Natalie Wood’s ego could take that. Frankly, I think they used to create that kind of attitude too much — allowing them to have the illusion when they knew all along that she wasn’t good enough.”
In fact, most of Wood’s original singing was thrown out, and Nixon’s was used in its place. She even dubbed some of Wood’s lines. It was then that Nixon started to push for official recognition.
“The anonymity didn’t bother me until I sang Natalie Wood’s songs in West Side Story,” Ms. Nixon told The Times in 1967. “Then I saw how important my singing was to the picture. I was giving my talent, and somebody else was taking the credit.”
In 1965, Nixon’s ghosting career ended
Finally a voice with a face, Nixon stopped working as a ghost singer and was hired to act and sing as one of the nuns in The Sound of Music (1965). She also appeared as the (credited) voice of Grandmother Fa in the 1998 Disney animated film Mulan.
Before and after Hollywood, Marni was an acclaimed concert singer, a specialist in contemporary music, a soloist with the New York Philharmonic, a recitalist at Carnegie Hall, Alice Tully Hall and Town Hall in New York and a featured singer on one of Leonard Bernstein’s televised young people’s concerts.
She also taught singing at the California Institute of Arts and the Music Academy of the West, and published an autobiography called I Could Have Sung All Night (2006).
On 24 July 2016, Nixon died of breast cancer, aged 86.
How are blockbuster movie musicals cast today?
Today, movie musical directors tend to cast either actors who are also trained singers (like Meryl Streep in Mamma Mia!), actors with a lot of prior experience in singing (like Hugh Jackman in Les Misérables) or someone whose fame overrides their need to have a perfect singing voice (like Emma Watson in the recent live-action version of Beauty and the Beast).
Behind-the-scenes vocal stand-ins like Marni’s are far lesson common today, with directors preferring to use pitch correction software like autotune instead.
“But they still are used,” Nixon, 83, told The Washington Post. “They just have a cleverer way to do it.”
A standard piano has 88 keys: 52 white and 36 black. But who decided this number would be the norm, and why?
Before the piano was invented, composers wrote a lot of music for the harpsichord, which has just 60 keys. This meant that everything they wrote was limited to the harpsichord’s five-octave range.
Then, the first piano was invented.
Around the year 1700, Bartolomeo Cristofori, a musical instrument technician from Padua, Italy, decided it was time to update the harpsichord – and he came up with a new keyboard instrument with a hammer mechanism.
Cristofori was hired by the Florentine court of Grand Prince Ferdinando de’ Medici in 1688 to look after their harpsichords and, eventually, other instruments.
A 1700 inventory of Medici instruments mentions an ‘arpicimbalo’ (lit. an instrument resembling a harpsichord) invented by Cristofori. The instrument had a brand-new hammer and damper mechanism, two keyboards and a range of four octaves (49 keys).
Poet and journalist Scipione Maffei described it in 1711 as a ‘gravicembalo col piano, e forte’ (harpsichord with quiet and loud). It was here that the ‘pianoforte’ found its name.
Piano, made by Bartolomeo Cristofori (1655-1731). Picture: Getty
Composers got more ambitious
After Cristofori’s invention, composers started writing more and more music for the piano. But the instrument’s four-octave range was limiting.
So, piano manufacturers designed new pianos with more keys, so that composers like Haydn and Mozart could write more interesting material with a wider range.
By the time Romantic composers like Chopin and Liszt were writing music in the mid-1800s, pianos had up to seven octaves. This meant they could compose pieces with a crazy range, like this mad piece by Liszt:
Steinway created the 88-key piano
In the late 1880s, piano manufacturer Steinway created the 88-key piano. Other manufacturers followed suit, and Steinway’s model has been the standard ever since.
An 88-key piano has seven octaves plus three lower notes (B, B flat and A) below the bottom C.
It has 52 white keys and 36 black keys (sharps and flats), with each octave made up of seven white keys and five black keys.
Steinway & Sons piano. Picture: Getty
Why did piano manufacturers stop at 88 keys?
Today’s composers usually write piano music that fits within the range of an 88-key model. Most piano makers also accept this as the limit, because anything outside is considered too high or low for the human ear.
But there are a few exceptions. For example, there’s a 102-key Stuart and Sons piano, which costs around £220,000.
Plus, Bösendorfer sells 92-key pianos, whose four extra keys are coloured black, so the pianist can distinguish them from the standard 88. The keys are rarely used, but the extra bass strings add harmonic resonance that contributes to the rich, overall sound of the instrument.
Here’s what they look like on the rather grand Bösendorfer semi-concert grand piano:
