Celtic Music Sheet Violin

If prayers were music, what would they sound like? Irish harpist Aine Minogue offers her artful answer on Celtic Meditation Music--a collection of original songs based on ancient Celtic prayers, specifically composed for meditation and relaxation. "The Irish harp has always been associated with spirituality," says Minogue, and this is especially evident on her newest album. Using traditional poetry as divine inspiration, she crafts a set of instrumental "slow airs"--feminine, expressive, and dynamic songs that transpose the silent spaces between the lines of Celtic prayer into melody. Minogue's numerous albums, including the acclaimed Between the Worlds, cross genres and appeal to Celtic, World, Folk, and New Age music enthusiasts alike. Her introspective style is at once deeply rooted in the ancient form and imbued with a creativity all her own, making her a regular favorite with Billboard Magazine and Boston Globe reviewers and National Public Radio. Now, with Celtic Meditation Music, fans--both new and old--are immersed in the haunting, modal tones of the harp, turning the act of listening into an invitation to an ancient sacred space--an invitation that lasts long after the final vibration of the strings. Irish harp accompanied by clarinet, cello, violin, and percussion.

J. S. Bach's sonatas and partitas for solo violin have been central to the violin repertoire since the mid-eighteenth century. This engaging volume is the first comprehensive exploration of the place of these works within Bach's music: it focuses on their structural and stylistic features as they have been perceived since their creation. Joel Lester, a highly regarded scholar, teacher, violinist, and administrator, combines an analytical study, a full historical guide, and an insightful introduction to Bach's style. Individual movements are related to comparable movements by Bach in other media and are differentiated from superficially similar works from later eras. Lester employs descriptions of historical and contemporary recordings, as well as accounts of nineteenth-century performances and commentaries on historical editions, to explore these works as they evolved through the centuries. Wherever possible, he uses analytic tools culled from eighteenth-century ideas, key notions originally developed for the specific purpose of describing the repertoire under consideration. Beginning with an overview of the solo violin music's place within Bach's oeuvre, this study takes the Sonata No. 1 in G minor as the paradigm of Bach's compositional strategy, examining each movement in detail before enlarging the discussion to cover parallel and contrasting features of the A-minor and C-minor sonatas. Next, a chapter is devoted to the three partitas and their roots in various dance-music traditions. The book concludes with a summary of form, style, and rhetoric in Bach's music, in which Lester muses on these masterpieces with an overall command of the music, criticism, and history of the 1700sthat is quite rare among scholars.