Wednesday, May 24, 2006

Back to the Sound of Music

Americans in France don't just get to translate the words, they also get to translate the notes.
Chords in French are lots of fun. Intead of plain old C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C, you get do,, mi, fa, sol, la, si, do (I think that's how you spell them in French). I guess it's more sophisticated, but improvising on the melody becomes a lot more work. The key of the piece would look like si bémol mineur instead of G flat minor. I had to look bémol up, which is pretty pathetic. Anybody who knows two things about music could have figured that out.

The concert last Friday night finished extremely well: l'Ensemble Baroque de Limoges played la Symphonie no. 40 en sol mineur de Mozart. Your exercise is to translate the italics and find the piece. I'll give you a French 20 if you send me a link for a site with the music file, or a link for the music file itself... but of course that's just if you have nothing better to do. At least that way you would get to hear the music yourself.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey! That's my cell phone ringtone.

:-D

(shouldn't I get partial credit for having such good taste?)

Sharon said...

Oh definitely, chère maman. I love that piece because it was the first on my first classical CD. A friend sent me the CD during the '04 fall semester and I think I listened to it almost every night.