Sketches

Anthony Hedges was a popular and versatile composer with some 300 broadcasts to his name in Britain and abroad. He wrote prolifically in a variety of genres, often in response to commissions, from music for massed children’s choirs and youth orchestras to operas and chamber music. His scenic imagination and atmospheric tone pictures are full of warmth and colour, such as can be found in the Four Breton Sketches and Scenes from the Humber, which captures the spirit of the city of Hull, where he spent many years teaching. The delightful Heigham Sound shows his vivacity and compositional élan.

A multiplicity of cultural influences makes the figure of Edward MacDowell (1860-1908), an American pianist-composer trained for a long time in Europe, particularly original. Born in New York, he received his first lessons from Colombian, Cuban and Venezuelan musicians, including the famous pianist Teresa Carreño. At the age of seventeen, MacDowell continued his studies at the Paris Conservatory, in Antoine Marmontel's class, and then at the Frankfurt Hochschule, where he studied composition with Joachim Raff. He was listened to by Clara Schumann and Franz Liszt, and was introduced by the latter to the publisher Breitkopf & Härtel in Leipzig. In 1888 he returned to the United Sates where he settled in Boston, combining his work as a composer with that of a concert pianist. When he moved to New York in 1896, he also taught at Columbia University, where MacDowell was the first to create a music department. In the same year, 1896, the MacDowells bought a farm in New Hampshire, an ideal place to pursue musical creativity in a peaceful rural setting. Much of MacDowell's compositional output dates from this happy period, including two piano concertos, two orchestral suites, four symphonic poems, several piano suites, Songs, four piano sonatas and numerous piano transcriptions of 18th-century music.

This will be quite a discovery for those who know the music of Bedrich Smetana only through his grand and nationalistic cycle of tone-poems, Ma Vlast, even if they are yet familiar with his more painfully intimate string quartets or his folkloristic operas. For Smetana, like most composers, needed to eat; and to do so he was happy to make his own contribution towards satisfying the seemingly insatiable appetite of the bourgeois 19th-century public for piano music that they could perform at home. Music of no great difficulty but boundless charm, these miniatures are now seldom heard and even less often recorded, and this is a shame, for works such as the Op.3 Characteristic Pieces show how the pianistic extroversion of Brahms and Liszt (who was a great admirer and supporter of the young Smetana, giving him valuable introductions to publishers) could be adapted to a domestic context, and with the particular inflection of Czech and Bohemian character, derived not only from simple and song-like melodies but also irregularly stressed dance-rhythms that the young Italian pianist Roberto Plano relishes to the full on this welcome new survey.

Arranger / composer has a remarkable list of credits, including Bjork, John Abercrombie, Joni Mitchell, Elvis Costello and Joe Zawinul, but few albums in his own name. Here he assembles a fantastic group of soloist for his own composition, Sketches, including David Leibman, Charlie Mariano, Peter Erskine & Nguyen Le.

"Sketches of Brunswick East" is the eleventh studio album by Australian psychedelic rock band King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard. The title is a reference to the Melbourne suburb of Brunswick East and Miles Davis' 1960 LP "Sketches of Spain", which inspired the album's jazz-orientated sound. The album was generally well received by professional music critics upon its initial release.

Program Arduino with ease! Using clear, easy-to-follow examples, Programming Arduino: Getting Started with Sketches reveals the software side of Arduino and explains how to write well-crafted sketches using the modified C language of Arduino.