Lisbon is one of the greatest destinations for music lovers. Every summer, Lisbon hosts a lot of musical events, including dedicated festivals for a special type of music such as Jazz, Fado and classical music. Some of these events are free to attend while the others are paid.

Among the events is Festival of Jazz music called “OUT JAZZ” which is one of the main free events every year, beginning in 2006, from the beginning of May to the end of September. Usually the concerts are held in gardens, parks and historical roads of the city. This year the concerts are held every Friday at 6:00 pm and Saturday from 5:00 pm to sundown. The performances include some famous jazz artists from Portugal, such as e Carlos Martins Quarteto, Joana Machado and Filipe Melo Trio.

The schedule of the concerts is announced on their official Facebook page.  This festival is organized by NCS, a Portuguese audiovisual company and Lisbon municipality. This year the festival has signed partnership with LxFactory. LxFactory is a flea market that occurs every Sunday along with the concert.

The idea of starting the Festival of Jazz in Lisbon was started in 2006 to select a working day to relax, dance and to listen to a good jazz music. That’s why they selected Friday to have the concerts in which is a working day in Portugal, later on they added Sunday.

Arco Do Cego Music Festival is another musical event in Lisbon between May 9 and 12. During the event, all concerts play classical music; the symphonies of Beethoven & Mozart.

Fado In Chiado is a live Fado Festival in the city. Fado is traditional Portuguese music using a special guitar called the Fado. Fado was added to UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage List from Portugal in 2011. The show occurs for 50 minutes daily starting at 7:00 pm. The entry ticket to the show costs 16 euros.

In 1998, the Fado Museum was opened for public visitors to promote Fado music in society. Visitors can listen and watch unique traditional samples of Fado music and songs which are making parts of the Portuguese culture. Also they can discover the history of Fado music, which was started in the nineteenth century. Within the museum premise there is a school to teach any interested to know how to play the Fado guitar.

Image credit: OUT JAZZ via Facebook

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Nicholas McCarthy, born 1989, a very unusual musician not because he was born without his right arm, but because he proved that impossibility is indeed nothing. Nicholas began to challenge the world at the age of only 14, when he first started to learn the piano.

During his teenage years Nicholas was brought down by his teachers. According to an interview he had with the BBC news, his teachers told him that he could not possibly become a pianist with one hand. “It was soul crushing because that’s all I wanted to do,” McCarthy said. Apparently this discouragement gave Nicholas more reason to not give up; being a young and headstrong teenager, he successfully found his way.

After only 3 years of practicing the piano with his only hand, McCarthy was awarded a place at the junior department of the Guildhall School Of Music, where he studied music and piano techniques with the concert pianist Lucy Parham for two years. This granted him the annual piano prize before he graduated.

The musically educated or the unmusically educated person can definitely understand what kind of a challenge McCarthy would have faced to be achieved as an acclaimed musician and pianist.

The wonder layes in how can a harmonic instrument be played to its full potential with only one hand instead of two? Nicholas’ theory was practical and simple: knowing that is what he wanted to do, his determination showed him the way.

Obviously most pianists use both hands, but it’s not necessarily a criteria. The left hand is usually used to construct the bass clef for a musical piece, while the right hand will play the melody on the treble clef, which in some cases means the left hand is almost repetitive or often relaxed while playing. But in order for Nicholas to play such musical pieces by elite Composers like Chopin or others, he has to put all the pressure on his only hand, thus playing the bass clef and the treble clef with one hand which requires an extremely high speed, for some pianists a second can hold up to 4 different notes on each hand but for McCarthy it would have to be 8. One can only imagine what kind of speed and focus and precision one would need to achieve such a technique.

Almost a century ago Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin, the Chopin-inspired composer, wrote the musical piece “Prelude and Nocturne for the Left Hand, Op. 9.” which is often performed by Nicholas, as if it was written specially to be played by McCarthy. For McCarthy it sure is a piece of cake.

Image Courtesy of  Nicholas McCarthy

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Los Angeles, U.S.A — Brilliant international pianist Ayse Taspinar will give a much-awaited performance at a concert on September 30, 2012 at Pierre’s Fine Pianos in West Lost Angeles. Taspinar will perform pieces from her repertoire of rare Ottoman classical music and well-known Western composers.

“I like to play well-known Western composers such as Franz Liszt with unknown pieces like Emile Robert Blanchet’s “Turquie,” which captures the mysticism of Turkish culture,” said Taspinar. “I also want to introduce music-lovers to the rich cultural mosaic of the Ottoman Empire, and to composers and musicians of different ethnic groups.”

The Program will feature Hungarian composer Franz Liszt’s “Grande Paraphrase de la Marche de Donizetti,” Swiss composer Emile Robert Blanchet’s “Turquie,” as well as pieces by Turkish composer Ahmet Adnan Saygun and two Armenian composers, D. Tchouhadjian and Komitas.

Tickets are $10 at the door and seating is on a first-come-first-served basis.

The concert is sponsored by the Los Angeles Turkish American Association (LATAA), a non-profit charitable organization, dedicated to promoting better understanding and relations between the peoples ofTurkey and the United States of America.

For more information visit www.laturks.org.

About Ayse Taspinar

Ayse Taspinar is an international pianist who has performed around the world, including New York, Los Angeles, Washington D.C., Rome, Buenos Aires and Ankara. In 2009, she received a UCLA fellowship for her doctorate thesis on piano music in the Ottoman Empire and she lectured on the topic, “Rediscovering the Shared Cultural heritage of Armenians and Turks through Music.”

Born in Paris, Ms. Taspinar studied music in Turkey, as well as at the Conservatorio di Roma and the Conservatorio di Milano, and won top prizes at several international competitions. She earned her Masters Degree in Music at Indiana University and recently completed her doctorate at the University of California, Los Angeles.

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When a crowd watches or listens to a musical performance, people rarely wonder about the story behind the musicians who created that ear attraction. What kind of ability and commitment does it take? Are all musicians meant to be talented just because they do things that ordinary people are not able to do? The answer can be both simple and complicated.

Our world evolves every second, whether we notice it or not. In a closer look, music has its own share of evolution from the dawn of time till this day and onwards.

For some, music is a time dimension and for others it is simply instinct. Time-influenced musicians are most likely to be composers or music teachers who have been taught music or gained their musical ability through regular music education. Meanwhile musicians who tend to follow their instincts often end up as Street Musicians, who play music out of purity. But what is the difference? Who would be a better musician? One can never tell, but one can definitely hear the difference.

Calling musicians “talented” because they know how to play an instrument or sing a song well is a stereotype. In a musician’s life everything is a challenge. Musicians who claim to be talented and lay back on their work always tend to fall behind; to be good in music it takes alot of hard work and effort, and one has to be focused and committed in all directions.

With music evolving with the world, eventually the idea of music education has been introduced as another way of gaining a prestigious place in music and improving the economy of the education system. But it seems that musical education methods are being taught by those who have never been taught music by books but by heart and ears. Those pure techniques and melodies have been recorded has been set as an example of musical perfection.

The irony lays when, in some parts of the world, a musician can only be accomplished if he has an acknowledged and approved musical education, else they remain a street musician or an amateur. Street musicians playing on the streets for audiences who spare time for their ears and maybe a coin or two is just more than enough for them. They prove to the world that nothing matters most other than playing that note on that instrument that became a  part of them, with nothing but a smile on the face.

When one refers to the music genre of Jazz for an example, we think of a style famous among street musicians and also most famous in modern music education. But what is jazz? Well, no one really knows, and this is where the beauty of jazz lays. So can a music that is not known be taught?

The word on the street is that jazz is a way of music also referred to as “improvisation.” How often do we musicians play their so called jazz music from music sheets, bar by bar, as it was written? Well in a festival that has 8 different groups, at least 4 will. To some, it is not wrong to do so, but it will then be wrong to call it jazz music.

Only because it sounded like a musical piece from an artist who is a jazz style artist it can get categorized under the genre of jazz. This is likely the bad influence of music education: these musicians gain skills and ability to play without the gift of creativity, originality and understanding of the flow of music. Taking this into a wider aspect, the world of jazz will never be the same or will never be the way it meant to be taking out its freedom of improvisation.

This is just one genre. Classical Music is another great genre that could be put into the equation: when was the last time the modern world has been introduced to a new, unforgettable piece? To a new, brilliant composer? To something like “Scheherazade” by Rimsky Korsakov? Chances are slim that our generation ever will and that is because the generation is being taught the works of Rimsky Korsakov and others like him. The outcome is that modern musicians live in the musical sphere of someone else without sharing the same flow of creativity and innovation these artists had. 

This does not mean that music should not be taught. It only makes us realize that as we move toward the future, music like it once was will be rare and in time, may perish.

Image Courtesy of  National Geographic
Photo Credit: Jim McWilliams

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March 26, 1778 was the day Ludwig Van Beethoven’s music started invading ears. It was his first performance was a barely eight years old child. 49 years later on that same day March 26th , Beethoven passes away.

Ludwig was no ordinary musician. He was born with a vision and assigned to a fate that has shaped music to what it is.  Ludwig’s legacy is yet lit to this century, from having his music acknowledged by merely observers  and written on papers to being recorded on electronic devices , Compact discs and played in global orchestras.

He was only 22 when he was under the apprenticeship of Papa Haydn. Haydn was known for his unique methods of teaching music, continuing the teachings of Mozart And Bach. But not for Ludwig ,He was a young man filled with a burst filled with passion and a belief that he will never  step in another Musician’s shoes, even if it was the greatest musician of all, Amadeus Mozart. It was not long till Ludwig’s arrogance deflected with Haydn’s teachings; in less than a year he had nothing else to learn from him.

Eight years later, Beethoven had already performed his first Symphony. Rumors began to spread then that he lost his hearing.but Was that the factor that made him famous after his death? The curiosity of how such genius work is being produced without being heard by its composer.

Its a two way argument that leads to one logical conclusion, the fact about musicians and sound. Musicians tend to develop what is known as “the feel,” or Instincts. These developed reactions come from what the sounds of music played around us do to our senses, and its pattern is  sub consciously being taught to the brain.If indeed Beethoven had lost his hearing, he no longer needed his hearing senses to develop his music.

It was all played within the dimensions of his brain and what has become his natural abilities and instincts : to know the next note without playing it. Just like predicting the future, the fate of a musical piece lays within him, the future of a note and where it stands next. The music that resulted from this is no different than the pieces with his full hearing functionality, or maybe it was even better.

The opposed argument comes when one listens to Beethoven’s symphonies and realizes the genius of its dynamics. Considering Ludwig’s 5th Symphony, the masterpiece of all symphonies in some opinions, is it really possible that such genuine genius could be composed in such perfection without being heard by its composer? For some, the only logical explanation is that Beethoven never lost his hearing completely, it has only faded with time and music sound vibrations that surrounded him , a common side effect of his life which was music.

This controversy has gained him the immortality and respect he always wanted. It is only sad, like the Moon light Sonata, that he achieved it after his death.

Image Courtesy of  Joseph Karl Stieler [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

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