eClassicaMusica

eClassicaMusica : DESCRIPTION

eClassicaMusica is a doorway to discover classical music.

This application provides a unique and very useful assistance to those who like classical music.

The core of the application focuses on major classical compositions considered among the greatest classical music ever composed. It aims at helping classical music lover discover compositions, build, evolve, or validate their own collection of classical compositions.

One unique feature of eClassicaMusica is the ability to discover and study using different angles, perspectives.

The Composer Doorway

One music lover may use de Composer Doorway to learn more about the great compositions of a given composer. Alternatively, without starting with a specific composer, you may want to explore a Period, discover the composers of that Period and further down the works of one of them. For instance, you may want to know who composed great music during the Baroque II period (Middle Baroque), select one of them and then browse the works.

One great feature of the application is a comprehensive but short list of 19 master composers to facilitate direct access to them. A flyout menu, broken down by period and composer, gives easy access to them and there works. You will find among them Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Shostakovich, etc.

The Composition Doorway

The Composition Doorway is two-pronged. Selecting a specific Period, the complete list of compositions recommended for that period is displayed, ordered by composer. Or, selecting a genre like piano concertos, produces a list of all recommended compositions for this genre, broken down by composer.

The Compilation Doorway

The Compilation Doorway starts from a different angle, from a set of compilations. A compilation is a list of compositions according to an expert, a musician, an analysis, a perspective such as a cross-section of piano works over the past 3 centuries, etc. Currently, there are 14 compilations in eClassicaMusica: Popular Operas, Great Violin Concertos, 20th Century, etc.

The design of the application is such that the user gets key data about over 900 composers form early medieval period to our contemporary period in a convenient fashion. You learn where composers were born, when, the Period they belong to. At the click of a button, a website opens in a new window to provide additional information about the selected composer.

Periods

The Period is an important feature of the application. You select a period, Romantic II for instance, and you get a pulldown list of all composers of the selected period. Some Periods are quite well defined such as Classicism, Baroque III (aka Late Baroque). Other are a bit less rigorously definable (first and second parts of the 20th century). This is exemplified by Ravel and Schoenberg, both belonging to the first decades of the 20th century but with totally different approaches to music composition.

Eleven Periods are defined in the application.

Periods nevertheless define a set of musical characteristics shared by composers of that Period, i.e. what they have in common. Of course, some composers straddle two periods and it becomes difficult to assign to a Period. So, periods answer the question: who are the other composers sharing the same core approach to musical composition? As mentioned above, we must be careful. This is why we divide the overall romantic style into two different Periods: early and late romantic. Let’s look at another example: Liszt and Chopin belong to the same early romantic period whereas Brahms and Mahler to the late romantic period with very different styles.

Compositions (Works)

A composition is described by a set of key characteristics:

- Genre: there are 102 genres defined in eClassicaMusica! They range from concertos, symphonies, operas to duet, requiem and rondo.

- Tonality: plays a fundamental role in Western music, so important that some symphonies are simply titled by their tonality (Franck, Symphony in d minor).

- Movements: number of movements.

- Year Composed. It is defined usually as the year of first public performance of the work. Some authors refer to the year the actual work was completed. It may be years after the composer finished composing before the work is being publicly performed; sometimes even after the death of the composer.

The year composed is important to compare or contrast works with compositions created decades before or after.

- Type or Name of Catalogue: often simply referred to Opus (Latin word for works). In many cases, the name od the catalogue is name given to the inventory and classification carried out by an expert ,usually after the death of a composer, for instance koechel (Köchel in German) for Mozart.

- Opus Number: unique number assigned to each work of the composer within a Catalogue (sometimes, two music experts set their own view of the compositions of composer: Haydn with Opus and Hoboken (Hobs.), for instance..

Movements

You can further dig into the description of the composition. Should a composition have more than one movement, a button is enabled. Clicking on it opens a new window where all the movements with Description or Tempo are listed. The description of a movement could be something like Good Morning, Good Morning (Peter Grimes, Britten) for operas and some other genres. Examples of tempo are Adagio, Allegro, etc. most of the time used for concertos, symphonies.

Recommended Compositions

eClassicaMusica builds on a comprehensive set of over 540 recommended classical compositions covering the full range or Periods and Genres.

For those composers having recommended compositions, the user can drill down:

- Get the compositions and their description. For each work, eClassicaMusica displays Title, Sub-Title or Comments, Genre, Year composed, Tonality, as well as the number of Movements, if any.

- Get an idea of the music, glimpse or hear a recording of the composition, just click a button to open a website (YouTube) and listen!

Genres

Genres become very useful when you discover that you like, for example, wind concertos. You would like to know more about this genre. You simply select the Wind Concertos in the list of Genres to get specific recommendations.

Cross-referencing Compilations

Getting suggestions to what to listen to from a compilation is great and you get good ones. Now, is I t possible that a specific composition suggested in one compilation be also recommended in another one? The answer is yes.

eClassicaMusica brings a valuable functionality to do that. You can display all compositions recommended in more than one compilation. In a sense, a (great) work referenced in more than one complications gets closer to being among the best. Note that sofar, we have refrained to use the qualifier Best for compositions or compilations.

Quiz

Classical music can be fun too! Take a quiz! Test your knowledge!

eClassicaMusica allows you to randomly build a list of questions about composers and classical music and run the quiz. You step through the list, get questions displayed, try to figure the answer and check your answer against the one provided by the application. You can run as many tests as you want to select a new set of questions. Many answers can be found in the application itself.

This is the first release of eClassicaMusica. Our product release plan intents to evolve and upgrade the application. New compilations will be added; current compilations expanded. Additional functionality will broaden the scope of the application.

More importantly, users can give us their feedback about what they would like to get in upcoming releases of the application.