JerryKnight.com

I noticed recently how weird my mind works. You know the most famous “easy” piano sonata by Mozart? In the movie Groundhog Day, the part where Phil takes piano lessons, they play that song. Here’s the thing – Phil rings the teacher’s doorbell at a precise moment in the song. Now, [...]

The Gustav Holst Foundation is suing Hans Zimmer, the movie soundtrack composer, for copying parts of Holst’s Mars movement of The Planets in the soundtrack for Gladiator. There are so many things wrong with this, but here’s my take. Composers have been mimicking, adapting, and even wholesale copying parts of each others’ compositions for centuries. [...]

In my early years of piano lessons, I played several sonatinas by Muzio Clementi (What piano student hasn’t?). Since then, I never thought much about this composer, since everything I’d heard or played was simplistic – charming, but not challenging or particularly interesting… At least this is the impression I remember. He [...]