Thankful for Music Education
By Christine Suter
NY is a state that has always had many strong school orchestra programs and for that reason I’m thankful to have grown up here. Even though it seems like a million years ago, I can still remember when I was in third grade and the sixth grade orchestra played a concert for us in our school gymnasium. After the concert the conductor demonstrated for us how each instrument was played and how it sounded. We were then invited to sign up to learn how to play one of the instruments and I immediately chose the violin. I was lucky in that playing the violin came naturally to me and I was always able to play songs by ear. I also remember that I always wanted to play everything faster than it was meant to played, which is probably why I love fiddle music so much.
Carl Phillipp Stamitz (1745-1801) was a German composer of partial Czech ancestry. His father, Johann Stamitz, was a violinist and composer of the early classical era. During his youth, Carl Stamitz took lessons from his father who was also a violinist and composer of the era. Later, Stamitz gained employment as a violinist in the court orchestra at Mannheim, and then he began to travel as a virtuoso. He would accept short-term performances and engagements, but failed to find a permanent position.
Boyle was born in 1889 in Bushey Park, near Enniskerry, Co. Wicklow Ireland, and spent her entire life in her family home there. Her body of work was quite diverse in that she wrote orchestral scores and chamber music, opera choral music, ballet scores and songs for voice and piano. Boyle's compositions bare resemblance to the lyrical symphonic landscapes created by her composition teacher, and famous composer of the time, Ralph Vaughan Williams. Although she was a prolific composer, she never became widely famous, most likely due to the fact that she was somewhat isolated for most of her life.
Ludwig van Beethoven
