Thursday, November 19, 2009

Playing the Fool for Hundreds of Years


La Folia, that is. This website gives information about every known setting of the famous tune, and even goes out on a limb to suggest that Beethoven stuck a Folia between measures 166 through 173 of the the second movement of his Fifth Symphony. The page is certainly worth exploring, particularly the nifty chronological map.

4 comments:

MICHAEL MONROE said...

Wow, what a great site - the Beethoven "discovery" is particularly cool and unexpected. I Twittered your post, by the way: http://twitter.com/MMmusing/status/5869401414

Randy Foster said...

If you look through it carefully, you will find some contemporary composers who wrote La Folias just for the site. Scroll down on this page to David Solomons and read the comments, then see the final version at his website here

Elaine Fine said...

I like the bossa nova Folia a lot.

Paul Gabler said...

Dear Elaine Fine,
Greetings from the Netherlands.
For a composer I can always make plenty of room and roll out the red carpet for exposing another Folia;-)

In fact you don't have to be a composer to enjoy making joyful music. 'In die Beschränkung zeigt sich der Meister' (a German sentence) is so true for the Folia-theme with its simple chord progression. I am really fascinated by all those variations.