Rock or baroque?

Another visit to Westminster Music Library by the young violinists from London Music Master’s ‘Bridge to the Community’ Project proved to be educational as well as entertaining. Before they gave a fabulous performance of their favourite tunes in a special concert, we decided to turn the tables on them and see just how much they knew about the composers of the music they were playing. Our “special quiz” required a dash around the library’s book shelves to turn up the answers, and produced some very interesting results…

So was J.S. Bach the world’s most famous exponent of rock music? We don’t think so, he was certainly a superstar but he was possibly more famous for writing seventeenth century Baroque than rock. It’s true he was sent to prison for constantly failing to turn up for work, but he still managed to compose lots of music while in jail. They did give him the paper to write it on, he wasn’t forced to write it on the walls… And what about Schumann? What’s all this lovey-dovey nonsense about “Romantic” music? I guess at a stretch it could indeed be about kissing (yuck!) and he certainly loved his wife Clara, but what about those symphonies? Were they about kissing too? It was all such a very long time ago!

Time for the concert, a remarkably accomplished performance for such young children, The Bridge Project is a unique educational initiative which identifies and nurtures young children who might not otherwise have the opportunity to engage in classical music. We look forward to welcoming them back to Westminster Music Library for a return visit – let’s see what interesting facts we can uncover about Beethoven. That’s Ludwig van Beethoven, the composer, not the St Bernard dog immortalised in film…

[Ruth]