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Welcome to Intermezzo from Interlochen Public Radio, where we take a few minutes to bounce some ideas around about classical music.
This week, Christy L'Esperance's co-host is a rock expert named Brody, who will talk about five types of rocks and minerals. Christy will match each rock with a piece of rock-related music!
This week, we've talked about green basalt, black basalt, red sandstone with fossils and red garnets in mica. The final mineral we'll talk about is native copper!
Native copper comes out of basalt rock, which is formed underground and mined in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.
Copper is used for many things in daily life: electrical wiring, plumbing, kitchen pans, your cell phone and pennies — especially those minted before 1982. In music, copper is also wrapped around piano strings and is part of the mixture that creates brass instruments, flutes and some percussion.
The contemporary composer Joan Tower's father was a geologist and mining engineer. She wrote, "I grew up loving everything to do with minerals and rocks. Copper is a heavy but flexible mineral that is used for many different purposes and most brass instruments are made of copper.”
Joan Tower loves minerals so much that she wrote a piece of music called "Copperwave" for brass quintet. The copper in these instruments help them to sound warm, resonant and bright.
Joan Tower - "Copperwave"
This week's Mystery Melody
Congratulations to this week's Golden Ears who guessed the Mystery Melody correctly! Listen for the song title revealed at the end of today's podcast episode.
