A million hits on Youtube

Georg Mertens

Congratulations to our colleague, Georg Mertens, whose Georgcello Youtube site has now received a million visits.

As we said in a post last month, Georg Mertens is a cellist, guitarist, composer, arranger, teacher and author who combines great musical skills with an astute knowledge of successful internet marketing.

How did he achieve a million hits on Youtube? It was not by choosing to play current popular music, which was the way former Mitchell Conservatorium student, Ella Jamieson and her band, Aston, clocked up the magic million, with their classical version of Lady Gaga's Telephone.

And it was not a viral campaign, like the wildly successful Canadian Christmas flashmob version of Handel's Hallelujah Chorus.

Georg's success in attracting a million visitors to his Youtube site has been achieved through providing so many musically interesting, varied performances on guitar and cello, both solo and in combination with other musicians.

His most popular video, so far, has been an Arabian improvisation on cello.

Britney Spears goes Baroque

Remember the Lady Gaga fugue? The very clever Giovanni Dettori has done it again: this time with his Baroque version of Britney Spears's songs Hit Me Baby One More Time and Oops, I Did It Again in his new composition called Counterpoint.

Mr Dettori has kindly made the sheet music available, too.

Counterpoint refers to the unique ability musicians have of saying two or more things at once and making sense! Lots of pieces of music have several tunes going at once, but this was developed to a high art in the Renaissance Period of Music (1450-1600 AD) and perfected by Johann Sebastian Bach in the Baroque Period (1600-1750).

The Naxos summary of periods in Music history is pretty well written and useful.

Giovanni Dettori teaches counterpoint via his Youtube website, which is well worth investigating.

I like the way you can listen to this piece and follow the scrolling score. Well done, Maestro Dettori!




Did I mention that Britney Spears is an anagram of Presbyterians?

A Lady Gaga Fugue?

As far as I know, Lady Gaga hasn't written any fugues. She may not even know what a fugue is... Do you?

Giovanni Dettori's Lady Gaga Fugue shows you what a fugue is and, if you read music, you can follow along as you listen. It is based on a part of the song Bad Romance



Do you notice how the tune from Bad Romance keeps coming back in different ways? It takes a lot of skill to write a fugue. Giovanni Dettori teaches people about counterpoint, which is the discipline of writing a piece of music that has several tunes going at the one time. Sometimes, as in a fugue, the tune is being harmonised with itself.

Composer, Giovanni Dettori has kindly published the sheet music for you to download and play as a free pdf file.