(Ga-ôrg’ Fe-lep’ Te’-le-man) 1681–1767 German composer Telemann was born in Magdeburg and showed early promise as a musician. While a law student at Leipzig Univeristy he founded a collegium musicum, directed the Leipzig Opera and was commissioned to write cantatas for St Thomas’s Church. In 1705 he became Kapellmeister to Count Erdmann of Promnitz, whose residence in Sorau (Zary) brought ...
1681–1767, German Telemann was born in Magdeburg, and created his first opera at the age of 12, in which he sang the title role and organized its informal performance in the street. Telemann was influenced by the operas he heard at the Brunswick court and Berlin. He attended university in Leipzig, and became the director of the ...
(Fe-lep’ de Ve-tre’) 1291–1361 French theorist and composer As a result of his treatise Ars nova (c. 1322) Philippe de Vitry was the most musically influential figure of his day. It described new developments in mensural notation, allowing composers more rhythmic flexibility and therefore compositional variety. Unfortunately, no songs known to be by Vitry have survived, but a number ...
(Fe-lep’ da Mon’-ta) 1521–1603 Flemish composer In his early years Monte travelled in Italy and, although his maturity was spent at the Habsburg court, he became one of the most prolific composers of Italian madrigals, publishing more than 1,100 of them. His career lasted for over 50 years, making him a good measure of changing tastes in ...
(Fe-lep’ Vâr-da-lo’) c. 1480s–1530s French composer Although French by birth and the composer of chansons and motets, Verdelot travelled to Italy early in his life, and is best known as one of the founders of the madrigal. He seems to have composed most, if not all, his madrigals in the 1520s, the genre’s first decade. Many of ...
Jazz and R&B star George Benson (b. 1943) seemed destined for a respected but low-key career in cool jazz until he adopted a funky hybrid of jazz and soul for the 1976 album Breezin’. Driven by accessible instrumentals and a smash reworking of Leon Russell’s ‘This Masquerade’, the album made Benson the biggest star to cross over from jazz to pop ...
With his wide range of standard and unorthodox techniques, George Lynch (b. 1954) became a guitarist’s guitarist as he cruised through the various incarnations of his bands Dokken and Lynch Mob. Born in Spokane, Washington, and raised in California, Lynch became lead guitarist of Dokken in 1980 after auditioning for Ozzy Osbourne in 1979 and losing out ...
Pigeonholed as the ‘quiet one’, misunderstood as an adopter of Eastern religion and music, and overshadowed (sometimes maligned) by his prolific, trail-blazing bandmates Lennon and McCartney, George Harrison (1943–2001) might have become a footnote in musical history. But as a member of The Beatles, Harrison made the words ‘lead guitar’ a household term and steadily developed as ...
(Ga-ôrg’ Böm) 1661–1733 German composer Böhm was a Lutheran organist-composer who studied with members of the Bach family before becoming organist at Lüneburg. At an early age he travelled to Hamburg, where he encountered Johann Adam Reincken (1623–1722), one of the most influential North German organists. Böhm contributed to the principal forms popular with the organists of this region, notably ...
(Ga-ôrg’ Moo’-fat) 1653–1704 German composer During the 1660s, Muffat worked with Lully in Paris, later visiting Vienna, Prague, Salzburg and Rome. The deep impression that his Italian and French studies made is reflected in four important collections. Armonico tributo (1682) consists of five sonatas modelled on Corelli’s concertos. These were revised and included along with six new concertos ...
1685–1759 English composer George Frideric Handel is one of the best known of all Baroque composers. His gift for melody, his instinctive sense of drama and vivid scene-painting, and the extraordinary range of human emotions explored in his vocal compositions make his music instantly accessible. Works such as Messiah (1741), Water Music (1717) and Music for the Royal Fireworks ...
(Zhan Fi-lep’ Ra-mo’) 1683–1764 French composer and theorist Rameau was born in Dijon, where he was first taught music by his father. During his early years he held organist’s posts in several places, including Avignon and Clermont-Ferrand, Paris (where he published his first harpsichord pieces in 1706), Dijon (1709), Lyons (c. 1713), and once more at Clermont-Ferrand (1715). He ...
(Kärl Fe’-lip E-ma’-noo-el Bakh) 1714–88 German composer In the eighteenth century, ‘Bach’ usually meant C. P. E. Bach, not his father Johann Sebastian. Born in Weimar, he studied under his father, then read law at the university in Frankfurt an der Oder. He took up a post in Berlin at the court of Prince Frederick, later Frederick ...
(Ga-ôrg Ben’-da) 1722–95 Bohemian composer Born at Staré Benátky in Bohemia into a family of musicians (his brother Franz was a violinist and composer at Frederick the Great’s court in Berlin), Benda went to Germany as a young man and spent most of his working career as Kapellmeister at Gotha; he retired in 1778. He is remembered chiefly for his German operas ...
(Mat-te’-as Ga’-ôrg Mon) 1717–50 Austrian composer Although he died at the middle of the century, Monn was an important figure in the development of the symphony. A Viennese (he was organist at the Karlkirche), he wrote some 21 symphonies, which make early use of the procedures of classical sonata form; all are in three movements except one, from 1740 ...
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