b. 1934 English composer Birtwistle, member as a student of the Manchester New Music Group, says his juvenilia are pastiche Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958). Study with Richard Hall opened his ears to Stravinsky, Webern and Varèse, altering his musical style radically. In many ways his music is utterly individual; Birtwistle has said that he was driven to ...
b. 1934, English Uniquely gifted amongst contemporary English composers, Birtwistle first made a splash on the opera scene with the acclaimed Punch and Judy (1968). Centring around the murderous activities of Punch, the work distinguished itself through a lack of straightforward narrative, repeating the story several times from numerous different perspectives. Musically evoking the traditions of the ...
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 ...
(Guitar, vocals, 1943–2001) Harrison initially became the most successful solo Beatle with the blockbuster triple album All Things Must Pass (1971) and the transatlantic chart topper ‘My Sweet Lord’. George diverted himself into raising funds for the disaster in Bangladesh with an all-star charity gig at New York’s Madison Square Garden in August 1971. The event was commemorated in ...
The saxophone occupies an unusual position in that it is a bespoke instrument that has barely changed since its creation. Although it does not occupy the position in the orchestra its creator had envisaged, Adolphe Sax’s invention has played a central part in music ever since it burst on to the scene in the 1840s. Sax’s father, Charles, ...
1918–90, American A hugely talented composer and conductor, Bernstein inspired the American music scene with his passion and flamboyance. Born in Massachusetts and essentially self-taught on the piano, he studied at Harvard and became an overnight sensation when stepping in for ailing New York Philharmonic conductor Bruno Walter in November 1943. Success as a composer followed, ranging ...
(Looch-ya’-no Bâr’-yo) 1925–2003 Italian composer Study with Giorgio Ghedini and Luigi Dallapiccola (1904–75) led Berio to an early interest in the possibilities offered by serialism (Nones, 1954). In 1955 Berio and Bruno Maderna (1920–73) jointly opened the Studio di fonologia for electronic composition, where he created two works, Thema (Omaggio a Joyce) (1958) and Visage (1961), that exploited ...
The Contemporary era can be dated back to Anton Webern’s death in September 1945. Webern’s influence on the generation of post-Second World War composers means that much of the music from the 1950s sounds more modern than music from the last 20 years. Composers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen (b. 1928) and Pierre Boulez (b. 1925) extended the 12-note, or serial ...
After the devastation wrought in Europe by World War II, the urgent task of rebuilding the continent’s war-torn urban fabric demanded radical solutions. These were found in the centralized urban planning advocated before the war by architects such as Le Corbusier and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Writing in 1953, the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928–2007) created an explicit analogy ...
Composers of the twentieth century and up to the present have often been drawn to the music of the medieval and Renaissance periods. A relatively early example is Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971), who became interested in the fourteenth-century technique of hocket and in the harmonic experiments of the Italian composer Carlo Gesualdo (c. 1561–1613). Hocket has since inspired many composers, both ...
Though art music since the war tended more often to define itself in opposition to rock and commercial pop music, signs of mutual regard were already emerging in the 1960s. While it is Stockhausen’s face that stands out from the crowd on the front cover of the Beatles’ 1967 album Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, it was Berio ...
The most successful librettist of the modern era was W. H. Auden, who provided texts for Britten’s first opera, Paul Bunyan and, in collaboration with Chester Kallman, for operas by Stravinsky (The Rake’s Progress), Henze (Elegy for Young Lovers, 1961; The Bassarids, 1966), and for less acclaimed works by John Gardner (1917–2011) and Nicolas Nabokov ...
Gamelan is an orchestral tradition in Java and Bali, where every instrument – various gongs and drums – is a member of the percussion family. The tradition emphasizes respect for the instruments and cooperation between the players. In 1887, the Paris Conservatoire acquired a gamelan. In 1889, Debussy went to the Paris Exhibition, where he heard the ...
From the 1980s, the new sound-worlds discovered by Stockhausen and others, using tape recorders and recording studio equipment, began to be further extended by the use of computers. The computer enables composers to examine and modify their work in unprecedented detail. Whereas the synthesizer can control pitch and timbre with ease, the computer can go a stage ...
European culture lay in ruins after the end of World War II. There were many who, in company with the philosopher Theodor Adorno, felt that Nazi atrocities such as Auschwitz rendered art impossible, at least temporarily. Others, though, felt that humanity could only establish itself anew by rediscovering the potency of art, including opera. On ...
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