(Vocal/instrumental group, 1935–40s) After the dissolution of The Cumberland Ridge Runners around 1935, Karl Davis (vocal, mandolin, 1905–79) and Hartford Taylor (vocal, guitar, 1905–63) maintained their popularity on the WLS National Barn Dance and other Chicago radio shows until the late 1940s. Echoing an earlier WLS mandolin-guitar duet, Mac & Bob (Lester McFarland and ...
(Vocals, songwriter, b. 1954) Aged 12, Norwegian Arly Karlsen bought his first guitar, and played with numerous bands in his native country during the 1970s, before forming The Western Swingers with Arne Løland and Liv Jurunn Heia. Their 1983 debut album, Sin Egen Stil, sold over 20,000 copies in Norway, and they ...
1928–2007, German A master of electronic composition, Stockhausen forged a unique path by creating and reinventing musical forms while recasting the fundamentals of musical content. One of his works lasts 24 hours. Another mixes electronic sounds with the voice of a boy soprano. As composer-conductor Pierre Boulez said: ‘He invented a new kind of relationship between music’s components. He ...
1894–1981 Austrian conductor Music director of several German opera houses before World War II, Böhm was director of the Vienna State Opera 1943–45 and 1954–56. He championed Berg’s Wozzeck, and gave many performances of operas by Richard Strauss, who dedicated Daphne to him. He was also renowned for his interpretations of Mozart and Wagner. Introduction | Modern Era ...
(Hints Kärl Groo-bâr) b. 1943 Austrian composer Gruber studied with Alfred Uhl (1909–92) and Hanns Jelinek (1901–69). He began by working in a serial idiom but soon, along with his composer colleagues Kurt Schwertsik and Otto M. Zykan, devised a more eclectic musical language (under the designation ‘MOB and tone art’ – Tonart being German for tonality), drawing in ...
(Hints Ho’-lig’-âr) b. 1939 Swiss composer and oboist Holliger’s work is characterized by a constant striving to push the boundaries of the expressive possibilities offered by all instruments. His scores often contain detailed instructions with regard to embouchure and breathing, finger pressure, placing of the bow etc. His interest in extreme situations and states of being is evident also ...
b. 1944 Welsh composer Jenkins played for more than a decade in the progressive rock band Soft Machine before attracting wider attention as a composer of music for advertising. A movement composed for De Beers diamond merchants, and scored for strings in Baroque concerto grosso style, became the Allegretto of his suite Palladio, while his best-known single track ...
(Kärl’-hints Shtôk’-hou-zen) 1928–2007 German composer Stockhausen studied with Frank Martin (1890–1974) and then with Messiaen in Paris, where he met Boulez. Stockhausen’s use of serialism differs from Boulez’s: whereas the latter wanted to find a means of creating relations between diverse elements, the former was concerned to provide a smooth path between extremes. This can be clearly seen in ...
(Koort Vil) 1900–50 German/American composer Weill was influenced by his teacher Busoni, by Stravinsky and by the ideal of Zeitoper (opera on contemporary subjects and themes). In his early, successful stage pieces, including Der Protagonist (‘The Protagonist’, 1926) and Royal Palace (1927), he soon moved towards a style, related to jazz and cabaret, that made him ...
In 1891, when the Irish playwright Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) wrote his famous words ‘Life imitates art far more than art imitates life’, he had somehow managed to overlook the artistic realities of the late nineteenth century. By that time, after some 50 years of the High Romantic era, music and opera had brought real life on stage and ...
The political structure of Europe changed greatly during the second half of the nineteenth century. Germany and Italy became united countries under supreme rulers. The Habsburgs’ Austrian Empire, ruled from Vienna, became fragmented into Austria-Hungary. The borders of this new confederation contained the cauldron of difficulties that eventually developed into the confrontations which culminated in World War I in ...
In 1905, and probably for several decades before that, there were more pianos in the United States than there were bathtubs. In Europe, throughout the nineteenth century, piano sales increased at a greater rate than the population. English, French and German makers dispatched veritable armies of pianos to every corner of the Earth. It was the ...
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 ...
The 1860s saw a number of major reorganizations in European politics. Italy became a united country under the king of (former) Piedmont-Sardinia, Victor Emmanuel II, in 1861 and its new national government tried to retain the kingdom’s liberal ideals, such as removing instances of operatic and intellectual censorship. However, Italy’s liberalism was not aspired to by other ...
Wagner’s Ring cycle is made up of four works – Das Rheingold (‘The Rhinegold’, 1851–54), Die Walküre (‘The Valkyrie’, 1851–56), Siegfried (1851–57; 1864–71) and Götterdämmerung (‘Twilight of the Gods’, 1848–52; 1869–74). Although there have been other, even more ambitious projects in the history of opera – Rutland Boughton’s cycle of choral dramas based on the Arthurian legends and Karlheinz Stockhausen’s ...
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