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• Instruments
• Woodwind

Cut a clean end to a length of bamboo, reed or other tube, place it near the mouth and direct a narrow stream of breath at its edge, and with a little practice, a pitched note can be produced. Blow a little harder and that note will jump to a series of ascending harmonics. It is not ...

• Instruments
• Woodwind

Transverse flutes worldwide, though they vary cosmetically and in size, have few variations on a common design: a parallel-bored tube with blowing aperture and a row of finger holes on the front (and occasionally a thumb hole). Most are made from locally available tubular materials, particularly bamboo. End-blowing means that, in a bamboo or reed flute, ...

• Instruments
• Woodwind

In East Asia and South America, some end-blown flutes have a feature that requires a different embouchure from neys and kavals. A ‘U’-shaped notch is cut in the rim on the opposite side to the player. It is bevelled on the inside or the outside of the tube to make a thin edge at which the breath is directed. The ...

• Personalities
• Sixties
• Sixties Pop

The first cracks in the seemingly impregnable façade that had been built up by three years of Beatlemania seemed insignificant. When John Lennon casually remarked that The Beatles were ‘more popular than Jesus’ in March 1966 he had no idea that his words would haunt him with increasing malevolence for the rest of the year. The Beatles narrowly avoided another major ...

• Personalities
• Sixties
• Sixties Pop

January George Marries Pattie Boyd George Harrison married model Pattie Boyd at Epsom registry office on 21 January. They had been going out together since meeting on the set of A Hard Day’s Night nearly two years earlier. Paul McCartney was the best man. John Lennon and Ringo Starr were both on holiday with their wives, planned as a decoy ...

• Personalities
• Sixties
• Sixties Pop

February ‘Penny Lane’/‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ The first record to emerge from the studio-bound Beatles was another pair of contrasting McCartney and Lennon songs, a recurring feature of recent singles but, with time to perfect and polish, the songs had moved up another level. Both made a nostalgic return to Liverpool for their inspiration but while Paul McCartney strode ...

• Personalities
• Sixties
• Sixties Pop

February Trip to Rishikesh The Beatles resumed their acquaintance with the Maharishi in mid-February when they, their wives, girlfriends and business managers flew out to his ashram at Rishikesh where they attended his initiator training course. Among the other initiators were actress Mia Farrow, Beach Boy Mike Love and Donovan. Ringo returned to Britain after 10 days; McCartney ...

• Techniques
• High Romantic
• Opera

The demise of the aria, as suggested by Wagner and to a lesser extent by Verdi, never really happened. The aria, of course, had its disadvantages. To start with, it encouraged performers to show off and hog the stage for much longer than was justified. This was a real possibility as the fame of individual singers ...

• Classical
• Contemporary Classical

Contemporary music whose ancestry lies in the Western classical tradition finds itself in a curious position. Nothing illustrates this better than the fact that we are not entirely sure what to call it. The label ‘classical’ seems anachronistic, especially when applied to composers who have challenged some of the fundamental assumptions of the classical tradition. ‘Concert music’ is similarly problematic ...

• Classical
• Medieval Era

‘Medieval’ as a concept is very hard to define, and the period itself is just as difficult to delineate. It was a term invented by Renaissance writers who wished to make a distinction between their modernity and what had gone before. Although the onset of the Renaissance is often taken to be around the beginning of the fourteenth century, ...

• Classical
• Modern Era

There is no escaping the crucial importance of World War I (1914–18) in the formation of the Modern Age (as the first half of the twentieth century has come to be known). The war changed irrevocably the development and directions of almost all pre-war innovations in politics, society, the arts and ideas in general. Declining economic conditions also altered ...

• Opera
• Modern Era

Although the art of the classical singer has traditionally been perceived as the pursuit of technical perfection and tonal beauty, the twentieth century enabled a re-evaluation of what that art should be. Due in part to the technological advances and harrowing events of the times, much of the music was innovative, challenging, moving, powerful and, ...

• Arts & Culture
• Classical
• Modern Era

In the twentieth century, Paris regained its place as the centre of musical innovation, especially in the years either side of World War I. In the late nineteenth century, Debussy’s influential musical innovations and explicitly anti-Wagnerian stance made Paris the centre of post-Wagnerian modernity. This was confirmed in the early modern period by the arrival of Serge Diaghilev ...

• Arts & Culture
• Classical
• Classical Era

Sturm und Drang (‘Storm and Stress’), a name taken from a play of the time, began as a literary movement that flourished in Germany and Austria in the second half of the eighteenth century. Easier to recognize than to define, its manifestations included the ‘horrid’ world of the Gothic novel and, in the visual arts, the paintings ...

• Arts & Culture
• Classical
• Medieval Era

The two great architectural styles of the medieval age were the Romanesque and the Gothic. The Romanesque, with its round-arch forms borrowed from classical buildings, is a massive style, characterized by solid pillars supporting the great stone roof vaults that were a new feature of construction. It is often crowded with imaginative sculpture. During the twelfth century, ...