have developed genres of musical performance similar to that of opera – they combine music, song, story-telling and theatrical presentation. The most famous of these is the Nō theatre of Japan. Nō theatre was essentially established in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries by the two great playwrights Kan’ami (1333–84) and his son Zeami (1363–1443). These two men drew upon ...
Petersburg was founded in 1703 by Peter the Great as his ‘window on the West’ – part of his plan to connect backward Russia to the modern world. A court theatre was included as part of Peter’s modernizing policy, but plays were being performed there for more than 30 years before the first opera was staged. This was La forza ...
section encompasses styles that were, at least initially, designed to work in tandem with other forms of expression, deepening or enhancing their impact. The scores of musical theatre are woven into stories played out by the characters on stage. A film soundtrack is composed to interlock with the action on a cinema screen, while cabaret songs work ...
Piaf Maurice Chevalier Barbara Carroll Mabel Mercer Josephine Baker Cabaret A swing rhythm and flattened third note help to create a style that is provocative and bawdy. Introduction | Soundtracks & Theatre ...
is used to enhance and mirror the action, for example with rhythmic movement and melodic intervals used to create a feeling of something ominous approaching. Introduction | Soundtracks & Theatre Styles & Forms | Cabaret | Soundtracks & Theatre ...
that brings both change and continuity, while ‘Life Upon The Wicked Stage’ has a cheerful mischievousness, brilliantly capturing the ‘playful’ character of showgirls. And if Kern gave musical theatre its first melodic voice, then it was his lyricist collaborator, Oscar Hammerstein, who gave musical theatre an understanding of its theatrical and dramatic role. The Theatricality And ...
, extra tom toms, bongos and roto-toms (tuneable tom toms with no shell), multiple cymbals and gongs. Drum-Kit History The drum kit originated in the multiple drum sets played in theatre and music-hall pits at the end of the nineteenth century. The drummer played the percussion part on a combination of bass drum, snare drum, cymbals and tom toms ...
Drums are widely used in traditional music in the Far East, along with a diverse range of cymbals, gongs, metallophones and untuned wooden idiophones. In much traditional music of this region, the drum is played by the director of the ensemble, who uses specific signals for the other performers. Chinese Drums Most Chinese drums (gu) are ...
great success from the early 1960s onwards. The Wurlitzer’s development started when the Everett piano company experimented with B.F. Meissner’s ideas about electro-magnetic pickups. The giant American jukebox and theatre organ manufacturer, Wurlitzer, then applied this pickup technology to make an amplifiable piano in which hammers strike metal reeds and the Wurlitzer electric piano was born. The popular ...
A musical ensemble is a group of two or more musicians who have come together to play music. In theory, an ensemble could contain any number of instruments in any combination, but in practice, certain combinations just don’t work very well, either for musical reasons or because of the sheer practicality of getting particular instruments and players ...
trouvés include found objects and specialist machines for making noises. Composers have made extensive use of both sound effects and found objects in orchestral music, especially in music for theatre, dance and opera. Sound Effects The wind machine was originally a theatrical sound effect, and is a cylinder of wooden slats with a canvas covering. The cylinder is ...
cymbal shapes or stick weights, so each drummer creates a blend of sounds that becomes his or her signature. Gong The gong has played an important role in the theatre and in religious ceremonies – particularly in the Far East and Central Asia, where it is believed to have originated; in Malaysia gongs were long considered a valuable part ...
music. Creating new instruments created a revolutionary new sound world. New instruments were often promoted outside the normal scope of the bourgeois concert audience, frequently being used for music theatre and film, and were not commonly included in the orchestra. The Art of Noise The Italian Futurist artist and musician Luigi Russolo (1885– 1947) invented a set of intonarumori ...
The basic construction of the violin, with its waisted or figure-of-eight body (with a hard-wood back, usually maple, and a softer front, usually spruce), was established early in the sixteenth century. The strings (tuned, from the top downwards, as E, A, D and G) run from a peg box, where tension can ...
Many musical cultures have made use of wooden concussion sticks. Their history goes back to ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, and they are played by the Aboriginal people of Australia. This group of instruments includes pairs of sticks struck together like claves (3 cm/1 in wide, 20 cm/8 in long), which are cylindrical wooden dowels widely used in Latin-American, ...
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David Bowie
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