AUTHORITATIVE | CURATED | First 500 words Free

• Personalities
• Classical
• Modern Era
• Singer

1912–79 English countertenor Deller was responsible for the revival of the alto voice in the concert hall and opera house. With his ensemble, the Deller Consort, he made many recordings of early music, and he recorded English lute-songs with Desmond Dupré. Introduction | Modern Era | Classical Personalities | Kathleen Ferrier | Modern Era | Classical ...

• Personalities
• Country
• Early Years of Hillbilly

(Vocals, fiddle, 1880–1956) Reed, a singer and fiddler from Princeton, West Virginia, made his living playing at dances and church meetings and giving music lessons. Recording in the late 1920s, he observed contemporary life in songs like ‘How Can A Poor Man Stand Such Times And Live ?’– a catalogue of the ills that afflicted ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Instrumentalist
• Modern Era

1877–1962 French pianist In his early years, Cortot combined the piano with conducting, directing the first performance in Paris of Götterdämmerung at the age of 24. As a pianist he specialized in Romantic music, especially Schumann and Chopin, and in music by contemporary French composers. He co-founded the Cortot-Thibaud-Casals piano trio in 1906. Introduction | Modern Era ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Contemporary Classical

(Al-fred Shnit’-ke) 1934–98 Russian composer The most striking aspect of Schnittke’s music is its combination of a multitude of styles. His Symphony No. 1 (1972) contains quotations from many composers – from Joseph Haydn (1732–1809) to Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840–93). The Concerti grossi parody Baroque styles with a degree of wit. Unlike other exponents of collage style, Schnittke retains a ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Contemporary Classical
• Instrumentalist

b. 1931 Austrian pianist Austrian-born Brendel studied in Zagreb and Graz and later attended classes with Edwin Fischer. He made his debut in Graz in 1948 and became well known in the 1950s through his many recordings. He is widely admired for his performances of the sonatas of Beethoven and Schubert. Introduction | Contemporary | Classical Personalities | Christophe Coin | ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Modern Era
• Singer

1873–1921 Italian tenor Caruso’s first great success was in L’elisir d’amore at La Scala in 1901, followed by his Covent Garden (1902) and Metropolitan Opera (1903) debuts in Rigoletto. He sang regularly at the Metropolitan thereafter, mainly in Verdi and Puccini, and also sang the French repertory including Faust, Manon and Samson et Dalila. He is considered ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Renaissance
• Theorist

c. 1557–1602 English composer and theorist Morley was the most important composer involved in developing the English Elizabethan madrigal from its Italian counterpart. In the 1580s and 1590s he published some English translations of Italian madrigals with newly composed English works of his own, which imitated the Italian style. His most famous works are the ‘fa la la’ madrigals: pieces ...

• The Voice
• Classical
• Contemporary Classical

English church music readily accommodates the high male alto voice, but only in the last half of the twentieth century was the countertenor (or ‘male alto’) welcomed into the opera house. After hearing the alto Alfred Deller singing in Canterbury Cathedral in 1944, Tippett remarked that the ‘centuries rolled back’. Tippett encouraged Deller to extend his repertory, which ...

• Classical
• Late Romantic

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 ...

• Opera
• Turn of the Century

The early nineteenth century was a period of insurgence in Europe, from the French Revolution in 1789 to the uprisings of around 1848. The Industrial Revolution, which began in Britain before spreading south to the rest of Europe, was also making its mark. These two strands of revolution transformed society, with a growing awareness of national identity ...

• Influences
• Classical
• Medieval Era

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 ...

• Inside the Music
• Country
• Early Years of Hillbilly

If you look for country music’s Big Bang, there is nothing more momentous than Bristol, 1927. Within four summer days, two stars appeared that would change the cosmology of country – remap the sky. And it all happened in a disused office building in a quiet mountain town perched on the state line between Virginia and Tennessee. Why ...

• Classical
• Contemporary Classical

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 ...

• Classical
• Early Romantic

Following the social and political upheaval of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, Europe enjoyed a short period of relative stability with Napoleon’s exile, the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in France and the establishment of the Vienna Peace Settlement in 1815. However, in the early 1820s a number of minor revolts broke out in Naples and ...

• Opera
• Turn of the Century

The schools of naturalism and realism had an immediate effect in Italy. With scant literary tradition to draw on from this period, Italian writers in the second half of the nineteenth century seized upon Zola’s beliefs as a potent dramatic source. The style they developed came to be known as verismo and was exemplified by writers such as Giovanni Verga ...