AUTHORITATIVE | CURATED | First 500 words Free

• Personalities
• Alternative/Indie Rock
• Drum’n’Bass
• Electronic
• Rock
• Twenty-First Century

(Vocal/instrumental group, 2003–present) Thunderous UK alt-rockers project Enter Shikari announced their arrival with the scream-filled hardcore debut Take To The Skies, which entered the UK charts at No. 4 in 2007, thanks to self promotion on networking sites like MySpace. The band hit the festival circuit, starring at Reading and Leeds, Download and Glastonbury, before ...

• Personalities
• Guitar Heroes
• New Wave

A crucial figure in New York’s late 1970s new-wave scene, Tom Verlaine (b. 1949) was born Thomas Miller in New Jersey. At an early age, he learned piano before switching to saxophone, inspired by John Coltrane. He took up the guitar in his teens and began forging his own style, searching for new ways of expressing himself ...

• Arts & Culture
• Classical
• Late Baroque

Musicians have always enjoyed a significant role as providers of social entertainment. In the early eighteenth century, this aspect of music-making gained greater importance, as the middle classes in European towns and cities cultivated the art of courtly dancing in such forms as the minuet, the bourée and the gavotte. Most of the era’s major composers, including ...

• Personalities
• Country
• Mainstream Country

(Vocals, songwriter, b. 1958) As a teenager, New Jersey-born Carpenter moved to Washington, D.C., where music became an integral part of her life. Establishing herself on the local folk circuit, she signed with Columbia, resulting in her 1986 debut album, Hometown Girl. Produced by guitarist John Jennings, it marked the beginning ...

• Performance
• Modern Era
• Opera

John Adams, a purveyor of much-admired and accessible music has had his opera, The Death of Klinghoffer performed across the world. The troubling story, set on a cruise ship, addresses the murder of Leon Klinghoffer, a Jewish man, by Palestinian hijackers. While meeting controversy about its subject matter, it would seem that for previous ...

• Personalities
• Hip Hop
• Rock
• Twenty-First Century

Marshall Bruce Mathers III was born on 17 October 1972 in Detroit, Michigan. The exact details of his upbringing there and in nearby Warren are unknown, suffice to say he was raised solely by his mother Debbie, and the upbringing, reputedly poverty-stricken, provided ample subject matter for much of the rapper’s lyrical material. 8 Mile And ...

• Instruments
• Electric & Electronic

Until the 1970s, most synthesizers were played by means of a traditional, piano-style keyboard. This tended to limit the player’s ability to expressively control the sound in real time and manufacturers sought to include additional means of control, such as modulation wheels and touch-sensitive ribbon controllers. Wind and brass players, however, realized that their experience of ...

• 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 ...

• Opera
• Modern Era

The opera house and, more specifically, opera audiences, were among the last to be receptive to the new musical language that developed during the twentieth century. Slow, as well as reluctant to vary their traditional musical tastes, perceptions and expectations, many viewed the opera house with nostalgia; as a symbol of the establishment, holding ...

• Major Operas
• Opera
• Turn of the Century

‘Rustic Chivalry’ Composed: 1888 Premiered: 1890, Rome Libretto by Giovanni Targioni-Tozzetti and Guido Menasci after Giovanni Verga’s play Early on Easter Day, Turiddu is heard offstage serenading Lola. The villagers start arriving for church. Santuzza stops Mamma Lucia, Turiddu’s mother, and asks where she may find him. He is supposed to have gone to another village to ...

• Major Operas
• Opera
• Turn of the Century

‘The Knight of the Rose’ For the follow-up to Elektra, Strauss declared he wanted to write a Mozart opera. Despite Hofmannsthal’s protests about a light, Renaissance subject set in the past, the librettist soon came up with a scenario that delighted Strauss. The correspondence between librettist and composer was good-natured and respectful. Each made suggestions to the other ...

• Major Operas
• Opera
• Turn of the Century

‘The Woman Without a Shadow’ Like Ariadne auf Naxos, Die Frau ohne Schatten had a tempestuous genesis. The idea itself stemmed from the period immediately after the premiere of Der Rosenkavalier, but Hofmannsthal’s continual flood of ideas compounded by Strauss’s curmudgeonliness ensured the project stalled regularly. The start of the First World War did nothing to help, and ...

• Major Operas
• High Romantic
• Opera

‘The Mastersingers of Nuremberg’ Die Meistersinger has often been described as a comedy. This, though, is not ‘comedy’ as found in the operas of Rossini or in Verdi’s Falstaff: what ‘comedy’ means in this context is the bitter ‘human comedy’. The premiere of Die Meistersinger took place in Munich on 21 June 1868. Wagner based his opera on the real-life ...

• Major Operas
• High Romantic
• Opera

Verdi’s five-act opera Don Carlos was taken from a drama written in 1787 by the German playwright Friedrich von Schiller (1759–1805). Written for the Paris Opéra, Don Carlos was first performed there on 11 March 1867. Schiller’s play was translated and the libretto written by Joseph Méry, who unfortunately died before it was completed, and Camille du Locle ...

• Major Operas
• Classical Era
• Opera

Composed in 1787 and triumphantly premiered in Prague on 29 October that year, Don Giovanni reworks the old legend of the serial seducer, drawing on the Spanish play by Tirso de Molina (1630) and Molière’s Don Juan (1665). The opera revolves around the tensions of class and sex that were so central to Figaro. Ensembles and propulsive ‘chain’ finales ...