AUTHORITATIVE | CURATED | First 500 words Free

• Personalities
• Alternative/Indie Rock
• New Wave
• Post-Punk
• Rock
• Twenty-First Century

(Vocal/instrumental group, 1996–present) Formerly known as Parva, Leeds’ Kaiser Chiefs – Ricky Wilson (vocals), Andrew White (guitar), Simon Rix (bass), Nick Hodgson (drums) and Nick Baines (keyboards) – plough the same indie furrow that fellow Britpoppers Blur did during their Parklife era. Wilson, something of an everyman, elicits playful singalong choruses from the most unexpected places, ...

• Personalities
• Blues
• Country
• Folk
• Jazz
• Noughties Pop
• Rock
• Soul
• Twenty-First Century

(Vocals, b. 1979) Despite being the daughter of superstar Ravi Shankar, Geetali Norah Jones Shankar is more jazz than world musician. Her debut Come Away With Me (2002) fuses elements of folk and soul into the genre, topped off with her sultry vocals, sounding as if they were beamed in from a smoky cellar bar. Her ability ...

• Personalities
• Hard Rock
• Mod
• Rock
• Sixties
• Sixties Pop

June Glastonbury Having played all the major historical rock festivals, The Who eventually made it to a traditionally wet and muddy Glastonbury on 24 June 2007. Belting out a career-spanning set, the band headlined a day of top British acts that included the Kaiser Chiefs and Manic Street Preachers. The set finished with the poignant ‘Tea And Theatre’ from ...

• Opera
• High Romantic

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 ...

• 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 ...

• 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 ...

• Instruments
• Percussion

Slit drums, or log drums, are found in many pre-industrialized cultures in Africa, Australasia, Central and South America, and the Far East. They are formed by hollowing a block of wood through a lengthwise slit, and are sounded by the players’ stamping feet or by being beaten with sticks. Slit drums are really idiophones as ...

• Classical
• Modern Era

The Modern Age was characterized by rapid and radical change and political turmoil. By 1918 the Russian tsar, the Habsburg emperor and the German kaiser had lost their thrones. The two Russian revolutions of 1917 resulted in a Communist government led by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was fragmented to allow self-determination to the newly formed countries of Czechoslovakia ...

• 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 ...

• Performance
• Modern Era
• Opera

‘The only thing worth emphasizing is that Theresienstadt has not hampered my musical activity, but actually encouraged it and supported it.’ The final entry in Viktor Ullmann’s journal referred to ‘Theresienstadt’, the town of Terezín, 60 kilometres northeast of Prague, which was remote enough for the Nazis to pursue their barbarism in relative seclusion. Yet within the ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Classical Era
• Composer

(Fränts Yo’-sef Hi’-dan) 1732–1809 Austrian composer Joseph Haydn was the most celebrated musician of the late-eighteenth century and the first of the great triumvirate (Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven) of Viennese classical composers. A tireless explorer and innovator, he did more than anyone to develop the dramatic potential of the sonata style. When he composed his cheerful F major Missa brevis ...

• Personalities
• Modern Era
• Opera

1900–50, German A precocious compositional talent, Weill’s early operatic works Der Protagonist (‘The Protagonist’, 1926) and Der Zar lässt sich photographieren (‘The Tsar has his Photograph Taken’, 1928) strengthened his resolve to invent a style of music theatre that used the finest playwrights and dancers. In 1927, he collaborated with writer Bertolt Brecht on Mahagonny Songspiel, and ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Modern Era

(Vikh’-tor Uhl’-man) 1898–c. 1944 Czech composer Ullmann studied in Vienna with Schoenberg and also in his native Prague with the pioneer of microtonal music, Alois Hába. In his own music their influence is joined by those of Mahler, Zemlinsky (with whom he studied conducting), Debussy and Weill, among others. His powerful opera Der Sturz des Antichrists (‘The Rise ...

• Personalities
• Modern Era
• Opera

1898–1944, Austrian Among the most heart-breaking of musicians’ stories is the brutally curtailed life and career of Viktor Ullmann. A Jewish victim of the Nazi genocide, he reached his creative zenith during two harrowing years inside Terezín (known as Theresienstadt by the Nazis). As he noted about himself and other musician prisoners before their death in the concentration camp ...