(Guitar, vocals, 1901–68) Born and raised in Georgia, James Arnold was taught to play guitar by his cousin. He moved to Buffalo, New York in his late teens and to Chicago in 1929. He worked outside music, making bootleg whiskey, but also played occasional jobs. He first recorded for Victor in 1930 as Gitfiddle Jim ...
Born in Henderson, Tennessee, in 1918, Eddy Arnold has not only shown remarkable longevity as an artist (his career spans seven decades and he has sold more than 80 million records); he was also a pivotal figure in country music’s dramatic stylistic shift during the 1950s from rough and rural to urbane and sophisticated. Speaking Through Song A ...
1874–1951, Austrian One of the most important and controversial figures of twentieth-century composition, Schoenberg was a true visionary who paved the way for serialism – a system that, while abandoning traditional western harmony and melody, gave direction to the chaos of atonality. In so doing, he attracted plaudits and outright vitriol, for although serialism has ...
Composed: 1930–32 Premiered: 1957, Zurich Libretto by the composer Act I Moses prays in the desert. He is answered by voices from the Burning Bush telling him to become a prophet and the leader of the Israelites. He pleads that he does not have the eloquence to explain God’s will in terms they can understand, but is told that ...
1921–2006 English composer Arnold began his career as an orchestral trumpet player, but soon attracted attention with music that combined tunefulness, orchestral brilliance and engaging humour (the comedy overture Beckus the Dandipratt and two sets of English Dances). His symphonies and concertos combine these qualities with deeper emotions; they have attracted a smaller, but admiring, audience. Among ...
1883–1953 English composer Bax was strongly affected by Richard Strauss, Debussy and Ravel, but the formative influence on him was a Romantic image of Ireland, first encountered through the poetry of W. B. Yeats and reflected in such tone-poems as The Garden of Fand (Fand was the goddess of the Western Sea). His music is passionate (the tone-poem ...
(Är’-nolt Shön’-bârg) 1874–1951 Austrian composer Together with Stravinsky, Schoenberg has become the most influential figure in twentieth-century music. In his youth he wrote music in a ripe and sumptuously orchestrated late-Romantic style, but came to believe that the later music of Wagner, and that of Mahler and Richard Strauss, as well as his own, was undermining ...
(Vocals, b. 1946) This LA-born former member of The Ikettes was Ike and Tina Turner’s backing vocalist. Remaining in London after a UK tour, she signed to Andrew Loog Oldham’s Immediate label, capitalizing on Britain’s love affair with American soul. She is best known for her 1967 hit, Cat Stevens’ ‘The First Cut Is The Deepest’. She ...
Albert Clifton Ammons was born in Chicago, Illinois in March 1907. As a young man he learned from Jimmy Yancey, who cast a long shadow over Chicago blues pianists through his work at rent parties, social functions and after-hours jobs. Ammons came to know other pianists and the blues specialists gathered together in Chicago to create a coterie ...
(Piano, vocals, 1902–41) William Bunch was born in Tennessee but raised in Arkansas. He played guitar and piano in his youth, left home in the mid-1920s and settled in East St. Louis, Illinois. He made his recording debut in 1930 for Vocalion as Peetie Wheatstraw. A popular and prolific recording artist for Decca and Vocalion until his ...
While blues music has produced dozens of great, innovative musicians, vocalists and songwriters, the continuing influence of Robert Johnson over the years has shown that no other performer has succeeded in combining all the elements in quite the exceptional way that he did. The fascination that Johnson holds for so many people lies not only in his extraordinary ...
(Vocals, guitar, 1903–62) Francis ‘Scrapper’ Blackwell is best known as Leroy Carr’s musical partner, but he was also a gifted artist in his own right. In 1928 he recorded ‘Kokomo Blues’, which Kokomo Arnold covered as ‘Original Old Kokomo Blues’, before Robert Johnson retooled it as ‘Sweet Home Chicago’. After Carr died in 1935, Blackwell retired from ...
As if at the convenience of history, the stock market crash in the final weeks of 1929 severed the 1920s from the 1930s. The breach was economic but its consequences were pervasive, sweeping away economic values and social illusions, and affecting all aspects of life for Americans and Europeans alike. America’s compliant 1920s middle class became the 1930s ...
Camille Saint-Saëns (1835–1921) is said to have written the first film score with L’assassinat du duc de Guise (‘The Assassination of the Duke of Guise’, c. 1908). Many composers in the US and Europe followed suit, although few wished to make a career in films. A famous exception was Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897–1957), whose scores include the Academy Award-winning The ...
In 1937, Arnold Schoenberg said, ‘I have at last learned the lesson that has been forced upon me during this year, and I shall not ever forget it. It is that I am not a German, not a European, indeed perhaps scarcely a human being – at least the Europeans prefer the worst of their race ...
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