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• Personalities
• Jazz & Blues
• Twenties

(Vocals, composer, bandleader, 1889–1975) Sissle worked with bandleader James Reese Europe from 1916–19, before teaming up with Eubie Blake; together Sissle and Blake wrote hits for Sophie Tucker and the successful all-black musicals Shuffle Along (1921) and Chocolate Dandies (1924). Sissle led his own bands in Europe during the late 1920s before returning to America in 1931 ...

• Personalities
• Jazz & Blues
• Twenties

(Piano, composer, 1883–1983) A long-surviving link to the ragtime era, James Hubert Blake wrote his first piece, ‘The Charleston Rag’, in 1899. The Baltimore native started out playing piano in sporting houses and with travelling medicine shows in the early 1900s. He also worked with bandleader-composer James Reese Europe before teaming up on the vaudeville circuit with ...

• Personalities
• Forties
• Jazz & Blues

(Trumpet, 1911–93) Mario Bauzá takes a large amount of credit for bringing music from his native Cuba into jazz. He worked with Noble Sissle and Chick Webb in New York in the 1930s before teaming up with Machito. While with Cab Calloway in 1939–40 he sparked Dizzy Gillespie’s interest in Cuban music, which eventually led to ‘Cubop’. He was ...

• Personalities
• Jazz & Blues
• Twenties

(Drums, 1898–1975) Arthur ‘Zutty’ Singleton was one of the first New Orleans drummers, along with Baby Dodds, to develop a melodic approach to the kit and the concept of the extended drum solo. He played in the second configuration of Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five, appearing on OKeh recordings cut in 1928 (including the landmark ‘West End Blues’), ...

• Styles & Forms
• Jazz & Blues
• Twenties

The 1920s was, without doubt, the Jazz Age. Workers and the newly burgeoning middle class turned into consumers due to relatively higher wages. The international political advantages that came from having just won a major war buttressed a ‘lost generation’ of artistic types, who took up residence in Europe. New moral codes, sophistication and cynicism abounded. Some ...

• Opera
• Classical Era

The Enlightenment was a natural, if late, consequence of the sixteenth-century Renaissance and Reformation. Also known as the Age of Reason, the Enlightenment advanced to be recognized in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and brought with it new, controversial beliefs that upended the absolutisms on which European society had long been based. Absolute monarchy, ...

• Opera
• Late Baroque

By the beginning of the eighteenth century, opera was established in some form in most major European centres. The basic types of serious and comic opera in both Italian and French traditions shared similarities, although the content and style of an operatic entertainment could vary according to whether it was intended to flatter a private patron, resound with ...

• Opera
• Roots of Opera

Opera, with its unique blend of poetry, drama and music, has come a long way from its humble beginnings in ancient Greek theatre. The grandiose, all-encompassing music dramas of Verdi and Wagner may seem a world away from the era of Aristotle and Plato, but this noble civilization, which held music and theatre in high ...

• Arts & Culture
• Classical
• Classical Era

When, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, French critics came into contact with Italian opera, many felt that the musical freedom of the Italians offered something that French opera, so closely tied to theatrical declamatory traditions, made impossible. The Abbé Raguenet, enamoured of Italian singing and the supporting instrumental skills, mocked French opera ...

• Instruments
• Brass

Bugle Best known in its military guise, the bugle is one of the simplest of brass instruments in terms of construction, but it is very difficult to play. The single tube of metal has no valves to help create different notes, so players have to do all the work by changing their embouchure – a combination of the ...

• 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
• Classical Era

The Enlightenment was a great wave of thought in the eighteenth century that combated mysticism, superstition and the supernatural – and to some extent the dominance of the church. Its origins lie in French rationalism and scepticism and English empiricism, as well as in the new spirit of scientific enquiry. It also affected political theory in the writings of ...

• Opera
• High Romantic

On the face of it, the French Revolution failed when the House of Bourbon returned to rule France after the defeat of Napoleon in 1815. The face of it, however, was deceptive. The forces of liberalism unleashed by the Revolution had simply made a strategic withdrawal. In France, liberals, socialists and republicans remained opposed to extreme ...

• Classical
• Late Baroque

More sophisticated diplomatic relations between states in the late Baroque era resulted in a time of relative peace – for a short period at least – during which the arts flourished. As in the Renaissance and early Baroque eras, writers, artists and musicians turned to the classical antiquity of Greece and Rome for their standards and their in­spiration. At ...

• Classical
• Renaissance

Classical ideals began to emerge and take shape in musical treatises in the late fifteenth century. One of the most famous exponents of this was Johannes Tinctoris (1430–after 1511), who, in his writings, claimed that music had been reborn in the works of John Dunstaple (c. 1390–1453) and his followers around 1440. Also central to Renaissance thinking about music ...