The English horn, or cor anglais, is a member of the oboe family. It is neither English nor a horn, and the name is usually written off as a mystery. Pitched a fifth below the oboe, it had been developed in 1760 by Ferlandis of Bergamo, but was rarely heard in the orchestra before the Romantic ...
c. 1465–1523 English composer Cornysh served at the courts of both Henry VII and Henry VIII as a poet, actor and musician. His greatest moment was being chosen to head the Chapel Royal at the famous ‘Field of the Cloth of Gold’ in June 1520. Five polyphonic works by him are preserved in the Eton Choirbook; he also composed early ...
The Renaissance recorder was played by blowing directly into a beak-shaped mouthpiece and the pitch was varied by changing the fingering on the holes – a set of seven on the front of the instrument and a single thumb-hole at the back. During this period the instrument was generally made of a single piece of wood, but today it usually ...
Larry Coryell (b. 1943), a father of jazz-rock fusion, has recorded more than 70 albums over the past 35 years. Born in Galveston, Texas, Coryell tried his hand at a number of instruments before settling on the guitar. Chet Atkins, Chuck Berry and Wes Montgomery were major influences. As a child Coryell studied piano, switching to ...
Born in Düsseldorf, Germany, Ulrich ‘Uli’ Jon Roth (b. 1954) began his lifelong musical journey on the trumpet, before switching to the classical guitar at the age of 13. This training, combined with his passion for classical music, would help Roth become one of the main protagonists of the neo-classical shred guitar style, later brought ...
Alternative-rock guitarist Billy Corgan (b. 1967) was born in Chicago, Illinois. Shortly after starting high school, Corgan began to learn guitar on an imitation Gibson Les Paul. His father, a musician, suggested that Billy listen to Jeff Beck and Jimi Hendrix but refused to teach him to play; consequently, Corgan was self-taught. His early influences were ...
(Ärk-an’-jel-o Ko-rel’-le) 1653–1713 Italian composer and violinist Corelli studied in Bologna, but by the mid-1670s was living in Rome, where he acquired a reputation as one of the city’s foremost violinists. His first patron in Rome was the exiled Queen Christina of Sweden, to whom he dedicated his earliest printed collection, 12 trio sonatas op. 1 (1681). Next ...
Death metal and grindcore both had roots in the decaying thrash metal scene of the mid-1980s. As that decade concluded, musicians on both sides of the Atlantic were looking for new and horrific ways to shock. The styles ended up gravitating towards one another, but began life as very different entities. Death metal bands like Morbid Angel and Death ...
As the 1990s began, dance music was really only subdivided into house or techno. However, another genre was forming alongside the explosion of big outdoor raves – hardcore, where extreme hedonism met a kind of underclass desperation. Hardcore has meant different things at different times. In the early 1990s, different parts of Europe had different words for ...
In the UK, hardcore split into two camps in the early 1990s. One half would lead to jungle, but within breakbeat hardcore, a faction of DJs and ravers felt that the music was getting too gloomy. Producers and DJs such as Slipmatt, Seduction, Vibes, Brisk and Dougal effectively led an exodus of white ravers away ...
(Pa’-ter Kôr-nal’-yoos) 1824–74 German composer Although gifted as an actor, Cornelius studied music in Berlin and joined Liszt’s circle in Weimar (1852), alongside Bülow, Joachim and others. He was a vociferous literary champion of the ‘New German School’ of Liszt and Wagner, yet his own works are surprisingly un-Wagnerian. They include many attractive Lieder, to his own poetry ...
The cornet is a looped brass instrument with a wide bore and three valves. Beginning life as a development of the circular looped post horn, it became a valved instrument in France in the late 1820s. It apparently reached Britain in the 1830s, where its bright sound soon displaced the keyed bugle from amateur wind bands. Most often to ...
The cornett of European Renaissance art music is a longer finger-hole horn made of wood. A precursor to the modern brass horns, it should not be confused with the valved – and much later developed – cornet. Construction and Playing Technique The cornett is a long tube, usually around 60 cm (20 in) in length. It is normally curved ...
The cornet is very similar to the trumpet in looks and playing technique. It is thought to have been invented by the instrument maker Jean-Louis Antoine in the 1820s. Antoine, who worked for the Parisian firm Halary, was one of a number of makers experimenting with the new valve technology that was revolutionizing brass instruments at the time. His ...
The first known examples of the recorder date from the Middle Ages. It became hugely popular in the Renaissance and Baroque periods and then, surpassed by the concert flute, it largely fell out of use in the professional arena. At the beginning of the twentieth century, however, it was redesigned by Arnold Dolmetsch and subsequently enjoyed a ...
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