Influences

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Gamelan music had a great influence in the West, notably at the 1889 Grand Universal Exhibition in Paris, where the shimmering timbre of the orchestra made a profound impression on Debussy and Ravel. The gamelan was introduced to the United States at the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893. This musical style comes from the very diverse Indonesian culture that embraces peoples living in more than 3,000 islands speaking over ...

Source: Classical Music Encyclopedia, founding editor Stanley Sadie
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Guido of Arezzo (b. c. ad 990/5) was perhaps the most influential music theorist of all time. He not only wrote one of the most widely read treatises of the Middle Ages, the Micrologus, but he also invented the system of lines for notating music that is still used today and a method of teaching melodies using the syllables ut, re, mi, fa, sol and la. Guido built a reputation ...

Source: Classical Music Encyclopedia, founding editor Stanley Sadie
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Winchester Troper: one of the earliest sources of polyphony, an English manuscript dating from the early eleventh century and originally used in Winchester; now in Cambridge. Montpellier Codex: an important source of motets, compiled during the thirteenth century; now in the Bibliothèque interuniversitaire, Montpellier. Roman de Fauvel: a satirical poem about the church written in the early fourteenth century. The most important manuscript has 167 musical items inserted in and appended to ...

Source: Classical Music Encyclopedia, founding editor Stanley Sadie
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Composers of the twentieth century and up to the present have often been drawn to the music of the medieval and Renaissance periods. A relatively early example is Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971), who became interested in the fourteenth-century technique of hocket and in the harmonic experiments of the Italian composer Carlo Gesualdo (c. 1561–1613). Hocket has since inspired many composers, both modernist (Harrison Birtwistle, b. 1934, for instance, in his Carmen ...

Source: Classical Music Encyclopedia, founding editor Stanley Sadie
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Baldassare Castiglione’s Il libro del cortegiano (‘The Book of the Courtier’) was published in 1528 and became the most influential book of manners of its time. It was still being reprinted well into the eighteenth century and was translated into many languages. The Courtier presents a series of evening conversations purported to have taken place at the court of Urbino, some 20 years before the book’s publication, in 1506–07, during ...

Source: Classical Music Encyclopedia, founding editor Stanley Sadie
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Although types of lute can be found in many societies, both ancient and modern, the structure and indeed name of the Renaissance lute derived from an Arabic instrument, al-ud (‘the ud’). Like the Western Renaissance lute, the ud consisted of a large curved soundbox, a short neck ending in a peg box and a series of strings to be plucked. As the Spanish-Portuguese peninsula consisted of a patchwork of Christian ...

Source: Classical Music Encyclopedia, founding editor Stanley Sadie
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During the early seventeenth century a remarkable dynasty of musicians emerged, culminating in the genius of J. S. Bach. His musical forebears are too numerous to consider individually, but a handful of them were sufficiently accomplished and imaginative as composers to deserve a mention. Their music is increasingly finding a place in present-day concert programming. Their multifarious gifts and musical versatility embraced singing, playing, teaching, composing and instrument-building. Their skills became ...

Source: Classical Music Encyclopedia, founding editor Stanley Sadie
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By the eighteenth century many musicians had become accustomed to travelling far from their native cities or countries in search of employment, or in response to invitations from rulers of different states. In the late-Baroque period this type of wandering existence had become a standard feature of musical life in Europe, involving singers, instrumentalists and composers, in sometimes permanent separation from their homes and families. In this way musical styles ...

Source: Classical Music Encyclopedia, founding editor Stanley Sadie
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The literary movement known as Sturm und Drang (‘Storm and Stress’) takes its name from a play of 1776 by Maximilian Klinger, about the American Revolution. Confined to the German-speaking lands, although it had parallels elsewhere, it contradicted (or reacted to) much current ‘enlightened’ thinking by emphasizing the emotional, the passionate, the irrational, the terrifying. It belonged initially in the theatre, where it was taken up by Friedrich von Schiller, ...

Source: Classical Music Encyclopedia, founding editor Stanley Sadie
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The reputation that Paris enjoyed for elegance and culture also attracted many foreign visitors to the city, who carried the French style to their own countries. While Italian opera was occasionally performed, French-language serious and comic opera predominated. The city’s most famous concert series was the Concert Spirituel, founded by Anne-Danican Philidor (1681–1728) in 1725. By the middle of the century, the mainly sacred repertory had expanded to include instrumental ...

Source: Classical Music Encyclopedia, founding editor Stanley Sadie
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In the seventeenth century, a Turkish army was driven back from the walls of Vienna. As diplomatic relations replaced hostilities, Turkish embassies in Vienna used ‘janissary’ or military bands as part of their parade and a Turkish band was presented to the Polish king by the Sultan. In the eighteenth century a fashion for Turkish sounds such as shawms, bass drums, jingles, cymbals and bells developed as admiration for the ...

Source: Classical Music Encyclopedia, founding editor Stanley Sadie
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The years 1826–28 saw the deaths of the three greatest composers of their respective generations, Weber, Beethoven and Schubert. Only in the years that followed could early Romanticism really forge its own identity. The 1830s saw the flowering of a new generation of great composers, including Chopin, Schumann, Berlioz, Liszt and Mendelssohn, and for each of these musicians the influence of their forebears, especially Beethoven, was enormous. When Beethoven died ...

Source: Classical Music Encyclopedia, founding editor Stanley Sadie
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At a time when expression was more important than maintaining classical forms, freer structures that enabled the communication of a single mood or idea became particularly popular with pianists as an alternative to sonatas. Schubert, for example, is best revealed in his short lyric pieces in which his melodic expansiveness is not constrained. His Moments Musicaux (‘Musical Moments’, 1828), a series of six intimate pieces, illustrate beautifully his ability to evoke ...

Source: Classical Music Encyclopedia, founding editor Stanley Sadie
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Between 1860 and 1918 Wagner became the most influential intellectual figure in Europe. For his Gesamtkunstwerk (‘Complete Art-Work’) he drew on a wide range of inspirations, including Greek tragedy, the symphonies of Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) and his own historicist ideas of realizing the latent tendencies of all arts. This ensured that his music-dramas reached into almost every area of European artistic, philosophical and even political life. The performance of the ...

Source: Classical Music Encyclopedia, founding editor Stanley Sadie
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The influence of jazz on concert music stretches back almost to the emergence of jazz itself from roots in gospel, ragtime and blues. One of the most popular black American dances of the 1890s was taken up by Debussy in his ‘Golliwog’s Cakewalk’ (from the piano suite Children’s Corner, 1906–08). Ragtime found its way into Satie’s ballet Parade and works by Stravinsky (notably Piano Rag Music, 1919). Ravel, for his ...

Source: Classical Music Encyclopedia, founding editor Stanley Sadie
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