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 ...
(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 ...
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 ...
(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 ...
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 ...
(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 ...
The history of musical instruments has always been very closely linked to the history of music itself. New musical styles often come about because new instruments become available, or improvements to existing ones are made. Improvements to the design of the piano in the 1770s, for instance, led to its adoption by composers such as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart ...
Unusually among musical instruments, a specific date has been posited for the invention of the clarinet. Johann Christoph Denner of Nuremberg has been claimed as the man who, in 1700, devised and built the first of these instruments. Like all the best stories, however, the history of the clarinet is shrouded in mystery. The instrument attributed ...
Sound effects and instruments trouvés include found objects and specialist machines for making noises. Composers have made extensive use of both sound effects and found objects in orchestral music, especially in music for theatre, dance and opera. Sound Effects The wind machine was originally a theatrical sound effect, and is a cylinder of wooden slats with a canvas ...
A trombone is a brass instrument sounded by buzzing the lips into a mouthpiece. It is peculiar amongst brass instruments in using a double ‘U’-shaped slide to alter its pitch. The early history of the trombone is confused, mostly due to a lack of clarity in naming instruments. It is generally accepted that the immediate precursor to the trombone was ...
1885–1935, Austrian The composer of just two operas, Berg was a man who took atonality and stretched it to its expressionistic limits. While Joseph Haydn (1732–1809), Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) are often referred to as the First Viennese School, the so-called Second Viennese School consists of Berg together with fellow student Anton Webern (1883–1945) and their ...
b. 1935, Finnish Hailing from a country without a strong operatic legacy, Sallinen approaches the craft of composition with true dramatic flair, as well as a genuine understanding of how to create theatre-oriented music in a more traditional tonal language. The first of his six operas, Ratsumies (‘The Horseman’, 1975), was such a huge national success that ...
(Kärl Ôrf) 1895–1982 German composer Orff’s Carmina Burana (‘Songs of Beuren’, 1937), with its simple melodies and pounding rhythms, is characteristic of his work. It is one of the most popular choral works in the repertory today. He wrote comic and satirical operas in this manner, including Der Mond (‘The Moon’, 1939) and Die Kluge (‘The Clever Girl’, 1943). ...
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