In 1981, Sam Bush (mandolin, vocals, b. 1952) lost half of his band, The New Grass Revival, to road weariness. Courtney Johnson (banjo, 1939–96) and Curtis Burch (guitar, vocals, b. 1945) were exhausted by the tours with Leon Russell and the club and festival dates in between. So Bush and his remaining partner ...
1881–1945, Hungarian Widely recognized as one of the twentieth century’s most important composers, Bartók was a complete original in terms of his musical language, creating a national style that merged folk melodies with the asymmetric patterns of Hungarian speech. His vocal lines, often punctuated by a heavy chordal style, are evident in Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, ...
Composed: 1911 (re. 1912; 1918) Premiered: 1918, Budapest Libretto by Béla Balázs, after a fairy-tale by Charles Perrault Bluebeard and Judith appear in the doorway of his castle. She has left her family and declares she will never leave him. He closes the iron door. She offers to warm the stones and let in the light. There are no ...
(Ba’-la Bar’-tok) 1881–1945 Hungarian composer and pianist Bartók’s earliest works were influenced by Johannes Brahms (1833–97), by Hungary’s famous Liszt and by Richard Strauss, then regarded as the last word in modernism. Bartók’s personal style, though, was formed by his discovery of Debussy and of Hungarian folk music. The strongly rhythmic, percussive, sharply dissonant music that ...
(Vocals, b. 1927) Born in Harlem to Caribbean parents, the young Belafonte lived in Jamaica for five years. Multi-talented, he starred on stage and screen (in Carmen Jones, 1954), becoming a folk singer in 1955. He led a brief calypso craze with ‘Jamaica Farewell’, ‘Mary’s Boy Child’ and the million-selling ‘Banana Boat (Day-O)’. The title song from ...
(Banjo, pedal steel guitar, b. 1939) Keith grew up in Boston, but he fell in love with bluegrass and mastered the Scruggs roll so well that he could play fast, fluid fiddle tunes on the banjo. He founded a duo with college roommate Jim Rooney (vocals, guitar, b. 1938) and in 1963 joined Bill Monroe. ...
(Vocal/instrumental group, 1990s) Blood Oranges never sold many records, but they made two terrific albums (1990’s Corn River and 1994’s The Crying Tree) thanks to some smart songwriting, a savvy mix of bluegrass and British folk-rock and the contrast between fizzy male vocals and melancholy female vocals. The band was founded by Jimmy Ryan (vocals, mandolin, ...
(Vocal/instrumental group, 1984–present) The Nashville Bluegrass Band put the blues back into bluegrass with their frank borrowings from black gospel quartets and country bluesmen. The band was founded in 1984 by Alan O’Bryant (vocals, banjo, b. 1955), Pat Enright (vocals, guitar, b. 1945), Mike Compton (mandolin, b. 1956) and bassist Mark Hembree, with Stuart ...
Hank Williams and George Jones would have found the whole notion of alt-country unfathomable. Why would anyone seek an alternative to bestselling country records ? For these sons of dire southern poverty, the whole point of making country records was to sell as many as possible and maybe catch hold of the dignity and comfort that a middle-class life might ...
When Steve Earle (b. 1955) was released from prison on 16 November 1994, it had been four years since he had released a studio album and three years since he’d done a tour. During that time lost to heroin and crack, much had changed in the world of country music. The charismatic but mainstream-pop-oriented Garth Brooks (b. 1962) was ...
When Vassar Clements formed a band called Hillbilly Jazz in 1975, Bill Monroe’s former fiddler pulled the cover off the hidden connection between country music and jazz. The two genres had more in common than most people thought. After all, Jimmie Rodgers recorded with Louis Armstrong early in their careers; jazz legend Charlie Christian debuted on Bob Wills’ radio ...
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 ...
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 ...
Timpani are bowl drums or kettledrums, constructed by stretching a skin across a round metal, wooden or pottery bowl. They are beaten with sticks or leather thongs. Timpani originated in Islamic countries in Africa and the Middle East, where they were used to accompany hunting and for ceremonial and military music. Tuning Tuning a large kettledrum or timpani ...
The Modern Age was characterized by rapid and radical change and political turmoil. By 1918 the Russian tsar, the Habsburg emperor and the German kaiser had lost their thrones. The two Russian revolutions of 1917 resulted in a Communist government led by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was fragmented to allow self-determination to the newly formed countries of Czechoslovakia ...
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