the European route – a fiddle, the Greek bouzouki and a set of pipes (found in Greece, Eastern Europe, Scotland and Ireland) – you have the perfect Celtic group, an ensemble with a 2,500-year pedigree. However, the length of this heritage has not always deemed it worth preserving. In Spain, during Franco’s dictatorship, ...
A frame drum is a skin stretched over and nailed to a shallow square or circular frame. It is played with sticks or with the hands. Frame drums are common to many musical cultures, and the modern tambourine and bodhrán are essentially the same instruments that were being played in Arabia and India in pre-Islamic times. They are often played ...
Whistles, or duct flutes, have a device to channel the player’s breath, so a narrow air stream hits a sharpened edge, causing the necessary turbulence to vibrate the air column without the player using any special embouchure. Usually this duct is created by inserting a block, known as a fipple, into the end of the ...
emerged from all corners, leftfield fusion artists mixed’n’matched the music with other forms, and some artists hit the mainstream. A new sub-genre emerged with a forceful upsurge of Celtic musicians in the 1970s. The climax was Bill Whelan’s Riverdance stage show, which has seduced many parts of the world into giving Irish dancing its highest ever profile and ...
it. ‘In China, traditional music is alive and that influences us. What we are doing is something completely different.’ Xiao Suo, Beijing punk musician Styles East Asia Celtic India Southeast Asia Caribbean Africa Australia & Oceania Middle East Native America Latin & South America Cajun & Zydeco Europe Russia & Central Asia World Style World music comprises a ...
with the premiere of his dramatic cantata The Whale at the London Sinfonietta’s inaugural concert in 1968. The Beatles’ Apple label recorded both it and Tavener’s next work, the Celtic Requiem – an often unsettling blend of the Mass for the Dead with children’s rhymes, and of rudimentary note-rows with major tonality. During the 1970s the austere textures of ...
Fingerstyle master Adrian Legg (b. 1948) defies categorization. But though his music combines British folk, Celtic, rock, classical, blues, jazz and country sounds, Legg’s warm, soulful playing is the thread that unites the styles. Born in Hackney, London, England, Legg took the first steps of his musical journey playing the oboe ...
, undertaking a very successful tour of Europe in the years before World War I. Her later, smaller-scale music shows a move away from the late Romantic language and Celtic idioms of her earlier works. It appears to have been easier for women composers to be accepted in the US. Beach had several successful female contemporaries (or near-contemporaries) including Mabel ...
Few genres are as closely identified with one person as bluegrass is with Bill Monroe (vocals, mandolin, 1911–96). Monroe not only defined the style’s instrumentation, style and repertoire, he also hired most of its major figures and gave the music its name – taken from his group, The Blue Grass Boys. Kentucky Roots Raised on his ...
UK No. 1 with the punky, singalong soul of ‘Geno’ (1980). The manifesto album Searching For The Young Soul Rebels (1980) backed it up. After internal disruptions, a Celtic element was added, and the stomping anthem ‘Come On Eileen’ from the 1982 album Too-Rye-Ay became a global No. 1. ‘Jackie Wilson Said’ charted in 1982, but a ...
Arts and Letters. His other works include two piano concertos, four piano sonatas (whose titles, Tragica, Eroica, Norse and Keltic, display the influence of his Celtic ancestry), orchestral suites and songs. Recommended Recording: Piano Concerto No. 2 in D Minor, op. 23, Van Cliburn, Chicago SO (cond) Walter Hendl (RCA/Sony) Introduction | Late ...
a jug band, which evolved into The Warlocks and ultimately into The Grateful Dead. The band fused such diverse elements as bluegrass, folk, blues, country, Celtic music and jazz, all of which were evident in their long, improvised live jams and in Garcia’s extended solos. Rarely captured adequately in the studio, early Dead ...
master of fingerstyle guitar. He is best known for his collaboration with guitarist Bert Jansch and his work with the folk group Pentangle. Renbourn created music that fused British and Celtic folk with blues, jazz, British early music, classical guitar and Eastern forms. Renbourn began playing guitar as a teen in his native Torquay, England. At first ...
For 35 years Mike Oldfield (b. 1953) has created work that melds progressive rock, folk, world music, classical music, electronic music, new age and dance. He is best known for his hit 1973 album Tubular Bells, which provided a theme for the movie The Exorcist, broke new ground as an instrumental concept album, ...
(Vocal/instrumental group, 1989–present) Nickel Creek gave a youthful jolt to the bluegrass scene when the charismatic, virtuosic group released its Alison Krauss-produced, eponymous 2000 debut album before half the quartet had turned 20. The band formed in 1989 when Chris Thile (vocals, mandolin, b. 1981) met the siblings Sara Watkins (vocals, fiddle, b. 1981) ...
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David Bowie
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