AUTHORITATIVE | CURATED | First 500 words Free

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Modern Era

(Där-yüs’ Me-yo’) 1892–1974 French composer One of the group known as ‘Les Six’, Milhaud was perhaps the most prolific composer of the twentieth century. Jazz was an important influence on him, as was the carnival music of South America, and he was famous for writing music in two or more keys at once (polytonality). He composed in most musical ...

• Instruments
• Keyboards

In one form or another, the harpsichord ruled the domestic keyboard roost throughout Europe – and later in America – from the late-sixteenth to the early-nineteenth centuries. Apart from the organ, it was the grandest and most versatile of all keyboard instruments until the advent of the mature fortepiano in the mid- to late-eighteenth century. Rise and Fall of ...

• Instruments
• Woodwind

The saxophone occupies an unusual position in that it is a bespoke instrument that has barely changed since its creation. Although it does not occupy the position in the orchestra its creator had envisaged, Adolphe Sax’s invention has played a central part in music ever since it burst on to the scene in the 1840s. Sax’s father, Charles, ...

• Personalities
• Modern Era
• Opera

1889–1963, French Cocteau was an exceptional and prodigious talent. Inspired by everything around him, he gained an international reputation as a playwright, novelist, poet, artist, opera librettist and filmmaker. After designing the set for Debussy’s opera Pelléas et Mélisande (1926), Cocteau wrote his first libretto for a Stravinsky opera-oratorio. Based on the Oedipus trilogy of ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Modern Era

(O-lev-ya’ Mes-se-an’) 1908–92 French composer Messiaen’s music is unmistakably personal, drawn from a wide range of interests rather than influences. A church organist from his twenties, he was aware of the ‘church modes’ (scales used in Western music before the development of the key system) and investigated other modes, including rhythmic ones. He studied Asian and ancient Greek ...

• Styles & Forms
• Cool Jazz
• Jazz

In the wake of the pyrotechnic manifesto that ​Charlie ‘Bird’ Parker and Dizzy Gillespie jointly issued on their first recording together in 1945, most musicians on the New York jazz scene began fanning the flames of bebop. Tempos picked up speed, intensity increased on the bandstand and blazing virtuosity became a means to an end, in a fiery ...

• Classical
• Contemporary Classical

After the devastation wrought in Europe by World War II, the urgent task of rebuilding the continent’s war-torn urban fabric demanded radical solutions. These were found in the centralized urban planning advocated before the war by architects such as Le Corbusier and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Writing in 1953, the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928–2007) created an explicit analogy ...

• Classical
• Modern Era

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 ...

• Influences
• Classical
• Modern Era

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 ...

• Instruments
• Classical
• Contemporary Classical

A small free-reed instrument, the harmonica, or mouth organ, is placed between the lips and moved to and fro to reach the rows of channels which house vibrating reeds, played by blowing into it. The arrival of the Chinese sheng in Europe in the eighteenth century encouraged a great deal of experimentation with free-reed instruments. In 1821 ...

• Instruments
• Classical
• Contemporary Classical

A type of xylophone, the marimba is a percussion instrument. The percussionist strikes a row (or two rows) of wooden blocks – laid out like a keyboard – beneath which are attached a series of echo chambers that resonate the sound. The compass of the instrument varies, but generally covers three or four chromatic octaves from the C below ...

• Classical
• Contemporary Classical

European culture lay in ruins after the end of World War II. There were many who, in company with the philosopher Theodor Adorno, felt that Nazi atrocities such as Auschwitz rendered art impossible, at least temporarily. Others, though, felt that humanity could only establish itself anew by rediscovering the potency of art, including opera. On ...

• Performance
• Classical
• Contemporary Classical

The twentieth century has seen a wealth of special effects employed in music, in much the same way as they are used in film, beginning with the intonarumori (‘noise-intoners’) invented by Luigi Russolo. A football rattle (called a ‘bird scare’ by the composer) was required by Havergal Brian (1876–1972) for his Gothic Symphony No. 1 (1927). The sound of ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Contemporary Classical

(Bârnt A-lo’-es Tsim’-mer-man) 1918–70 German composer Initially attracted to Milhaud and Stravinsky, Zimmermann studied at Darmstadt and was already integrating serialism with elements of popular music in the ballet score Metamorphose (1954), whose ‘boogie-woogie’ passage was later incorporated into the trumpet concerto Nobody Knows da Trouble I See of the same year, itself featuring the African-American spiritual of that ...

• Personalities
• Modern Era
• Opera

1918–70, German Attracted to the avant-garde, Zimmerman composed only one opera, yet it is one of the most powerful German-language works of recent years. The four-act Die Soldaten (‘The Soldiers’) premiered in Cologne in 1965. Zimmermann travelled outside Germany just once, when he was sent to France during the war. Here, he familiarized himself with the ...