SEARCH RESULTS FOR: Earl Thomas Conley
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(Vocals, songwriter, b. 1941) Conley’s first big break came in 1975, when Mel Street recorded his song ‘Smokey Mountain Memories’. Conway Twitty took his song ‘This Time I Have Hurt Her More Than She Loves Me’ to the top of the US country chart in 1976. On moving to Nashville, his first No. 1 hit, ‘Fire ...

Source: The Definitive Illustrated Encyclopedia of Country Music, consultant editor Bob Allen

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 ...

Source: Classical Music Encyclopedia, founding editor Stanley Sadie

1567–1620 English poet and composer Campion first distinguished himself as a poet and poetic theorist. His treatise, Observations in the Art of English Poesie (1602), included controversial opinions regarding metre and rhyme, revealing the musical basis of his poetry. He published four books of lute-songs. Some are humanist experiments in setting classically accentuated poetry, but the best are ...

Source: Classical Music Encyclopedia, founding editor Stanley Sadie

c. 1557–1602 English composer and theorist Morley was the most important composer involved in developing the English Elizabethan madrigal from its Italian counterpart. In the 1580s and 1590s he published some English translations of Italian madrigals with newly composed English works of his own, which imitated the Italian style. His most famous works are the ‘fa la la’ madrigals: pieces ...

Source: Classical Music Encyclopedia, founding editor Stanley Sadie

1505–85 English composer Athough undoubtedly a fine composer, Tallis is also worth mentioning for his amazing ability to sustain a successful career spanning the religious upheavals of the reigns of Henry VIII and his three children. Beginning as a good Catholic, he composed Latin Masses and motets. When change came, he changed too and turned out to be ...

Source: Classical Music Encyclopedia, founding editor Stanley Sadie

1576–1623 English composer Weelkes was one of the leading composers of the English madrigal. The unusual text of ‘Thule the Period of Cosmographie’ (1660) is a list of marvels, each of which he matches with appropriately descriptive music. Also famous is ‘As Vesta Was, from Latmos hill descending’ (1601), his contribution to The Triumphs of Oriana, a book ...

Source: Classical Music Encyclopedia, founding editor Stanley Sadie

Although researchers continue to make discoveries about the way music was performed in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, little is known about one of its most crucial aspects: how did singers actually sound ? Many medieval theorists and writers mention performers with voices ‘like those of angels’, and words such as ‘sweetness’ occur again and again; equally, the ...

Source: Classical Music Encyclopedia, founding editor Stanley Sadie

Alternative-rock guitarist Mike McCready (b. 1966) was born in Pensacola, Florida. His family moved to Seattle soon afterwards. He was 11 when he bought his first guitar and began to take lessons. In high school, McCready formed a band that disintegrated after they were unsuccessful in obtaining a record contract in Los Angeles. Disillusioned, he did not pick ...

Source: Rock Guitar Heroes, consultant editor Rusty Cutchin

As is the case with pretty much all stars, before the beautiful butterfly came the unremarkable caterpillar. Bowie was born not on Mars but in Brixton, South London. He started life as David Robert Jones on 8 January 1947. His father was a promotions officer for the children’s charity Barnardo’s and his mother a cinema usherette. He had one ...

Source: David Bowie: Ever Changing Hero, by Sean Egan

The word ‘Baroque’ is derived from the Portuguese barrocco, a term for a misshapen pearl, and it was still with this sense of something twisted that it was first applied – to the period between about 1600 and 1750 – in the nineteenth century. In 1768, Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote: ‘a Baroque music is that in which the harmony ...

Source: Classical Music Encyclopedia, founding editor Stanley Sadie

The revival and imitation of ancient theatrical genres in sixteenth-century Italy bore fruit in seventeenth-century England and France in the works of the great dramatists of those countries: William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe, Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine. In Italy, however, the sixteenth-century innovations in spoken drama were followed in the next century not by a great national ...

Source: Classical Music Encyclopedia, founding editor Stanley Sadie

Broadly speaking, empiricism, from the Greek empeiria (‘experience’), is a philosophical tradition that accepts as fact only what can be verified by observation, or experience, through the use of the five senses. Galileo Galilei’s support of Copernican theory was a result of his observation of the planet Venus through a telescope. His insistence that what he saw ...

Source: Classical Music Encyclopedia, founding editor Stanley Sadie

In the first part of the seventeenth century, two traditions of absolute power were struggling to maintain their hold. In England, after the death of Elizabeth I in 1603, the Stuart dynasty fought for survival for 40 years. Then the dream crumbled in the face of civil war and the execution of the king, Charles I, ...

Source: Classical Music Encyclopedia, founding editor Stanley Sadie

(Hin’-rikh Eg’-nats Frants fun Be’-ber) 1644–1704 German composer Biber was a violin virtuoso and one of the most imaginative composers of his time. He was employed at the Moravian court of Kromeriz (near Brno in today’s Czechoslovakia) during the 1660s, but from the early 1670s worked at the Salzburg court of the Prince-Archbishop, where he subsequently became Kapellmeister (‘chapel master’) ...

Source: Classical Music Encyclopedia, founding editor Stanley Sadie

1649–1708 English composer Blow held various court appointments and served as the first Composer of the Chapel Royal (1700). His greatest gifts lay in the composition of vocal music, notably anthems and services for the church. Among the finest of his verse anthems is ‘God spake sometime in visions’, for the coronation of James II (1685). In this piece, ...

Source: Classical Music Encyclopedia, founding editor Stanley Sadie
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