SEARCH RESULTS FOR: Edgard Varèse
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(Ed-gar’ Va-rez’) 1883–1965 French-American composer As a young man, Varèse became convinced that the twentieth century needed its own music, untrammelled by the legacy of the nineteenth. He emigrated to the US and began to write music (Amériques, Offrandes, 1921) that took the dissonance and rhythmic energy of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring as a starting-point. He ...

Source: Classical Music Encyclopedia, founding editor Stanley Sadie

A range of metal percussion instruments are found in the western orchestra, many of which have ancient and global origins. Triangle The triangle comprises a slim steel bar, circular in cross-section, bent into an equilateral triangle (18 cm/7 in each side) with one corner open. It is played with a metal rod, and is suspended from a ...

Source: The Illustrated Complete Musical Instruments Handbook, general editor Lucien Jenkins

The ondes martenot (‘martenot waves’) was invented in 1928 by French inventor and cellist, Maurice Martenot. Martenot had met his Russian counterpart, Leon Theremin, in 1923 and the two of them had discussed possible improvements to Theremin’s eponymous instrument. In fact, Martenot’s instrument was patented under the name Perfectionnements aux instruments de musique électriques (‘improvements to electronic ...

Source: The Illustrated Complete Musical Instruments Handbook, general editor Lucien Jenkins

1874–1929, Austrian Hofmannsthal was a precocious talent. His first published poem appeared when he was just 16 and he rapidly made the acquaintance of some of the leading literary figures of the day. Most important was a paternalistic relationship with the German poet Stefan George (1868–1933). Hofmannsthal’s youthful ability led to a creative crisis in his mid-twenties from which he ...

Source: Definitive Opera Encyclopedia, founding editor Stanley Sadie

(Vikh’-tor Uhl’-man) 1898–c. 1944 Czech composer Ullmann studied in Vienna with Schoenberg and also in his native Prague with the pioneer of microtonal music, Alois Hába. In his own music their influence is joined by those of Mahler, Zemlinsky (with whom he studied conducting), Debussy and Weill, among others. His powerful opera Der Sturz des Antichrists (‘The Rise ...

Source: Classical Music Encyclopedia, founding editor Stanley Sadie

By the turn of the twentieth century, Western classical music seemed to have reached a crisis in language. Tonality had become enfeebled by its own progressive tendency, via increasing chromaticism, toward subtler and more complex forms of expression. European society had become similarly enervated by the familiar comforts of a bourgeois existence. In many quarters across the Continent ...

Source: The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Music, general editor Paul Du Noyer

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 ...

Source: Classical Music Encyclopedia, founding editor Stanley Sadie

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 ...

Source: Classical Music Encyclopedia, founding editor Stanley Sadie

Western classical music since the seventeenth century, because it placed great emphasis on harmonic subtlety and tensions between keys, had been less interested in melodic flexibility (a maximum of 12 notes to the octave, while Indian music uses 22) and in rhythm (regular division into bars, normally of two, three, four or six beats; Indian ...

Source: Classical Music Encyclopedia, founding editor Stanley Sadie

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 ...

Source: The Illustrated Complete Musical Instruments Handbook, general editor Lucien Jenkins

While in Paris, Varèse became interested in the dynaphone. Invented by René Bertrand and Nadal in 1927, this monophonic instrument was placed on a table. The right hand turned a knob controlling the pitch of an oscillator, while the left hand controlled volume and timbre. Honegger wrote for four dynaphones and a piano in his ballet score Roses de ...

Source: Classical Music Encyclopedia, founding editor Stanley Sadie

The tape recorder, invented in 1935, had been used early on to record concerts by the Berlin Philharmonic, but it was not until 1948 that Pierre Schaeffer, a technician at the Radiodiffusion Française studio in Paris, conceived his Etude aux chemins de fer. This was the first piece of musique concrète, an experimental technique that ...

Source: Classical Music Encyclopedia, founding editor Stanley Sadie

Musique concrète (‘concrete music’) was the term coined by Pierre Schaeffer (1910–95) in 1948 to describe his new approach to composition, based on tape recordings of natural and industrial sounds. The term was chosen to distinguish the new genre from pure, abstract music (musique abstrait). Schaeffer was a radio engineer and broadcaster. Having gained a qualification from L’École Polytechnique ...

Source: The Illustrated Complete Musical Instruments Handbook, general editor Lucien Jenkins

In the twentieth century, some musicians became interested in inventing new acoustic instruments that could take music beyond the tuning systems, scales and harmonic language inherent in the instruments commonly played in western classical music. Creating new instruments created a revolutionary new sound world. New instruments were often promoted outside the normal scope of the bourgeois concert audience, ...

Source: The Illustrated Complete Musical Instruments Handbook, general editor Lucien Jenkins

Varèse was particularly interested in the sounds of the modern urban world. His music takes a sound world derived from factories and industrialization and turns them into music. But it took the off-beat genius of Ligeti to compose a work entirely for special effects: his Poème symphonique (1962) has passed into musical folklore as the piece of music written for 100 ...

Source: Classical Music Encyclopedia, founding editor Stanley Sadie
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