AUTHORITATIVE | CURATED | First 500 words Free

• Influences
• Classical
• Medieval Era

Guido of Arezzo (b. c. ad 990/5) was perhaps the most influential music theorist of all time. He not only wrote one of the most widely read treatises of the Middle Ages, the Micrologus, but he also invented the system of lines for notating music that is still used today and a method of teaching melodies using the syllables ...

• Classical
• Medieval Era

‘Medieval’ as a concept is very hard to define, and the period itself is just as difficult to delineate. It was a term invented by Renaissance writers who wished to make a distinction between their modernity and what had gone before. Although the onset of the Renaissance is often taken to be around the beginning of the fourteenth century, ...

• Influences
• Classical
• World of Music

Gamelan music had a great influence in the West, notably at the 1889 Grand Universal Exhibition in Paris, where the shimmering timbre of the orchestra made a profound impression on Debussy and Ravel. The gamelan was introduced to the United States at the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893. This musical style comes from the very diverse Indonesian culture ...

• Classical
• Medieval Era

The seven centuries covered here saw, essentially, the making of modern Europe. They saw the rise of the papacy and its numerous conflicts. They saw the shaping and reshaping of nations and empires. Yet beyond, and often because of, these conflicts and changes, they also saw the formation of great cultures. As nation met nation in ...

• Major Operas
• Opera
• Turn of the Century

‘Rustic Chivalry’ Composed: 1888 Premiered: 1890, Rome Libretto by Giovanni Targioni-Tozzetti and Guido Menasci after Giovanni Verga’s play Early on Easter Day, Turiddu is heard offstage serenading Lola. The villagers start arriving for church. Santuzza stops Mamma Lucia, Turiddu’s mother, and asks where she may find him. He is supposed to have gone to another village to ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Early Baroque

(An-ton’-yo Chas’-te) c. 1623–69 Italian composer Cesti was a Franciscan monk who studied music in Rome. Employed as a singer at the Florentine and Sienese courts, he then travelled to Venice, where his first opera Orontea (1649) was successfully performed at the Teatro di SS Apostoli. Following an affair with a singer, Cesti moved to Innsbruck, Austria, ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Classical Era
• Composer

(An-ton’-yo Sal-yâr’-e) 1750–1825 Italian composer Born in north Italy, Salieri went to Vienna when he was 15. He had several early successes and at 24 became court composer and conductor of the opera, and Kapellmeister 14 years later. He visited Italy where, in 1778, he wrote the opera for the opening of La Scala, Milan, and ...

• Personalities
• Early Romantic
• Opera

1799–1862, French Jacques-François-Fromental Halévy, who was born in Paris, studied there with several composers – of whom the most influential was Cherubini. Success at the opera house was rather long in coming, however, and Halévy had to endure rejections and failures before scoring his first success with Clari (1828), which was written for the Spanish mezzo-soprano ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Conductor
• Contemporary Classical

b. 1941 Italian conductor Muti won the Guido Cantelli International Conductors’ Competition in 1967. He was appointed principal conductor of the Florence Maggio Musicale in 1969. Principal conductor and music director of the New Philharmonia Orchestra 1973–82, and of the Philadelphia Orchestra 1980–92, he went on to become music director of La Scala, Milan 1986–2005 and of the ...

• Styles & Forms
• Classical
• Medieval Era

Before music was written down, musicians either memorized or improvised what they played or sang. Very little is known about the earliest European music because it was not recorded in notation. The music theorist Isidore of Seville (c. ad 559–636) even said that melodies could not be written down, and two centuries passed before a system of notation was ...