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• Personalities
• Alternative/Indie Rock
• Hard Rock
• Heavy Metal
• Rock
• Twenty-First Century

(Vocal/instrumental group, 1999–present) Hundred Reasons – Colin Doran (vocals), Paul Townsend (guitar), Larry Hibbitt (keyboards), Andy Gilmour (bass) and Andy Bews (drums) – are a UK hard rock band just three albums into their career. A change from Columbia to V2 in September 2005 saw Hibbitt take production duties for the excellent Kill Your Own album of 2006. Outside of ...

• Personalities
• Garage Rock
• Rock
• Twenty-First Century

(Vocal/instrumental group, 1993–present) Sweden’s Hives – Pelle Almqvist (vocals), Niklas Almqvist (guitar), Mikael Karlsson Åström (guitar), Mattias Bernval (bass) and Christian Grahn (drums) – suffered relative obscurity in their home country until the UK’s garage rock obsession in 2000, after signing to the Poptones label. Immaculately attired and only slightly serious, the band excelled at an almost pantomime ...

• Classical
• Classical Era

The very name, ‘Classical Era’, speaks for itself: it proclaims a period that is regarded as ‘Standard, first-class, of allowed excellence’, with manifestations that are ‘simple, harmonious, proportioned, finished’, to quote a dictionary definition. The period from 1750 to roughly 1820 is widely recognized as one of exceptional achievement in music – it is the ...

• Opera
• Late Baroque

By the beginning of the eighteenth century, opera was established in some form in most major European centres. The basic types of serious and comic opera in both Italian and French traditions shared similarities, although the content and style of an operatic entertainment could vary according to whether it was intended to flatter a private patron, resound with ...

• 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, ...

• Classical
• Renaissance

‘Renaissance’ is a French word meaning ‘rebirth’. It has been used since the nineteenth century to describe the period between c. 1300 and 1600. Three hundred years is a long time for a single historical or cultural period, and the strain shows in any attempt to define the term ‘Renaissance’. The cultural phenomenon central to the Renaissance was a revival ...

• Arts & Culture
• Classical
• Contemporary Classical

The history of opera is dominated by Italian and Austro-German composers. It is in Italy and Germany that we find the greatest number of opera houses. La Scala in Milan lays claim to be the most famous opera house in the world, and its opening night every season is a major event in the country’s social calendar. The theatre, ...

• Influences
• Classical
• Medieval Era

Composers of the twentieth century and up to the present have often been drawn to the music of the medieval and Renaissance periods. A relatively early example is Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971), who became interested in the fourteenth-century technique of hocket and in the harmonic experiments of the Italian composer Carlo Gesualdo (c. 1561–1613). Hocket has since inspired many composers, both ...

• Inside the Music
• Classical
• Medieval Era

Du Fay’s Mass L’homme armé was one of the first of several dozen Masses of that name composed between the years 1450 and 1700. ‘L’homme armé’ (‘The Armed Man’) was a popular, probably satirical, tune which may have been aimed at the less-valiant members of the French army during the last stages of the Hundred Years’ War. Attracted by ...

• Inside the Music
• Country
• Cowboys & Playboys

Country music today retains little of the regional identity that characterized it in its early days. There are pockets of resistance to this homogeneity and to the hegemony of Nashville – a honky-tonk dance circuit and a fiercely independent singer-songwriter tradition in Texas, for example – but overall the scene is one of major stars playing huge venues. The middle ...

• Inside the Music
• Country
• Mainstream Country

Country music and gospel have always been close partners, since many gospel acts come from the American South, and Nashville, the home of country music, lies in the heart of the Bible Belt. Numerous influences abound within the Church, stretching from traditional shape-note singing that goes back several hundred years, to today’s contemporary and Christian ...

• Instruments
• Brass
• Electric & Electronic
• Keyboards
• Percussion
• Stringed
• Woodwind

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 ...

• Instruments
• Woodwind

Unusually among musical instruments, a specific date has been posited for the invention of the clarinet. Johann Christoph Denner of Nuremberg has been claimed as the man who, in 1700, devised and built the first of these instruments. Like all the best stories, however, the history of the clarinet is shrouded in mystery. The instrument attributed ...

• Instruments
• Ensembles

A musical ensemble is a group of two or more musicians who have come together to play music. In theory, an ensemble could contain any number of instruments in any combination, but in practice, certain combinations just don’t work very well, either for musical reasons or because of the sheer practicality of getting particular instruments and players ...

• Instruments
• Keyboards

In 1905, and probably for several decades before that, there were more pianos in the United States than there were bathtubs. In Europe, throughout the nineteenth century, piano sales increased at a greater rate than the population. English, French and German makers dispatched veritable armies of pianos to every corner of the Earth. It was the ...