AUTHORITATIVE | CURATED | First 500 words Free

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Contemporary Classical

(Yan’-nis Ze-na’-kis) 1922–2001 French/Greek composer Xenakis took up the formal study of music late, having lessons with Honegger, Milhaud and Messiaen in Paris in the early 1950s. He developed a technique in which masses of sound were manipulated according to laws of mathematical probability. This can be clearly heard in the accumulation of overlapping string glissandos in Metastasis (1954), ...

• Instruments
• Electric & Electronic

Computer music can be defined as music that is generated by, or composed and produced by means of, a computer. The idea that computers might have a role to play in the production of music actually goes back a lot further than one might think. As early as 1843, Lady Ada Lovelace suggested in a published article that ...

• 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 ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Contemporary Classical

b. 1932 American composer Early work as a studio pianist in Hollywood led to pockets of work in the 1960s. During the 1970s, he produced music for a number of films including The Towering Inferno (1974). Following collaborations with Steven Spielberg in the mid-1970s, Williams wrote music to Star Wars (1977). Stylistically, he adopts the romantic breadth 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 ...

• Classical
• Contemporary Classical

Contemporary music whose ancestry lies in the Western classical tradition finds itself in a curious position. Nothing illustrates this better than the fact that we are not entirely sure what to call it. The label ‘classical’ seems anachronistic, especially when applied to composers who have challenged some of the fundamental assumptions of the classical tradition. ‘Concert music’ is similarly problematic ...