1561–1633, Italian Like his rival and fellow Roman Giulio Caccini, Jacopo Peri possessed several musical talents. He was a composer, singer and harpist. In 1588, also like Caccini, Peri joined the Medici court in Florence. At age 27, he was, it seems, an attractive addition to one of the most glittering courts in ...
(Ya-ko-po Pa’-re) 1561–1633 Italian composer Peri was a Florentine who held a post as musician at the Medici court. He was probably a member of Bardi’s famous circle of Camerata in Florence, but by 1592 was enjoying the patronage of the amateur composer Corsi. One of the poets of Corsi’s household was Rinuccini, whose pastoral poem Dafne was partly set ...
Jimi Hendrix remains the most innovative and influential rock guitarist in the world. He changed the way the guitar was played, transforming its possibilities and its image. Other guitarists had toyed with feedback and distortion, but Hendrix turned these and other effects into a controlled, personalized sound that generations of guitarists since have emulated and embellished. He was ...
A crucial figure in New York’s late 1970s new-wave scene, Tom Verlaine (b. 1949) was born Thomas Miller in New Jersey. At an early age, he learned piano before switching to saxophone, inspired by John Coltrane. He took up the guitar in his teens and began forging his own style, searching for new ways of expressing himself ...
(Fran-swa’ Koo-per-an’) 1668–1733 French composer Couperin, known as le grand, was the most gifted member of an illustrious French musical family. He lived and worked in Paris where, at the age of 18, he inherited the post of organist at St Gervais, which had previously been held by his father and uncle. In 1693 he was appointed ...
(Vocal/instrumental group, 1975–present) Chicago native Ed Williams learned slide guitar from his uncle, renowned bluesman J.B. Hutto. During the early years of the Blues Imperials, flamboyant frontman Ed continued working at his day job in a local car wash, but by the early 1980s the band had established a substantial regional following. Their 1986 Alligator Records ...
(Bâr-när’-do Pas-kwe’-ne) 1637–1710 Italian composer Pasquini was a keyboard virtuoso and teacher working in Rome, who numbered Muffat, Francesco Gasparini (1668–1727) and Domenico Zipoli (1688–1726) among his pupils. He benefited from several of the leading Roman patrons of the time, including the cardinals Pamphili and Ottoboni, as well as from the exiled Queen Christina of Sweden. He served ...
1567–1643, Italian Claudio Giovanni Antonio Monteverdi was born in Cremona and began his illustrious career as a choirboy in the town’s cathedral. By the time he was 20, he had already published the first of his eventual nine books of secular madrigals. He was also a skilled composer of motets. Monteverdi’s horizons expanded in 1591 when he joined the ...
Opera, with its unique blend of poetry, drama and music, has come a long way from its humble beginnings in ancient Greek theatre. The grandiose, all-encompassing music dramas of Verdi and Wagner may seem a world away from the era of Aristotle and Plato, but this noble civilization, which held music and theatre in high ...
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 ...
Classical ideals began to emerge and take shape in musical treatises in the late fifteenth century. One of the most famous exponents of this was Johannes Tinctoris (1430–after 1511), who, in his writings, claimed that music had been reborn in the works of John Dunstaple (c. 1390–1453) and his followers around 1440. Also central to Renaissance thinking about music ...
The Renaissance, with its renewed interest in the music of the ancient world, is where the true roots of opera lie. The word ‘Renaissance’ means ‘rebirth’ and refers to the revival of the artistic and intellectual ideals of classical civilization following the intervening Middle Ages. The Renaissance began in Italy in the late fourteenth century and later spread to ...
Rossini’s two-act version of the Cinderella story, his twentieth opera and last Italian comic opera, received its first performance at the Teatro Valle in Rome on 25 January 1817. This was followed by performances in London (1820), Vienna (1822) and New York (1826). The Teatro Valle, which had commissioned Rossini to write the opera for the carnival in ...
The six intermedi composed to celebrate the marriage of Ferdinando de’ Medici of Florence and Christine of Lorraine in 1589 were the most spectacular and expensive ever seen. So lavish was the presentation that it completely dominated the play it accompanied – La pellegrina (‘The Pilgrim’) by Girolamo Bargagli. All the texts and music survive, together with the designs for ...
c. 1550–1602, Italian Emilio de’ Cavalieri – composer, teacher, dancer and organist – was born in Rome. At the de’ Medici court in Florence, he organized the family’s spectacular celebrations and was also involved with the innovative Camerata group and their experiments into the stile rappresentativo (representative style). In 1589, Cavalieri contributed madrigals and concluding music ...
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