AUTHORITATIVE | CURATED | First 500 words Free

• Personalities
• Fifties Pop
• Film Music & Soundtracks
• Jazz
• One-Hit Wonders
• Rock

‘Cry Me A River’, 1955 ‘Cry Me A River’ was a US No. 2 hit single for Julie London, thanks in part to her involvement in the movie, The Girl Can’t Help It. In the film, London appears during a fantasy scene in press agent Tom Miller’s apartment and sings the song to him. Despite an extensive movie ...

• Personalities
• Pop
• Soul & R&B
• Twenty-First Century

Adele Laurie Blue Adkins was born on 5 May 1988 in Tottenham, a deprived part of North London with a high rate of unemployment. Her mother, Penny Adkins, was just 18 and an art student when her daughter was born. Adele’s father, Mark Evans, exited Adele’s life when she was aged three, leaving mother and daughter ...

• Performance
• Classical
• Early Romantic

During the first half of the nineteenth century, London became the financial and commercial capital of the world, its population expanding to two and a half million. Concert life had stagnated at the turn of the century, but the first few years of the new century saw a new interest in the art and by 1810 development was ...

• Personalities
• Blues
• Rock
• Sixties
• Sixties Pop
• Soul

(Vocals, b. 1944) A UK Top 50 entry with 1968’s self-penned ‘Marjorine’ prefaced a sweaty and chart-topping overhaul of The Beatles’ ‘With A Little Help From My Friends’. This domestic success was not repeated in North America. Nevertheless, he became a bigger star there following a show-stealing performance at Woodstock (1969) and hit revivals in 1970 of The Beatles’ ...

• 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 ...

• 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 ...

• Opera
• Early & Middle Baroque

As part of the Renaissance (literally ‘rebirth’), which began in Italy in around 1450, the Baroque era was a revolution within a revolution. It saw a break from the Medieval view of humanity as innately sinful. Instead, Renaissance thinking cast individuals as a dynamic force in their own right and gave free rein to human imagination, ingenuity and ...

• Classical
• Early Baroque

The word ‘Baroque’ is derived from the Portuguese barrocco, a term for a misshapen pearl, and it was still with this sense of something twisted that it was first applied – to the period between about 1600 and 1750 – in the nineteenth century. In 1768, Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote: ‘a Baroque music is that in which the harmony ...

• Classical
• Late Baroque

The late Baroque era (1700–50) was a time of major political change throughout Europe, involving a shift in the balance of power between sovereign states. Across the continent it was a period of almost continuous warfare, the effects of which were later felt in other parts of the world as a result of conflicting ambitions among the various trading ...

• 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 ...

• Arts & Culture
• Classical
• Late Romantic

While in the US and several European countries there is a tradition of mixed wind bands, Britain developed bands made up of brass instruments with saxophone and percussion. The repertory of such ensembles tended to be arrangements of dance music, opera overtures and marches. (Twentieth-century British composers have pioneered original music for brass band.) The brass band developed ...

• Arts & Culture
• Classical
• Late Baroque

Musicians have always enjoyed a significant role as providers of social entertainment. In the early eighteenth century, this aspect of music-making gained greater importance, as the middle classes in European towns and cities cultivated the art of courtly dancing in such forms as the minuet, the bourée and the gavotte. Most of the era’s major composers, including ...

• 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, ...

• Arts & Culture
• Classical
• Renaissance

One of the best-known Renaissance music manuscripts, the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, was compiled by the musician Francis Tregian (1574–1619) during his imprisonment in London for recusancy from 1609 until his death. The manuscript contains an unusually wide-ranging collection of nearly 300 keyboard pieces by English composers (many of them also known for their Catholic sympathies), including Tallis, Byrd ...

• Houses & Companies
• Late Baroque
• Opera

During the early eighteenth century a few composers enjoyed regular close collaboration with a favourite librettist, such as Fux with Pariati, or both Vinci and Porpora with the young Metastasio. However, such examples were rare, and instead it was common for a popular libretto created for one major Italian opera centre to be adapted for the needs ...