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• Inside the Music
• Classical
• Medieval Era

Written in the early 1360s, Machaut’s Mass cycle sets all the movements of the Ordinary, the dismissal (Ite missa est), and its response. Although not all the movements are based on chant (the Kyrie, Sanctus, Agnus Dei and the dismissal are based on their respective plainchant melodies, in isorhythm, whereas the Gloria and Credo are ...

• Personalities
• Blues
• Blues Rock
• Guitar Heroes
• Hard Rock

Joe Bonamassa, born in 1977, began playing guitar at the age of four on a small instrument given to him by his father. By the age of seven, he was playing Stevie Ray Vaughan songs on a full-size guitar. Bonamassa began performing in upstate New York at the age of 10 and was discovered by the blues great ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Late Romantic

(Jool Mas-na’) 1842–1912 French composer Shortly after his first operatic success with Le roi de Lahore (‘The King of Lahore’, 1877) Massenet became professor at the Paris Conservatoire; he was subsequently elected to the French Academy instead of his rival Saint-Saëns. Massenet’s 28 operas include several enduring masterpieces: Manon (1884) remains one of the most popular French Romantic operas, while Werther ...

• Personalities
• Country
• Cowboys & Playboys

(Vocal/instrumental group, 1930s–40s) Louise Massey And The Westerners are largely forgotten today, but in their heyday, this was one of the most successful western acts in the USA. Polished, versatile and influential, they boasted a smooth sound that obscured their origins as rural musicians under their fiddling father Henry’s tutelage in New Mexico. The band included ...

• Personalities
• Opera
• Turn of the Century

1842–1912, French The son of a businessman, Jules Massenet had a musical mother and was admitted to the Paris Conservatoire at the age of 11. He had a prolific career with varying degrees of success, but above all he became reputed for his orientalist excursions, his brilliant musical projection of the female character, and the ability ...

• Major Operas
• Opera
• Turn of the Century

Manon and Werther have become Massenet’s most frequently performed operas, but several others are gaining ground, among them Hérodiade, Thaïs, Sapho, Cendrillon, Grisélidis, Chérubin and Don Quichotte, all recently revived. Both Manon and Werther – and the other operas as well – are about relationships. The tale of Manon explores a theme that ...

• Major Operas
• Opera
• Turn of the Century

In comparison to Manon, Werther is the romantic dreamer, totally lost as he sees his beloved Charlotte marry another man. But his music – a seductive, rocking melody where he and Charlotte at once express the strength of their love and the necessity to deny it in the face of social pressure – etches itself on the audience’s ...

• Personalities
• Nineties
• Rock
• Trip Hop

(Dance/vocal group, 1987–present) Founders and exponents of a downtempo groove of trip hop, 3D (Robert Del Naja), Daddy G (Grant Marshall) and Mushroom (Andrew Vowles) began working together in Bristol in the late 1980s in a loose collective under the name of The Wild Bunch. Named after a line in a comic book, their debut album Blue Lines ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Medieval Era

(Ge-yom’ Düfa’) c. 1397–1474 French composer Du Fay is regarded as the leading musical figure of his generation, and his reputation in his own time is emphasized by his employment at many of the most important musical centres in Europe. He grew up in Cambrai, where his skills were recognized early by the ecclesiastical authorities, and in his late ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Medieval Era

c. 1390–1453 English composer Dunstaple was the best known of an influential group of English composers which included Power. To judge by the number of his works in continental manuscripts, he was probably one of the most important composers of his day in Europe, although he may not have travelled particularly widely. He wrote early Mass cycles, including ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Medieval Era

d. 1445 English composer Power was a contemporary of Dunstaple and, although rather less famous than him, was nonetheless an important figure in a period when English music was extremely influential. The majority of his works are movements from the Mass Ordinary. He broke new ground in the composition of Mass cycles, linking the movements of his Mass ...

• Inside the Music
• Classical
• Medieval Era

The term contenance angloise (‘English manner’), was first coined by the poet Martin Le Franc in his poem ‘Le Champion des Dames’ (c. 1440–42), in which he described new French music and implied that Du Fay and Binchois had ‘taken on the contenance angloise and followed Dunstaple’. Although the poet did not define the term, the text immediately before this ...

• 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 ...

• 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 ...

• Arts & Culture
• Classical
• Classical Era

The dominant style in art at the start of the classical era was the Rococo (from rocaille, ‘shellwork’). Created in early eighteenth-century France, its leading figures in the graphic arts were Antoine Watteau and François Boucher. The closest musical analogue is not Mozart (as once was traditionally argued) but François Couperin (1668–1733) – the late Baroque generation, in ...