Composed: 1930–32 Premiered: 1957, Zurich Libretto by the composer Act I Moses prays in the desert. He is answered by voices from the Burning Bush telling him to become a prophet and the leader of the Israelites. He pleads that he does not have the eloquence to explain God’s will in terms they can understand, but is told that ...
Tim Farriss (b. 1957) was born in Perth, Western Australia, and found fame with his brothers Andrew and Jon as a member of the band INXS, originally known as the Farriss Brothers Band. The oldest of the Farriss children, Tim was classically trained on the guitar for four years, starting at the age of eight. He ...
Master of guitar-generated sound effects, Adrian Belew (b. 1949) makes his Parker Deluxe guitar not only sing but also scream, squawk, roar, tweet and talk in elephant tongue. Best known for his time in King Crimson during the early Eighties as comic foil to Robert Fripp’s relatively nerdy straight man, Belew is one of the most ...
Blues-rock guitarist Peter Green was born Peter Greenbaum in Bethnal Green, London in 1946. He began playing guitar at the age of 10. Among his early influences were Hank Marvin, Muddy Waters and B.B. King. After Green played bass in several semi-pro outfits, keyboardist Peter Bardens invited him to play lead in his band. Three months later ...
James Joseph McGuinn (b. 1942) was raised in Chicago and became a fan of folk music as a teenager. He asked for and received a guitar from his parents after hearing Elvis’s ‘Heartbreak Hotel’. In 1957, McGuinn entered Chicago’s Old Town School of Folk Music, where he studied five-string banjo and guitar. McGuinn’s skills and solo performances attracted the ...
Perhaps no other artist has forged so eclectic a career as guitarist-singer-songwriter-producer-technologist-experimenter Todd Rundgren (b. 1948). In his 40 years on the rock scene, Rundgren has pursued interests ranging from pop songcraft to experimental composition with his band Utopia, and from innovative record production to nostalgic reinvention tours with Ringo Starr’s All-Starr Band and The New Cars. Rundgren’s guitar ...
Alternative experimental guitarist Thurston Moore (b. 1958) was born in Coral Gables, Florida. Inspired by New York’s punk and new-wave scene, Moore moved to the city in 1977. While playing in a band called The Coachmen, he met Lee Ranaldo, an art student and member of Glenn Branca’s avant-garde guitar orchestra. Moore assembled a band with bassist ...
No one had ever produced records like Phil Spector. There had been lavish orchestrations and raucous sounds, but until the early 1960s, the elements were clearly defined in recordings, with a fair amount of separation allotted to a limited number of rhythm and percussion instruments within the confines of a mainly monaural medium. Spector changed all that. Applying ...
This section encompasses styles that were, at least initially, designed to work in tandem with other forms of expression, deepening or enhancing their impact. The scores of musical theatre are woven into stories played out by the characters on stage. A film soundtrack is composed to interlock with the action on a cinema screen, while cabaret songs ...
From the eclectic musical melting pot of ragtime, Gilbert & Sullivan, early jazz, Viennese operetta, blackface minstrel shows and authentic Deep-South blues emerged the Broadway show tune. ‘Show’ and ‘tune’, of course, are the essential indicators of musical style. The music created for Broadway musicals – and, subsequently, for the musical form whatever its ...
Originating as a device to mask the sound of a whirring projector, film music has become so much more than ‘music from the movies’. Before the advent of video and DVD, the soundtrack was the most accessible way to return to a favourite movie. It has since evolved into a multi-million dollar industry and one of the most thriving ...
Cabaret thrived on sensuality, wit and an intimacy between performer and audience. Its essence lies in intimate, escapist venues, where charismatic artists perform with ad-hoc backing from piano, brass and bass. Unlike the popularist music hall, cabaret was born from experimentation and a desire to explore the space between mass entertainment and the avant-garde. A French ...
In the seventeenth century, a Turkish army was driven back from the walls of Vienna. As diplomatic relations replaced hostilities, Turkish embassies in Vienna used ‘janissary’ or military bands as part of their parade and a Turkish band was presented to the Polish king by the Sultan. In the eighteenth century a fashion for Turkish sounds such as shawms ...
Sturm und Drang (‘Storm and Stress’), a name taken from a play of the time, began as a literary movement that flourished in Germany and Austria in the second half of the eighteenth century. Easier to recognize than to define, its manifestations included the ‘horrid’ world of the Gothic novel and, in the visual arts, the paintings ...
The Nashville sound has been both praised and maligned. Occasionally called ‘crossover country’, ‘easy listening country’ or ‘countrypolitan’, it was a trend more than an innovation. As such, it arose as much from commercial considerations as it did from personal artistry. All through the decades there have been periodic cross-pollinations between the country world and the wider pop audience. From ...
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