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• Personalities
• One-Hit Wonders
• Reggae
• Rock

‘Pass The Dutchie’, 1982 Based on The Mighty Diamonds’ reggae hit, ‘Pass The Kouchie’, Birmingham-based Musical Youth’s ‘Pass The Dutchie’ was a pro-cannabis hit that reached No. 1 in the UK. One of the fastest-selling singles of the year, they could not capitalize on its success, and had disbanded within two years. A reunion was mooted in 1993 ...

• Inside the Music
• Classical
• World of Music

Most Indian classical music has three main components: a solo melody line, a rhythmic accompaniment and a drone. Vocal music is predominant, although modern Western audiences are more aware of instrumental genres. Improvisation, a key feature of Indian music, is based on the elaborate rules of the ragas and talas, which are the principal formal concepts ...

• Arts & Culture
• Classical
• Medieval Era

In the second half of the twelfth century, the new cathedral of Notre Dame was the focus of an extraordinary effort by Leonin and others to create a whole new musical liturgy. Thanks to their efforts and to the presence of the increasingly independent University of Paris, whose curriculum was aimed towards ecclesiastical careers, the city became a ...

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

Adele was just three years old when she attended her first live gig with her mother: a Cure concert in London’s Finsbury Park. It was the same year her father, a Welsh plumber, left her mother, practically severing all ties with his daughter in the process. After that first gig, the tot took to the music straight ...

• Inside the Music
• Classical
• Renaissance

Cantus firmus technique, in which a pre-existent melody forms the basis of a new composition, lends itself well to musical homage, and it is likely that the selection of cantus firmi was often influenced by the dedicatee or patron. This might mean the choice of a favourite song, or a section of plainchant whose text held some ...

• Influences
• Classical
• Late Baroque

By the eighteenth century many musicians had become accustomed to travelling far from their native cities or countries in search of employment, or in response to invitations from rulers of different states. In the late-Baroque period this type of wandering existence had become a standard feature of musical life in Europe, involving singers, instrumentalists and composers, in ...

• Women in Music
• Classical
• Early Romantic

During the nineteenth century, women amateurs of the middle and upper classes continued to be taught music privately, often receiving an extremely thorough musical education from the leading musicians of the day. Professional women musicians, like their eighteenth-century predecessors, often came from musical families and were traditionally taught by their parents. Although many learned the art of ...

• Arts & Culture
• Classical
• Late Baroque

From the earliest years of the Baroque era musicians, scientists and assorted intellectuals, mainly from Italy, wrote treatises and manifestos discussing the theories, aesthetics and musical practice of a new style of music. By the early eighteenth century almost every country in Europe was producing writers who aimed to define musical styles and concepts. They attempted to ...

• 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 Romantic

The political structure of Europe changed greatly during the second half of the nineteenth century. Germany and Italy became united countries under supreme rulers. The Habsburgs’ Austrian Empire, ruled from Vienna, became fragmented into Austria-Hungary. The borders of this new confederation contained the cauldron of difficulties that eventually developed into the confrontations which culminated in World War I in ...

• Classical
• Medieval Era

‘Medieval’ as a concept is very hard to define, and the period itself is just as difficult to delineate. It was a term invented by Renaissance writers who wished to make a distinction between their modernity and what had gone before. Although the onset of the Renaissance is often taken to be around the beginning of the fourteenth century, ...

• Classical
• Modern Era

There is no escaping the crucial importance of World War I (1914–18) in the formation of the Modern Age (as the first half of the twentieth century has come to be known). The war changed irrevocably the development and directions of almost all pre-war innovations in politics, society, the arts and ideas in general. Declining economic conditions also altered ...