b. 1964, German A bass who is renowned for his vivid performances and sumptuous tone, Pape first came to international attention in 1991 singing the role of Sarastro in a production of Die Zauberflöte conducted by Georg Solti. He has sung almost all of the great German bass roles and demonstrates great versatility in concert too, but he ...
Jacobean, Tudor, Gothic, Louis XIII, XIV, XV and XVI, Flemish Renaissance, Elizabethan cinquecento, Queen Anne, Empire and Moorish’. The ingenious Henri Pape of Paris could provide instruments of almost any size and shape. Round, oval, hexagonal, pyramidic, concealed within a table or a writing desk, or brazenly ...
Ariadne auf Naxos, Cassandra and Didon (Les Troyens), Judith in Duke Bluebeard’s Castle and Schoenberg’s half-spoken, half-sung monodrama Erwartung. Introduction | Modern Era | Opera Personalities | Rene Pape | Modern Era | Opera ...
The history of musical instruments has always been very closely linked to the history of music itself. New musical styles often come about because new instruments become available, or improvements to existing ones are made. Improvements to the design of the piano in the 1770s, for instance, led to its adoption by composers such as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart ...
Computer music can be defined as music that is generated by, or composed and produced by means of, a computer. The idea that computers might have a role to play in the production of music actually goes back a lot further than one might think. As early as 1843, Lady Ada Lovelace suggested in a published article that ...
Sound effects and instruments trouvés include found objects and specialist machines for making noises. Composers have made extensive use of both sound effects and found objects in orchestral music, especially in music for theatre, dance and opera. Sound Effects The wind machine was originally a theatrical sound effect, and is a cylinder of wooden slats with a canvas ...
The player piano (usually known by one of its manufacturers’ trade names as the ‘pianola’) was a mechanical device for causing the piano to play a fixed composition in a fixed way. The music has been cut into a roll of paper and when this is fed through a mechanism built into the specially designed piano, a bellows system causes ...
The high quality of performance and sound on modern CDs, as well as the sheer range of recordings available, has had a dramatic effect on the reception of classical music. On the one hand, recording has brought the music to much larger audiences than concert halls could ever accommodate. On the other hand, it has altered the ...
No instrument has had a more dramatic impact on contemporary music than the synthesizer. Its development opened up a whole new world of seemingly endless sonic possibilities and ushered in completely new forms of music. History The birth of the synthesizer dates back to the mid-1940s when Canadian physicist, composer and instrument builder, Hugh le Caine (1914–77) built the ...
The bizarre Telharmonium is widely regarded as the earliest example of a purely electronic instrument. Patented in 1897 by Thaddeus Cahill (1867–1934), a lawyer and inventor from Washington D.C., the Telharmonium pioneered several important technologies. The sound was generated by a series of electromechanical tone wheels (rather like the Hammond organ), each of which produced a pure sine tone ...
Transverse flutes worldwide, though they vary cosmetically and in size, have few variations on a common design: a parallel-bored tube with blowing aperture and a row of finger holes on the front (and occasionally a thumb hole). Most are made from locally available tubular materials, particularly bamboo. End-blowing means that, in a bamboo or reed flute, ...
The trombone developed the idea of the Renaissance slide trumpet. While the trumpet abandoned the slide in favour first of crooks and later of valves, the trombone pursued the slide method and perfected it. The trombone is shaped like a giant paper-clip. While the left hand holds the instrument close to the mouth, the right hand grasps a crossbar; ...
Varèse was particularly interested in the sounds of the modern urban world. His music takes a sound world derived from factories and industrialization and turns them into music. But it took the off-beat genius of Ligeti to compose a work entirely for special effects: his Poème symphonique (1962) has passed into musical folklore as the piece of music written for 100 ...
The violin family is a group of fretless bowed stringed instruments that has its roots in Italy. Four instruments make up the family: the violin, the viola, the violoncello (commonly abbreviated to cello), and the double bass. The characteristic body shape is one of the most recognizable in music; the particular acoustic properties this shape imparts have made the ...
Bagpipe Somewhere, perhaps in Mesopotamia, about 7,000 years ago, a shepherd may well have looked at a goat skin and some hollow bones and had an idea for a new musical instrument: the bagpipe. In the early Christian era, the instrument spread from the Middle East eastward into India and westward to Europe. By the seventeenth ...
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