AUTHORITATIVE | CURATED | First 500 words Free

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Contemporary Classical

(K’zhesh’-tôf Pen-de-ret’-ske) b. 1933 Polish composer Following the early influence of Stravinsky and Webern, Penderecki joined the forefront of the avant-garde with Tern ofiarom Hiroszimy (‘Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima’, 1960), which uses tone-clusters, quarter-tones and graphic notation. His music of this time is searingly intense and passionate. His music softened during the late 1970s, becoming more ...

• Personalities
• Modern Era
• Opera

b. 1933, Polish Violin virtuoso Penderecki attended the Kraków Academy until 1959, when he entered a composers’ competition several times and collected a first prize and two second prizes. Initially attracted to the avant-garde movement, Penderecki found international fame with Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima (1960), written for 52 stringed instruments. This used tone clusters to convey ...

• Instruments
• Ensembles

A musical ensemble is a group of two or more musicians who have come together to play music. In theory, an ensemble could contain any number of instruments in any combination, but in practice, certain combinations just don’t work very well, either for musical reasons or because of the sheer practicality of getting particular instruments and players ...

• Instruments
• Percussion

Bass Drum The dominant feature of every military band is its big bass drum. Throughout the history of percussion instruments, this drum has been the mainstay of time-keeping, whether it is used for a marching army or in a late-twentieth century heavy metal band. Early versions of the bass drum (it was certainly known in Asia around 3500 BC) ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Contemporary Classical

Stabat Mater, Gidon Kremer, Vladimir Mandelssohn, Thomas Demenga, Hilliard Ensemble, Staatsorchester Stuttgart (cond) Dennis Russell Davies (ECM) Introduction | Contemporary | Classical Personalities | Krzysztof Penderecki | Contemporary | Classical ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Contemporary Classical
• Instrumentalist

European debut at the Lucerne Festival in 1948. He formed a piano trio with Eugene Istomin and Leonard Rose in 1936; as a soloist he performed works by Bernstein, Penderecki, Dutilleux and Davies as well as the standard repertory, and he became one of the best-loved violinists of the twentieth century. Introduction | Contemporary | Classical Personalities | ...

• Personalities
• Alternative/Indie Rock
• Classical
• Guitar Heroes

includes writing the scores for 2011’s We Need To Talk About Kevin and 2012’s The Master. A 2012 album release from Nonesuch Records saw Greenwood collaborating with Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki in an unusual rock/classical partnership that far exceeded all expectations. Greenwood has generally favoured Fender Telecaster guitars that have been customized and rewired, although he also has a number ...

• Personalities
• Modern Era
• Opera

was deeply affecting. His voice was not incredible, but he used it intelligently. He founded the Aldeburgh Festival with Britten. Introduction | Modern Era | Opera Personalities | Krzysztof Penderecki | Modern Era | Opera ...

• Personalities
• Alternative/Indie Rock
• Electronic
• Rock
• Twenty-First Century

travel. It remains Radiohead’s most acclaimed work, and saw influences from artists as diverse as DJ Shadow (on the rhythm of ‘Airbag’) and classical, avant-garde composers such as Penderecki (on the drowsy ‘Climbing Up The Walls’). The band set out on tour, and by the end of 1997 OK Computer was lauded as the greatest album of the ...

• Classical
• Contemporary Classical

visible in Poland, where the Warsaw Autumn Festival became (from 1956) a virtually unrestricted platform for international contemporary music, and composers such as Witold Lutosławski (1913–93) and Krzysztof Penderecki (b. 1933) appropriated avant-garde techniques to their own highly individual expressive ends. But elsewhere, especially in the USSR and East Germany, composers continued to endure sudden blocks on ...

• Styles & Forms
• Classical
• Contemporary Classical

movements or parts of movements, whose order could be transposed also fed the development of graphic scores, in which conventional notation and layout were abandoned. Composers such as Penderecki increasingly wrote with their own notational symbols and systems, first heard to fiercely expressive effect in Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima. The Rise of Minimalism If many of ...

• Classical
• Contemporary Classical

responds with rugged beauty. European opera over the following decades readily embraced the primitive and the complex. In Die Teufel von Loudun (‘The Devils of Loudun’, 1972), the Polish composer Penderecki, a devout Christian, graphically depicted demonic possession (or sexual obsession) in a seventeenth-century convent. The special vocal and instrumental devices Penderecki demanded represented a search for new forms ...

• Arts & Culture
• Classical
• Contemporary Classical

The most successful librettist of the modern era was W. H. Auden, who provided texts for Britten’s first opera, Paul Bunyan and, in collaboration with Chester Kallman, for operas by Stravinsky (The Rake’s Progress), Henze (Elegy for Young Lovers, 1961; The Bassarids, 1966), and for less acclaimed works by John Gardner (1917–2011) and Nicolas Nabokov ...

• Arts & Culture
• Classical
• Contemporary Classical

other works, Respighi’s The Pines of Rome and Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. Martin Scorsese’s 2010 film Shutter Island used an extensive compilation score of contemporary music by Ligeti, Penderecki, Cage, Feldman, Scelsi, Schnittke and others. ...