(Ar’-vo Pairt) b. 1935 Estonian composer Pärt initially wrote in a neo-classical style, gradually shifting to serial techniques as previously banned scores filtered into the country. Works such as Perpetuum mobile (‘Continuous Motion’, 1963) attracted the wrath of the state. A love of Baroque music and particularly J. S. Bach is revealed in works such as Collage teemal B-A-C-H (1964). ...
b. 1944 English composer The influence of Cage and Feldman can be heard in Nyman’s creation of elastic, intuitive sound-worlds. 1–100 (1976) is simply a series of 100 chords descending through a circle of fourths. Nyman’s early music is full of allusions to and quotations from music of the past, in addition to the use of amplification and rhythms ...
The Contemporary era can be dated back to Anton Webern’s death in September 1945. Webern’s influence on the generation of post-Second World War composers means that much of the music from the 1950s sounds more modern than music from the last 20 years. Composers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen (b. 1928) and Pierre Boulez (b. 1925) extended the 12-note, or serial ...
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 ...
After the devastation wrought in Europe by World War II, the urgent task of rebuilding the continent’s war-torn urban fabric demanded radical solutions. These were found in the centralized urban planning advocated before the war by architects such as Le Corbusier and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Writing in 1953, the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928–2007) created an explicit analogy ...
After the cataclysmic upheaval of World War II subsided, it was clear that a very different musical world would result. The conflict had led to the dislocation, destruction and occupation of major cities in Germany and central Europe, coupled with the dispersal of their leading creative figures around the globe. It was inevitable that fresh centres, directions ...
Composers of the twentieth century and up to the present have often been drawn to the music of the medieval and Renaissance periods. A relatively early example is Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971), who became interested in the fourteenth-century technique of hocket and in the harmonic experiments of the Italian composer Carlo Gesualdo (c. 1561–1613). Hocket has since inspired many composers, both ...
Like its close relation the concertina, the accordion is a glorified mouth organ, in which the ‘reeds’ (now generally made of tempered steel) are set in vibration by a rectangular bellows. The bellows are operated by the left hand, which also – as in all keyboard instruments – manipulates the so-called bass keyboard, in this case a ...
There are many different instrumental interfaces through which it is possible to control synthesized or sampled sounds – the most common being the piano-style keyboard. The electronic musician is also able to access a wide range of sounds through electric guitar, string, percussion and wind instruments. These devices are, to a large extent, quite recognizably conventional, ...
The bagpipe principle is simple: instead of the player blowing directly on a reed pipe, the air is supplied from a reservoir, usually made of animal skin, which is inflated either by mouth or by bellows. The result is the ability to produce a continuous tone, and the possibility of adding extra reed-pipes to enable a single ...
The banjo is a plucked stringed instrument with a circular body and fretted neck. Its roots lie in the French and British colonies of Africa, where instruments made from a hollowed-out gourd covered with animal skin, bamboo neck and catgut strings were popular. Particularly associated with celebrations and dancing, these instruments went by various names including banza and ...
On the face of it, barrels and music would seem unlikely bedfellows. Their alliance, however, goes back at least to the ninth century, when the first detailed description of a barrel organ appeared in an Arab treatise. Mechanics of the Barrel Organ The mechanical principle underlying all such instruments, from the automated organ and piano to ...
The invention of valves meant that brass instruments could now explore the bass register, and soon after 1835 bass tubas started being manufactured in Germany. Essentially a keyed bugle by descent, the bass tuba (confusingly, the name tuba comes from the Latin word for trumpet) has a very wide conical bore and as a result requires a good ...
The bassoon, constructed in three parts, started being made in the mid-seventeenth century, perhaps in France in imitation of the flute and oboe. Built with three keys by the Denners of Nuremberg, the new instrument allowed greater virtuosity in the player than the one-piece curtal and dulcian, which began to decline in favour of the bassoon ...
Bells are a feature of ceremony and ritual. They are used for meditation and prayer, and to mark significant life events such as funerals and weddings. Bells are used to mark out the timetable of our daily lives – appearing as alarm bells, warning signals and in mechanized chimes in clocks. In Japan, bonsho temple bells are rung ...
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