AUTHORITATIVE | CURATED | First 500 words Free

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Contemporary Classical

b. 1936 American composer Reich studied with Hall Overton (1920–72), Vincent Persichetti (1915–87), William Bergsma (1921–94), Milhaud and Berio. A particular focus of his development was Asian music, especially its rhythmic structures. Much of Reich’s music is characterized by phasing, in which a number of instruments play identical music starting one after the other, giving an echo or ...

• Instruments
• Classical
• Contemporary Classical

The world’s first synthesizer was the American RCA Mk I, made in 1951, whose bulk occupied a laboratory. To play it, composers such as Babbitt had to tap in punched-tape instructions – there was no keyboard. In 1964, Robert Moog (1934–2005) developed the first commercially successful synthesizer. It was capable of generating a wide range of sounds ...

• Electronic

compositions for synthesizers. Kraftwerk explored sampling, and their fusion of synthesized melodies and rigid electronic beats laid the foundation for techno and electro, while Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Philip Glass’s minimalist works were precursors for ambient and new age music. By the end of the decade, New York DJs and rappers merged street culture with sampling ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Contemporary Classical

Recommended Recording: Angel of Light (Symphony No. 7), Dances with the Winds, Cantus arcticus, Lahti SO (cond) Osmo Vänska (BIS) Introduction | Contemporary | Classical Personalities | Steve Reich | Contemporary | Classical ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Contemporary Classical

the avant-garde (Ligeti’s sharp sense of humour, including self-mockery, is audible in many of his works). Ligeti had become fascinated with the music of the American minimalists, Reich and Riley, and with the music for player piano (able to perform music which was unplayable by human hands) of Conlon Nancarrow, as well as with the complex ...

• Personalities
• Modern Era
• Opera

German Russian-born, yet once a popular German composer, Pfitzner has shrunk into the recesses of memory, not least because his esteemed position was promoted by a Third Reich that, like him, believed German culture was threatened by international Jewry. His works Von deutscher Seele (‘Of the German Soul’, 1921) and Das dunkle Reich (‘The Dark Realm’, ...

• Personalities
• Eighties
• Eighties Pop
• Eighties Singer-Songwriters
• Rock

is a versatile and sometimes surreal songwriter whose work involves adventurous sound experimentation. The subject matter of her songs has embraced everything from Emily Brontë’s characters to controversial psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich (‘Cloudbusting’, 1985). Often perceived as a perfectionist (a charge she denies), she has frequently stood her ground against record-company influence and won. She rarely tours. Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour has ...

• Personalities
• Fusion & Jazz Rock
• Guitar Heroes
• Jazz
• Latin Jazz
• World

own signature Ibanez PM-100 guitar and various other custom instruments. More than just a jazz-guitar virtuoso, Metheny has performed with an impressively diverse range of artists, including Steve Reich, Ornette Coleman, Joni Mitchell, Herbie Hancock and David Bowie. And as a composer, his curriculum vitae includes compositions for solo guitar, small ensembles and large ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Contemporary Classical

his pieces have any pre-determined form (though A Rainbow in Curved Air uses a rhythmic structure akin to the Indian tal). In this he differs from the other minimalists, Reich and Glass, both of whom have shown interest in articulating their longer works in formal structures. Riley has said that the fault with Western music is that it uses ...

• Styles & Forms
• Ambient
• Electronic

Cage was followed by composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen, whose tape-based audio collages laid the basis for modern-day sampling, and the acknowledged founders of minimalism: Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Philip Glass. By the late-1960s this freethinking approach, combined with a growing drug culture, had also produced some of rock’s most adventurous forays as bands like Pink ...

• Styles & Forms
• Classical
• Contemporary Classical

or less all genres of contemporary pop music. Western classical composers have also absorbed the rhythmic vitality of, in particular, West African music. In the case of Steve Reich (b. 1936), the experience of Ghanaian drumming techniques led him to a style based on complex, repeated rhythmic patterns. The magnificent Drumming (1971), scored for various percussion instruments with ...

• 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 ...

• Classical
• World of Music

Ravel (1875–1937) were entranced when they encountered gamelan music from Java in the late nineteenth century; Olivier Messiaen (1908–92) found inspiration in a thirteenth-century Indian treatise; and minimalist composer Steve Reich (b. 1936) was influenced by the traditional musics of Africa and Asia. In the Americas, the Native Americans in the north have retained a musically discrete identity, whereas ...

• Classical
• Contemporary Classical

a mutually negotiated pace through a group of simple melodic fragments. Listeners, too, found minimalism accessible: the use of synthesizers and amplified instruments by groups such as Steve Reich and Musicians and the Philip Glass Ensemble won them an enthusiastic following among rock-music audiences. New Methods of Composition Many of the former avant-garde composers also became disillusioned with the ...

• Opera
• Modern Era

in Dusseldorf in 1938, the exhibition displayed works by Jewish and other ethnic minority composers, musicians who were perceived as an ideological or political threat to the Third Reich, and those who embraced atonal or avant-garde writing styles. Some more astute, or fortunate, people departed Germany before it was too late (if indeed they had the ...