AUTHORITATIVE | CURATED | First 500 words Free

• Performance
• Classical
• Modern Era

Stravinsky’s third ballet for Diaghilev was no piece of naive primitivism: he worked painstakingly with an expert on ancient Slavonic customs, Nikolay Roerich, to ensure the scenario’s ethnographic accuracy, and worked a number of published folk melodies into the score. Of those many already embodied the irregularities of metre and accentuation that The Rite exploits to such violent ...

• Arts & Culture
• Classical
• Contemporary Classical

Camille Saint-Saëns (1835–1921) is said to have written the first film score with L’assassinat du duc de Guise (‘The Assassination of the Duke of Guise’, c. 1908). Many composers in the US and Europe followed suit, although few wished to make a career in films. A famous exception was Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897–1957), whose scores include the Academy Award-winning The ...

• Arts & Culture
• Classical
• Modern Era

In the twentieth century, Paris regained its place as the centre of musical innovation, especially in the years either side of World War I. In the late nineteenth century, Debussy’s influential musical innovations and explicitly anti-Wagnerian stance made Paris the centre of post-Wagnerian modernity. This was confirmed in the early modern period by the arrival of Serge Diaghilev ...

• Instruments
• Woodwind

The flute most familiar to us from its use in orchestral and solo music is more properly known as a ‘transverse’ or ‘side-blown’ flute. The flute family is distinct from the other woodwind instruments in that it does not use a reed to generate sound. Instead, a stream of air striking the edge of an opening in the side of ...

• Instruments
• Classical
• Modern Era

The most widely used tuned percussion in early twentieth-century classical music are the timpani. These instruments, often called ‘kettledrums’, are metal hemispheres with a tense membrane (formerly leather, now plastic) across the top and are tuned to play a single note. An instrument with military origins (as the timpani/trumpets combination in Monteverdi’s Orfeo, 1607, reminds us), timpani ...

• Classical
• Late Romantic

The 1860s saw a number of major reorganizations in European politics. Italy became a united country under the king of (former) Piedmont-Sardinia, Victor Emmanuel II, in 1861 and its new national government tried to retain the kingdom’s liberal ideals, such as removing instances of operatic and intellectual censorship. However, Italy’s liberalism was not aspired to by other ...

• Opera
• Modern Era

The opera house and, more specifically, opera audiences, were among the last to be receptive to the new musical language that developed during the twentieth century. Slow, as well as reluctant to vary their traditional musical tastes, perceptions and expectations, many viewed the opera house with nostalgia; as a symbol of the establishment, holding ...

• Major Operas
• Early Romantic
• Opera

‘The Huguenots’ Composed: 1836 Premiered: 1836, Paris Libretto by Eugène Scribe, Emile Deschamps and Gaetano Rossi Act I Nevers, a Catholic, has invited the Huguenot Raoul to a feast, as the king desires peace between the two factions. The guests describe their experiences of love. Raoul has fallen for a lady whom he saved from some ...

• Performance
• Classical
• Modern Era

Turandot’s significance within the history of twentieth-century opera is twofold. Not only was it Puccini’s last opera and, for many, his finest, even though he did not live to finish Act 3 (which was completed from sketches by Franco Alfano). It is also the last work in the Italian grand opera tradition to enter the permanent international repertory. ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Instrumentalist
• Modern Era

(Ba’-la Bar’-tok) 1881–1945 Hungarian composer and pianist Bartók’s earliest works were influenced by Johannes Brahms (1833–97), by Hungary’s famous Liszt and by Richard Strauss, then regarded as the last word in modernism. Bartók’s personal style, though, was formed by his discovery of Debussy and of Hungarian folk music. The strongly rhythmic, percussive, sharply dissonant music that ...

• Personalities
• Alt. Country & The Bluegrass Revival
• Country

(Vocals, guitar, b. 1955) Dave Alvin did most of the Springsteen-like songwriting and his brother Phil Alvin (vocals, guitar, b. 1953) did all the lead singing for The Blasters, one of the best roots-rock bands of the ’80s. Dave left to join X and then left that band for a solo career that increasingly emphasized the ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Modern Era

(Ed-gar’ Va-rez’) 1883–1965 French-American composer As a young man, Varèse became convinced that the twentieth century needed its own music, untrammelled by the legacy of the nineteenth. He emigrated to the US and began to write music (Amériques, Offrandes, 1921) that took the dissonance and rhythmic energy of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring as a starting-point. He ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Modern Era

(E’-gor Strvin’-ske) 1882–1971 Russian composer Stravinsky was a Russian composer, naturalized to French citizenship, then ultimately became American. He was one of the most formative influences on twentieth-century music. He came from a musical background (his father was principal bass singer at the Imperial Opera in St Petersburg) and studied with Rimsky-Korsakov, from whom he acquired a mastery ...

• Personalities
• Modern Era
• Opera

1882–1971, Russian Stravinsky, who was born in Oranienbaum, Russia, and died in New York, is one of the most important composers of the twentieth century. A master of style, he could create sound palettes as extreme and varied as any written during his lifetime, even if these extremes stemmed from his refusal to associate ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Critic
• Early Romantic

(Loo-e’ Ek-tôr’ Ber-lyoz’) 1803–69 French composer and critic Berlioz was the leading French musician of his age. His greatest achievements, and those for which he is best remembered, were with large-scale orchestral and vocal works, although he also wrote in other genres. He was rooted in classical traditions – his earliest influences included Gluck and the music of the ...