AUTHORITATIVE | CURATED | First 500 words Free

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Modern Era

1910–81 American composer Barber came from a musical family, and was trained in singing as well as composition. At 21 he gave the premiere of his own Dover Beach, for baritone and string quartet. Many of his works are vocal, including two full-length operas, Vanessa (1957) and Antony and Cleopatra (1966), numerous fine songs and, perhaps ...

• Personalities
• Modern Era
• Opera

1910–81, American Samuel Barber’s talents were evident from a very young age. Musically conservative, his harmonic language was highly influenced by late nineteenth-century Romanticism and often criticized by modernists. Indeed, although his style defied label, and his dissonances and harmonies were not truly Romantic, his gifts as a supreme melodist served to pigeonhole him. Barber established ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Early Baroque

(Za’-moo-el Shidt) 1587–1654 German composer Scheidt – a pupil of Sweelinck, organist, composer and himself a teacher – served as Kapellmeister to the Halle court from 1619. He published seven collections of sacred music: the earliest, Cantiones sacrae (‘Holy Songs’, 1620), contains eight-voice polychoral motets. One calls for instrumental doubling of parts; the musical style blends Italian and Netherlandish ...

• Personalities
• Fifties
• Jazz & Blues

(Trombone, b. 1930) Chris Barber has been a key figure on the British traditional jazz scene since he broke away from Ken Colyer’s band to lead his own group in 1954. The band was one of the leading names in the so-called ‘trad boom’ of the late 1950s. It became the Chris Barber Jazz & Blues Band – with the ...

• Houses & Companies
• Early & Middle Baroque
• Opera

The writing and performance of Baroque music and opera relied heavily on wealthy patrons, who often employed musicians in their private orchestras and opera houses. Among these patrons were the aristocratic Barberini family, who made their fortune in the Florentine cloth business. Moving to Rome, the Barberini became one of the city’s most powerful family dynasties. Maffeo Barberini ...

• Personalities
• Modern Era
• Opera

1911–2007, Italian One of the most important opera composers during the 1950s, Menotti had already written two operas by the time he entered the Milan Conservatory aged 13, and he would go on to write 23 more. He later moved to America and studied at the Curtis Institute, where he met his lifelong companion and inspiration, ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Modern Era

(Gra-zhe’-na Bat-sa’-vech) 1909–69 Polish composer Bacewicz was a pupil of Nadia Boulanger. She became one of Poland’s leading composers as well as being an accomplished violinist. Her music is characterized by an individual neo-classicism and a clear sense of structure. She wrote a great deal for her own instrument (including seven violin concertos and five violin sonatas) as well as a ...

• Personalities
• Modern Era
• Opera

b. 1933, English Known for her rich, expressive and intensely personal performances, Baker’s voice is equally at home with Handel, Mozart, Donizetti, Berlioz and Walton. Britten wrote the role of Kate Julian for her in Owen Wingrave, while William Walton (1902–83) adjusted the part of Cressida in Troilus and Cressida to suit her voice. ...

• Classical
• Contemporary Classical

European culture lay in ruins after the end of World War II. There were many who, in company with the philosopher Theodor Adorno, felt that Nazi atrocities such as Auschwitz rendered art impossible, at least temporarily. Others, though, felt that humanity could only establish itself anew by rediscovering the potency of art, including opera. On ...

• Opera
• Classical Era

The Enlightenment was a natural, if late, consequence of the sixteenth-century Renaissance and Reformation. Also known as the Age of Reason, the Enlightenment advanced to be recognized in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and brought with it new, controversial beliefs that upended the absolutisms on which European society had long been based. Absolute monarchy, ...

• Classical
• Late Baroque

The late Baroque era (1700–50) was a time of major political change throughout Europe, involving a shift in the balance of power between sovereign states. Across the continent it was a period of almost continuous warfare, the effects of which were later felt in other parts of the world as a result of conflicting ambitions among the various trading ...

• Blues

Few would deny that the blues has played a more important role in the history of popular culture than any other musical genre. As well as being a complete art form in itself, it is a direct ancestor to the different types of current popular music we know and love today. Without the blues there would have been no Beatles ...

• Classical
• Classical Era

The Enlightenment was a great wave of thought in the eighteenth century that combated mysticism, superstition and the supernatural – and to some extent the dominance of the church. Its origins lie in French rationalism and scepticism and English empiricism, as well as in the new spirit of scientific enquiry. It also affected political theory in the writings of ...

• Classical

The story of classical music is not bound up simply with the traditions of any one country: it is tied up with the cultural development of Europe as a whole. This section attempts to pick out the composers from each successive age who, looked at from one point of view, exerted the greatest influence on their contemporaries and subsequent ...

• Classical
• Late Baroque

More sophisticated diplomatic relations between states in the late Baroque era resulted in a time of relative peace – for a short period at least – during which the arts flourished. As in the Renaissance and early Baroque eras, writers, artists and musicians turned to the classical antiquity of Greece and Rome for their standards and their in­spiration. At ...