AUTHORITATIVE | CURATED | First 500 words Free

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Modern Era

1866–1925 French composer For a long time regarded as a mere joker because of his apparently absurd and flippant titles – ‘Genuine Limp Preludes (For a Dog)’, ‘Bureaucratic Sonatina’ – Satie is now regarded as a major figure in his own right, as well as an influence both on his contemporaries Debussy and Ravel and on many more recent composers. ...

• Instruments
• Percussion

Sound effects and instruments trouvés include found objects and specialist machines for making noises. Composers have made extensive use of both sound effects and found objects in orchestral music, especially in music for theatre, dance and opera. Sound Effects The wind machine was originally a theatrical sound effect, and is a cylinder of wooden slats with a canvas ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Modern Era

composing in his early seventies. Recommended Recording: Complete Music of Carl Ruggles, Buffalo PO (cond) Michael Tilson Thomas (Other Minds) Introduction | Modern Era | Classical Personalities | Erik Satie | Modern Era | Classical ...

• Personalities
• Opera
• Turn of the Century

Rome 1885 Goes to Villa Medici, Rome 1888 Visits Bayreuth Festival 1889 Hearing Javanese gamelan music at Paris Exposition has profound effect on him 1891 Becomes friends with Erik Satie 1893 Sees Maurice Maeterlink’s play Pelléas et Mélisande; begins work on his opera Pelléas et Mélisande 1894 Préludes à l’aprés-midi d’un faune is not well-received by some critics 1899 Marries ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Modern Era

an ‘Impressionist’, but Ravel’s music is in fact precisely and delicately crafted, subtly perfect in its artifice (in the best sense of the word). Influenced by Emmanuel Chabrier (1841–94), Satie and his close friend Stravinsky, attracted to Spain temperamentally (he never visited the country, but his mother came from the Basque region), he absorbed all these factors – ...

• Personalities
• Blues
• Classical
• Guitar Heroes

and blues he had grown up with; A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1998), based on Shakespeare’s play, featured the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra; Darktown (1999) was a personal album; Sketches Of Satie (2000) featured arrangements for guitar and flute played by Hackett’s brother John, who has appeared on most of his solo albums. Hackett’s prolific solo career continued in the 2000s ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Modern Era

was trained in Paris (where he lived for many years) by Nadia Boulanger, and was friendly with several of ‘Les Six’, but his own music is more influenced by Satie and is deeply rooted in American folk music and hymns. It is melodically fresh, harmonically plain and of great simplicity; he was an influence on the later minimalists. His ...

• Personalities
• Modern Era
• Opera

, marching bands and popular American tunes were a large part of his cultural heritage, Thomson attended Harvard and studied under Nadia Boulanger in France, where he met Satie, Cocteau and the members of Les Six. He collaborated with writer Gertrude Stein on Four Saints in Three Acts, a rhythmically repetitive opera with no plot, which ...

• Styles & Forms
• Ambient
• Electronic

Brian Eno was the first artist to use the term ‘ambient’ to describe his music on his 1978 album, Music For Airports, composers like Claude Debussy and Erik Satie, with their notion of composing pieces to complement listening surroundings, broke with musical conventions and expectations. Frenchmen Erik Satie and Claude Debussy are often called the ‘fathers of ...

• Classical
• Late Romantic

, all helped establish his separation from Wagner and the Germanic tradition. Other important influences on his artistic outlook were French poetry and art. Radicals Even more radical, Erik Satie (1866–1925) managed further separation. His unemotional, brief works, often with comic or satiric programmes, established a very different aesthetic. In 1916, the writer Jean Cocteau took ...

• Classical
• Modern Era

to be listened to with the head in the hands is immediately suspect. Wagner’s music is the prototype of such music.’ Cocteau found a highly sympathetic spirit in Erik Satie (1866–1925) whose anti-emotional, often witty or ironic style was much to his liking. From the 1920s onwards, Cocteau became occasionally involved with a loosely knit group of composers ...

• Styles & Forms
• Classical
• Modern Era

the predictable adversary, Wagner, but also Debussyan Impressionism and the Russian ‘primitivism’ of The Rite of Spring. Cocteau singled one composer out for particular praise, the maverick Satie, with whom he had collaborated the previous year on the ballet Parade. The frivolous style of Satie’s score (which included orchestral parts for a revolver, a typewriter and ...

• Influences
• Classical
• Modern Era

The influence of jazz on concert music stretches back almost to the emergence of jazz itself from roots in gospel, ragtime and blues. One of the most popular black American dances of the 1890s was taken up by Debussy in his ‘Golliwog’s Cakewalk’ (from the piano suite Children’s Corner, 1906–08). Ragtime found its way into Satie’s ballet Parade and ...

• Performance
• Classical
• Contemporary Classical

The twentieth century has seen a wealth of special effects employed in music, in much the same way as they are used in film, beginning with the intonarumori (‘noise-intoners’) invented by Luigi Russolo. A football rattle (called a ‘bird scare’ by the composer) was required by Havergal Brian (1876–1972) for his Gothic Symphony No. 1 (1927). The sound of ...