AUTHORITATIVE | CURATED | First 500 words Free

• Techniques
• Opera
• Turn of the Century

Spearheaded by Arnold Schoenberg, the Second Viennese School included composers such as Alban Berg and Anton Webern (1883–1945) and formulated a new approach to music and composition that proved at once radically innovative and deeply controversial. Schoenberg considered the work of composers such as Wagner and Mahler to have become over-complicated and harmonically cluttered, and felt that a new ...

• Personalities
• Pop
• Soul & R&B
• Twenty-First Century

As a schoolgirl, Adele had music constantly on the brain. She even persuaded her mother to make her a sequined eye patch to wear to school so she could channel pop star Gabrielle. Adele’s natural musicality saw her take up clarinet and guitar, but her ultimate devotion was reserved for vocals. She used to queue for hours to get ...

• Styles & Forms
• Hip Hop
• Old School Hip Hop

It used to be easy to talk about rap or hip hop, because essentially everybody knew where they stood: the artists made 12-inch singles that didn’t get played on the radio; they dressed in acres of brightly coloured leather, with people break-dancing and body-popping around them; and nobody came from farther west than New Jersey. Back in the day ...

• Arts & Culture
• Classical
• Late Romantic

In 1859, at a conference of musicians in Leipzig, the representatives of a musical ‘party of progress’ under the leadership of Liszt gave itself the name New German School in conscious opposition to Brahms and his followers, who were still committed to composing in the spirit of the classical style. During his sojourn in Weimar (1848–61), Liszt had ...

• Major Operas
• High Romantic
• Opera

Act I The act opens in Mime’s smithy, in a forest near where Fafner, now a dragon thanks to the tarnhelm, lives in a cave guarding his treasure. Years before, Sieglinde sheltered there and, dying, entrusted her child and the broken sword to Mime’s care. He has raised Siegfried as his son, hoping to ...

• The Voice
• High Romantic
• Opera

The failure of Peter Cornelius’s The Barber of Baghdad was not due to lack of charm or talent – the opera contained both in plenty – but to a small, vociferous group of reactionary musicians who objected to the influence of Franz Liszt and his ‘New German School’. The ethos of the New German School was to foster the work ...

• Personalities
• Alternative/Indie Rock
• Rock
• Twenty-First Century

(Vocal/instrumental group, 1998–present) Los Angeles-based emo-rock band led by Hollywood actor Jared Leto. Originally a family project with drummer brother Shannon, they endured some line-up changes before settling on lead guitarist Tomo Miličeviç. Though singer/guitarist Leto claims reluctance to use his name to promote the band, it has undoubtedly had an impact on the level of airplay they ...

• Styles & Forms
• American Punk
• British Punk
• Rock
• Seventies
• Seventies Rock

As The Sex Pistols passed through three record companies in the first half of 1977, sacked their songwriting bass player for liking The Beatles and struggled to find venues that would let them play, they became a side-show in the thriving British punk scene now led by The Clash. In London, new punk clubs sprang up and found ...

• Styles & Forms
• American Punk
• British Punk
• Rock
• Seventies
• Seventies Rock

January The Sex Pistols Get The Bullet On 6 January 1977 EMI Records terminated its contract with The Sex Pistols, saying it was unable to promote the group’s records ‘in view of the adverse publicity generated over the past two months’. The media furore over the Pistols’ TV appearance six weeks earlier had barely abated and now politicians were weighing ...

• Styles & Forms
• American Punk
• British Punk
• Rock
• Seventies
• Seventies Rock

January The Sex Pistols Head South At the beginning of January 1978 The Sex Pistols flew out to Atlanta, Georgia, for a series of dates in the American South. It all unravelled at Randy’s Rodeo in San Antonio on 8 January in front of 2,000 rowdy Texans: Sid Vicious was suffering from heroin withdrawal and behaving aggressively; Rotten’s ...

• Personalities
• Modern Era
• Opera

1885–1935, Austrian The composer of just two operas, Berg was a man who took atonality and stretched it to its expressionistic limits. While Joseph Haydn (1732–1809), Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) are often referred to as the First Viennese School, the so-called Second Viennese School consists of Berg together with fellow student Anton Webern (1883–1945) and their ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Conductor
• Late Romantic

(Goos’-taf Ma’-ler) 1860–1911 Austrian composer and conductor Gustav Mahler bestrode the world of music at the end of the nineteenth century. ‘My time will come’, he remarked about his often misunderstood compositions. For Mahler the conductor, due recognition did come during his lifetime, but another half-century had to pass before a fully sympathetic appreciation of his creative achievement was possible ...

• Styles & Forms
• Classical
• Contemporary Classical

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 ...

• Styles & Forms
• Classical
• Twentieth Century

By the turn of the twentieth century, Western classical music seemed to have reached a crisis in language. Tonality had become enfeebled by its own progressive tendency, via increasing chromaticism, toward subtler and more complex forms of expression. European society had become similarly enervated by the familiar comforts of a bourgeois existence. In many quarters across the Continent ...

• Styles & Forms
• Classical
• Modern Era

Nineteenth-century music had developed with an unprecedented awareness of its own history, and by 1900 the European musical legacy seemed as permanent and unshakeable as the institutions – the opera houses, concert halls and conservatories – that nurtured it. Above all, classical tonality and its associated forms and genres, now the everyday stuff of textbooks, had ...