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• Personalities
• Jazz & Blues
• Sixties

From the 1950s through to the 1990s there was rarely a stranger experience for jazz audiences than witnessing the stage shows of Sun Ra and his Solar-Myth Arkestra. The mysterious, robed keyboardist and his exotic big band blended theatrics with pure jazz and free exploration, crafting a unique brand of ‘space jazz’ that reflected the mid-century’s curiosity about exploring ...

• Personalities
• Sixties
• Sixties Pop

Between early 1963 and early 1964 The Beatles went from being virtual unknowns to international pop superstars, a position they maintained over the next two years by an intense schedule of recording and touring, as well as two major feature films. They did it by writing consistently better and better songs, often under extreme pressure, and by ...

• Personalities
• Sixties
• Sixties Pop

January ‘Please Please Me’ ‘Gentlemen, you have just recorded your first number one,’ producer George Martin told The Beatles after they’d completed ‘Please Please Me’. He was right … just. It was released on 11 January, the same day that The Beatles appeared on the influential Thank Your Lucky Stars networked ITV show. The single made the Top ...

• Personalities
• Sixties
• Sixties Pop

January First US No. 1 When ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ shot to No. 1 in the Cashbox chart on 18 January, having leapt from No. 43 to the top slot, The Beatles were in Paris on a three-week run at the Olympia, staying at the grandiose George V Hotel where they were also writing songs for ...

• Personalities
• Sixties
• Sixties Pop

February Ringo Marries Maureen Cox On 11 February a tonsil-less Ringo married Maureen Cox, the Liverpool girlfriend he’d been ‘going steady’ with since the Cavern Club days, at London’s Caxton Hall Registry Office. The ceremony was attended by Mr and Mrs Lennon and George Harrison who quipped, ‘Two down and two to go’. Paul McCartney was on holiday ...

• Arts & Culture
• Classical
• Medieval Era

The two great architectural styles of the medieval age were the Romanesque and the Gothic. The Romanesque, with its round-arch forms borrowed from classical buildings, is a massive style, characterized by solid pillars supporting the great stone roof vaults that were a new feature of construction. It is often crowded with imaginative sculpture. During the twelfth century, ...

• Arts & Culture
• Classical
• Medieval Era

In the second half of the twelfth century, the new cathedral of Notre Dame was the focus of an extraordinary effort by Leonin and others to create a whole new musical liturgy. Thanks to their efforts and to the presence of the increasingly independent University of Paris, whose curriculum was aimed towards ecclesiastical careers, the city became a ...

• Classical
• Medieval Era

The seven centuries covered here saw, essentially, the making of modern Europe. They saw the rise of the papacy and its numerous conflicts. They saw the shaping and reshaping of nations and empires. Yet beyond, and often because of, these conflicts and changes, they also saw the formation of great cultures. As nation met nation in ...

• Classical
• Medieval Era

‘Medieval’ as a concept is very hard to define, and the period itself is just as difficult to delineate. It was a term invented by Renaissance writers who wished to make a distinction between their modernity and what had gone before. Although the onset of the Renaissance is often taken to be around the beginning of the fourteenth century, ...

• Styles & Forms
• Classical
• Medieval Era

Before music was written down, musicians either memorized or improvised what they played or sang. Very little is known about the earliest European music because it was not recorded in notation. The music theorist Isidore of Seville (c. ad 559–636) even said that melodies could not be written down, and two centuries passed before a system of notation was ...

• Influences
• Classical
• Medieval Era

Guido of Arezzo (b. c. ad 990/5) was perhaps the most influential music theorist of all time. He not only wrote one of the most widely read treatises of the Middle Ages, the Micrologus, but he also invented the system of lines for notating music that is still used today and a method of teaching melodies using the syllables ...

• Influences
• Classical
• Medieval Era

Winchester Troper: one of the earliest sources of polyphony, an English manuscript dating from the early eleventh century and originally used in Winchester; now in Cambridge. Montpellier Codex: an important source of motets, compiled during the thirteenth century; now in the Bibliothèque interuniversitaire, Montpellier. Roman de Fauvel: a satirical poem about the church written in the early fourteenth ...

• Influences
• Classical
• Medieval Era

Composers of the twentieth century and up to the present have often been drawn to the music of the medieval and Renaissance periods. A relatively early example is Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971), who became interested in the fourteenth-century technique of hocket and in the harmonic experiments of the Italian composer Carlo Gesualdo (c. 1561–1613). Hocket has since inspired many composers, both ...

• Inside the Music
• Classical
• Medieval Era

The term contenance angloise (‘English manner’), was first coined by the poet Martin Le Franc in his poem ‘Le Champion des Dames’ (c. 1440–42), in which he described new French music and implied that Du Fay and Binchois had ‘taken on the contenance angloise and followed Dunstaple’. Although the poet did not define the term, the text immediately before this ...

• Inside the Music
• Classical
• Medieval Era

Du Fay’s Mass L’homme armé was one of the first of several dozen Masses of that name composed between the years 1450 and 1700. ‘L’homme armé’ (‘The Armed Man’) was a popular, probably satirical, tune which may have been aimed at the less-valiant members of the French army during the last stages of the Hundred Years’ War. Attracted by ...