AUTHORITATIVE | CURATED | First 500 words Free

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Contemporary Classical

1944–2013 English composer Tavener first had his music performed while studying at the Royal Academy of Music, but came to wider attention with the premiere of his dramatic cantata The Whale at the London Sinfonietta’s inaugural concert in 1968. The Beatles’ Apple label recorded both it and Tavener’s next work, the Celtic Requiem – an often unsettling blend of ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Contemporary Classical

b. 1954 British composer Born in England to Scottish parents, Weir studied privately with Tavener and at Cambridge University. Various world traditions have informed the narratives of her operas, such as A Night at the Chinese Opera (1987, a Chinese Yuan Dynasty drama), The Vanishing Bridegroom (1990, a story from the Scottish west highlands) and Miss Fortune ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Contemporary Classical
• Instrumentalist

playing on gut strings, which create a rich and mellow tone quality). He has given first performances of works by Adès, Rihm and, most notably, John Tavener, of whose work The Protecting Veil he gave the 1989 Proms premiere and later made a bestselling recording. Introduction | Contemporary | Classical Personalities | Evgeny Kissin | Contemporary ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Contemporary Classical

his score for the film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Recommended Recording: Ghost Opera, Kronos Quartet, Wu Man (Nonesuch/Warner) Introduction | Contemporary | Classical Personalities | (Sir) John Tavener | Contemporary | Classical ...

• Classical
• Contemporary Classical

Contemporary music whose ancestry lies in the Western classical tradition finds itself in a curious position. Nothing illustrates this better than the fact that we are not entirely sure what to call it. The label ‘classical’ seems anachronistic, especially when applied to composers who have challenged some of the fundamental assumptions of the classical tradition. ‘Concert music’ is similarly problematic ...

• Classical
• Contemporary Classical

1970s, and Peter Sculthorpe (1929–2014) in the aboriginal traditions of his native Australia. Expressions of personal faith and spirituality also characterize the work of a number of composers: John Tavener (1944–2013) and Arvo Pärt (b. 1935) have drawn on the Eastern Orthodox tradition, Henryk Górecki (1933–2010) and James Macmillan (b. 1959) on Roman Catholicism and Sofiya Gubaydulina (b. 1931) ...

• Styles & Forms
• Classical
• Contemporary Classical

thrust of minimalism but bringing to the mix European dissonance, political radicalism, intellectual literariness and rock music. A further development saw the emergence of Górecki, Pärt and Tavener, all of whom achieved large-scale success and CD sales in the early 1990s. Works such as Górecki’s Third Symphony (1976), Pärt’s Passio (1981) and Tavener’s The Protecting Veil (1987) ...

• Arts & Culture
• Classical
• Contemporary Classical

Though art music since the war tended more often to define itself in opposition to rock and commercial pop music, signs of mutual regard were already emerging in the 1960s. While it is Stockhausen’s face that stands out from the crowd on the front cover of the Beatles’ 1967 album Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, it was Berio ...

• Inside the Music
• Classical
• Contemporary Classical

The synthesizer has become hugely influential since the 1960s, but it had many antecedents in twentieth-century electronic instruments. The theremin, invented in 1920 by the Russian Lev Theremin, consists of a box containing thermionic valves producing ethereal oscillations which were modified by moving a hand around an attached antenna. The ondes martenot was first demonstrated in 1928 by ...