b. 1935 American composer Initially influenced by Stockhausen, Riley was profoundly affected by the sustained, minimalist style of La Monte Young, whom he met at the University of California at Berkeley. He had paid for his studies by playing ragtime in a bar. He soon became interested in improvised music and ‘happenings’ and made a serious study of ...
Terry Kath (1946–78) was the guitarist and a founding member of the jazz-rock ensemble Chicago Transit Authority (soon shortened to Chicago), which, like their contemporaries Blood, Sweat & Tears, brought a jazzy, horn-based sound to hard rock with their early albums, before settling into a superstardom built around anthemic pop ballads. Early on, however, ...
(Harmonica, vocals, 1911–86) Saunders Terrell was born in Greensboro, Georgia and taught himself to play the harmonica at the age of eight. He lost the sight in one eye, aged 10, and the second eye at 16. Terry played mostly in North Carolina from the late 1920s. He teamed up with Blind Boy Fuller in 1934 ...
(Vocals, guitar, 1894–1946) Much of the success of The Skillet Lickers, the north Georgia string band led by Gid Tanner, was due to the warm, friendly singing of the blind Riley Puckett, who also anchored them with eccentric single-note guitar runs dictated by his own sense of time and melody. In 1924, he and ...
(Vocals, guitar, harmonica, b. 1933) Riley was born in Pocahontas, Arkansas, and enjoyed seven releases on Sun without ever securing the hit that his finest work undoubtedly deserved. He and his band were often utilized as session musicians and worked with many other Sun artists. A highly versatile artist, he eventually recorded rockabilly, blues ...
(Vocals, piano, songwriter, b. 1943) This Texas-raised musician, sculptor and playwright is an American original. His left-of-centre songs about the road and life’s characters have created a cult following via such albums as Juarez (1975), Lubbock (On Everything) (1979) and Human Remains (1995). ‘New Delhi Freight Train’ and ‘Amarillo Highway’ are his most covered songs. Styles & ...
Unlike rock music, electronic music is made partly or wholly using electronic equipment – tape machines, synthesizers, keyboards, sequencers, drum machines and computer programmes. Its origins can be found in the middle of the nineteenth century, when many of electronic music’s theories and processes were conceived. In 1863 German scientist Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz ...
(Jörd’ji Le-get’-e) 1923–2006 Hungarian composer Because of the disruption of World War II and the subsequent Communist regime in Hungary, Ligeti did not become aware of Western European musical modernism until he was over 30. Until then he wrote in the folk-song-based, Bartók-influenced style that was officially approved in his country. He left Hungary during the 1956 uprising, ...
(Volf-gang Reem) b. 1952 German composer Rihm studied with Stockhausen. He was influenced by a diverse range of composers, including Webern, Bartók, Mahler and Beethoven. His early music is strongly expressive, even Romantic (Symphony No. 3, 1976–77). From the 1980s a more distinctive and personal voice emerged as his music became more economical of means and ...
Ambient music has existed since the late-nineteenth century. Although 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 ...
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 ...
After the devastation wrought in Europe by World War II, the urgent task of rebuilding the continent’s war-torn urban fabric demanded radical solutions. These were found in the centralized urban planning advocated before the war by architects such as Le Corbusier and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Writing in 1953, the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928–2007) created an explicit analogy ...
After the cataclysmic upheaval of World War II subsided, it was clear that a very different musical world would result. The conflict had led to the dislocation, destruction and occupation of major cities in Germany and central Europe, coupled with the dispersal of their leading creative figures around the globe. It was inevitable that fresh centres, directions ...
La Monte Young was saxophonist and jazz musician as a youth, but his postgraduate work at the University of California at Berkeley (where he met Riley) led to a performance of his Trio for Strings (1958) arranged by his composition teacher, Seymour Shifrin (1926–79), in an attempt to show Young how much he had miscalculated. The work, consisting ...
The legend of Sun Records seems to expand and shine brighter with every passing year, as successive generations discover the almost unbelievable array of musical gems that were created at that modest little studio at 706 Union Avenue, Memphis. Sun was the brainchild of one man and it is no exaggeration to say that without his contribution, not ...
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