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The history of musical instruments has always been very closely linked to the history of music itself. New musical styles often come about because new instruments become available, or improvements to existing ones are made. Improvements to the design of the piano in the 1770s, for instance, led to its adoption by composers such as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart ...

Source: The Illustrated Complete Musical Instruments Handbook, general editor Lucien Jenkins

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 ...

Source: The Illustrated Complete Musical Instruments Handbook, general editor Lucien Jenkins

A range of metal percussion instruments are found in the western orchestra, many of which have ancient and global origins. Triangle The triangle comprises a slim steel bar, circular in cross-section, bent into an equilateral triangle (18 cm/7 in each side) with one corner open. It is played with a metal rod, and is suspended from a ...

Source: The Illustrated Complete Musical Instruments Handbook, general editor Lucien Jenkins

The tape recorder, invented in 1935, had been used early on to record concerts by the Berlin Philharmonic, but it was not until 1948 that Pierre Schaeffer, a technician at the Radiodiffusion Française studio in Paris, conceived his Etude aux chemins de fer. This was the first piece of musique concrète, an experimental technique that ...

Source: Classical Music Encyclopedia, founding editor Stanley Sadie

Musique concrète (‘concrete music’) was the term coined by Pierre Schaeffer (1910–95) in 1948 to describe his new approach to composition, based on tape recordings of natural and industrial sounds. The term was chosen to distinguish the new genre from pure, abstract music (musique abstrait). Schaeffer was a radio engineer and broadcaster. Having gained a qualification from L’École Polytechnique ...

Source: The Illustrated Complete Musical Instruments Handbook, general editor Lucien Jenkins

The ondes martenot (‘martenot waves’) was invented in 1928 by French inventor and cellist, Maurice Martenot. Martenot had met his Russian counterpart, Leon Theremin, in 1923 and the two of them had discussed possible improvements to Theremin’s eponymous instrument. In fact, Martenot’s instrument was patented under the name Perfectionnements aux instruments de musique électriques (‘improvements to electronic ...

Source: The Illustrated Complete Musical Instruments Handbook, general editor Lucien Jenkins

In the twentieth century, some musicians became interested in inventing new acoustic instruments that could take music beyond the tuning systems, scales and harmonic language inherent in the instruments commonly played in western classical music. Creating new instruments created a revolutionary new sound world. New instruments were often promoted outside the normal scope of the bourgeois concert audience, ...

Source: The Illustrated Complete Musical Instruments Handbook, general editor Lucien Jenkins

Varèse was particularly interested in the sounds of the modern urban world. His music takes a sound world derived from factories and industrialization and turns them into music. But it took the off-beat genius of Ligeti to compose a work entirely for special effects: his Poème symphonique (1962) has passed into musical folklore as the piece of music written for 100 ...

Source: Classical Music Encyclopedia, founding editor Stanley Sadie

The Modern Age was characterized by rapid and radical change and political turmoil. By 1918 the Russian tsar, the Habsburg emperor and the German kaiser had lost their thrones. The two Russian revolutions of 1917 resulted in a Communist government led by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was fragmented to allow self-determination to the newly formed countries of Czechoslovakia ...

Source: Classical Music Encyclopedia, founding editor Stanley Sadie

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 ...

Source: Classical Music Encyclopedia, founding editor Stanley Sadie

(Hans Vâr’-ner Hent’-se) 1926–2012 German composer Henze’s musical education was interrupted by the Second World War, but after the conflict ended, he took composition lessons with Wolfgang Fortner and René Leibowitz. Those studies introduced him to Schoenberg’s 12-note technique, which he continued to employ to his own ends; but it was Stravinsky who exerted the strongest influence on ...

Source: Classical Music Encyclopedia, founding editor Stanley Sadie

1874–1929, Austrian Hofmannsthal was a precocious talent. His first published poem appeared when he was just 16 and he rapidly made the acquaintance of some of the leading literary figures of the day. Most important was a paternalistic relationship with the German poet Stefan George (1868–1933). Hofmannsthal’s youthful ability led to a creative crisis in his mid-twenties from which he ...

Source: Definitive Opera Encyclopedia, founding editor Stanley Sadie

(Fe-lep’ Vâr-da-lo’) c. 1480s–1530s French composer Although French by birth and the composer of chansons and motets, Verdelot travelled to Italy early in his life, and is best known as one of the founders of the madrigal. He seems to have composed most, if not all, his madrigals in the 1520s, the genre’s first decade. Many of ...

Source: Classical Music Encyclopedia, founding editor Stanley Sadie

(Vocal/instrumental group, 1994–present) Formed by Jón Pór (Jónsi) Birgisson (vocals), Georg Hólm (bass) and Ágúst Ævar Gunnarsson (drums) in Reykjavik, the Icelanders’ wholly unique sound, perhaps most successfully achieved on third album Ágætis Byrjun (1999), is a lulling, lurching blend of classical music and ambient, of rock with something from far outside the genres’ confines. Orri ...

Source: The Definitive Illustrated Encyclopedia of Rock, general editor Michael Heatley

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 ...

Source: The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Music, general editor Paul Du Noyer
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