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 ...
Although researchers continue to make discoveries about the way music was performed in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, little is known about one of its most crucial aspects: how did singers actually sound ? Many medieval theorists and writers mention performers with voices ‘like those of angels’, and words such as ‘sweetness’ occur again and again; equally, the ...
Vince Gill (b. 1957) broke out of a respected but static 10-year career as a bandmember and solo act and into country stardom with the 1990 hit ‘When I Call Your Name’. Gill was in the forefront of the neo-traditional country movement and became one of the biggest crossover singing stars in Nashville. It helped that he was an excellent country ...
Blue-eyed soul and country guitarist and singer-songwriter Bonnie Raitt was born in Burbank, California in 1949, the daughter of Broadway vocalist John Raitt and pianist-singer Marge Goddard. At the age of eight, she was given a Stella guitar as a Christmas present, which her parents insisted she play at family gatherings. Raitt became a devotee of blues ...
In his short life, California guitarist-mandolinist Clarence White (1944–73) conceived innovations that would inspire country and rock guitarists from both a stylistic and technical perspective long after his death. He brought bluegrass picking to the forefront of rock, turning acoustic guitar into a solo instrument. He developed a device for electric guitar that let traditional guitarists sound like pedal-steel ...
Blind Lemon Jefferson (c. 1893–1929) opened up the market for blues records in 1926 when ‘Got The Blues’, backed with ‘Long Lonesome Blues’, became the biggest-selling record by a black male artist. It brought him the trappings of success, including a car and chauffeur, and he released nearly 100 songs over the next four years, before his death. ...
As is the case with pretty much all stars, before the beautiful butterfly came the unremarkable caterpillar. Bowie was born not on Mars but in Brixton, South London. He started life as David Robert Jones on 8 January 1947. His father was a promotions officer for the children’s charity Barnardo’s and his mother a cinema usherette. He had one ...
The word ‘Baroque’ is derived from the Portuguese barrocco, a term for a misshapen pearl, and it was still with this sense of something twisted that it was first applied – to the period between about 1600 and 1750 – in the nineteenth century. In 1768, Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote: ‘a Baroque music is that in which the harmony ...
The revival and imitation of ancient theatrical genres in sixteenth-century Italy bore fruit in seventeenth-century England and France in the works of the great dramatists of those countries: William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe, Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine. In Italy, however, the sixteenth-century innovations in spoken drama were followed in the next century not by a great national ...
Broadly speaking, empiricism, from the Greek empeiria (‘experience’), is a philosophical tradition that accepts as fact only what can be verified by observation, or experience, through the use of the five senses. Galileo Galilei’s support of Copernican theory was a result of his observation of the planet Venus through a telescope. His insistence that what he saw ...
In the first part of the seventeenth century, two traditions of absolute power were struggling to maintain their hold. In England, after the death of Elizabeth I in 1603, the Stuart dynasty fought for survival for 40 years. Then the dream crumbled in the face of civil war and the execution of the king, Charles I, ...
(Hin’-rikh Eg’-nats Frants fun Be’-ber) 1644–1704 German composer Biber was a violin virtuoso and one of the most imaginative composers of his time. He was employed at the Moravian court of Kromeriz (near Brno in today’s Czechoslovakia) during the 1660s, but from the early 1670s worked at the Salzburg court of the Prince-Archbishop, where he subsequently became Kapellmeister (‘chapel master’) ...
1649–1708 English composer Blow held various court appointments and served as the first Composer of the Chapel Royal (1700). His greatest gifts lay in the composition of vocal music, notably anthems and services for the church. Among the finest of his verse anthems is ‘God spake sometime in visions’, for the coronation of James II (1685). In this piece, ...
(Ga-ôrg’ Böm) 1661–1733 German composer Böhm was a Lutheran organist-composer who studied with members of the Bach family before becoming organist at Lüneburg. At an early age he travelled to Hamburg, where he encountered Johann Adam Reincken (1623–1722), one of the most influential North German organists. Böhm contributed to the principal forms popular with the organists of this region, notably ...
(Det’-rikh Books-te-hoo’-de) c. 1637–1707 German composer Buxtehude was born in Scandinavia, but from 1668 until his death held the post of organist at St Mary’s, Lübeck. The position did not require him to provide much in the way of vocal music; he also wrote cantatas and arias for the Abendmusiken (public concerts), in which he was deeply involved. His cantatas ...
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David Bowie
Fantastic new, unofficial biography covers
his life, music, art and movies, with a
sweep of incredible photographs.