AUTHORITATIVE | CURATED | First 500 words Free

• Arts & Culture
• Classical
• Modern Era

Western classical music since the seventeenth century, because it placed great emphasis on harmonic subtlety and tensions between keys, had been less interested in melodic flexibility (a maximum of 12 notes to the octave, while Indian music uses 22) and in rhythm (regular division into bars, normally of two, three, four or six beats; Indian ...

• Instruments
• Classical
• Contemporary Classical

A small free-reed instrument, the harmonica, or mouth organ, is placed between the lips and moved to and fro to reach the rows of channels which house vibrating reeds, played by blowing into it. The arrival of the Chinese sheng in Europe in the eighteenth century encouraged a great deal of experimentation with free-reed instruments. In 1821 ...

• Instruments
• Percussion

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, ...

• Major Operas
• Opera
• Turn of the Century

Madama Butterfly is the last opera to be written by the trio of Puccini, Illica and Giacosa. It was, as usual, beset by difficulties in the preparation and approval of the libretto. Puccini was as opposed to one particular scene as Giacosa was for it. Puccini, of course, won, but Giacosa remained so convinced that ...

• Personalities
• Jazz & Blues
• Twenties

Universally acknowledged as one of the twentieth century’s emblematic composers, Edward Kennedy ‘Duke’ Ellington used his long-standing touring orchestra as a tool to create wholly unique tonal colours and a distinctive harmonic language in jazz. His career was characterized by the close and long-lasting relationships that he struck up with particular musicians and other figures from the music business, ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Early Romantic

(Frants Bâr’-vald) 1796–1868 Swedish composer Berwald played the violin in the court orchestra in Stockholm from 1812 until 1828. In 1829 he went to Berlin, where he worked on various operatic projects. His efforts were largely fruitless, and it was not until the 1840s that he met with success; all the works on which his reputation now rests date from ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Early Romantic

(Fre’-drikh fun Flo’-to) 1812–83 German composer Flotow was a prolific composer of operas. He studied at the Paris Conservatoire (1828–30) and was influenced by the major opera composers of the day, including Rossini, Meyerbeer and Donizetti, and later by his friendships with Charles Gounod (1818–93) and Jacques Offenbach (1819–80). His early operas are in the French lyric style, but ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Contemporary Classical

b. 1958 Finnish composer He studied at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, and later with Ferneyhough and Lachenmann. He made several visits to IRCAM, the research institute founded by Boulez in Paris, and while electronics no longer feature extensively in his music, his distinctive harmonic language owes much to the experiments in spectral analysis he undertook there. ...

• Personalities
• Modern Era
• Opera

1910–81, American Samuel Barber’s talents were evident from a very young age. Musically conservative, his harmonic language was highly influenced by late nineteenth-century Romanticism and often criticized by modernists. Indeed, although his style defied label, and his dissonances and harmonies were not truly Romantic, his gifts as a supreme melodist served to pigeonhole him. Barber established ...

• Styles & Forms
• Classical
• Late Romantic

Composers at the end of the nineteenth century were awestruck by the music dramas of Richard Wagner. His colossal achievements could not be followed, and yet the challenge his music laid down, particularly in the realms of harmony, had to be reckoned with – either developed or rejected – by any European composer of the next generation. Music ...

• Classical
• Early Romantic

Following the social and political upheaval of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, Europe enjoyed a short period of relative stability with Napoleon’s exile, the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in France and the establishment of the Vienna Peace Settlement in 1815. However, in the early 1820s a number of minor revolts broke out in Naples and ...

• Classical
• Modern Era

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 ...

• Styles & Forms
• Modern Era
• Opera

Throughout the twentieth century, opera constantly re-evaluated and redefined itself. Two world wars created a crisis of national identities that was reflected in a series of artistic challenges within the world of music – tradition over pluralism, experimentation over formalization – as composers sought to free themselves from Austro-Germanic influences. Bolder Attitudes Janáček is a case in point. Quitting ...

• Influences
• Classical
• Contemporary Classical

Messiaen’s creative personality and influence as a teacher were fundamental to the development of new music in Europe after 1945. He was Debussy’s natural successor, taking the French master’s innovative approach to harmony and rhythm to a new plane, while sharing his openness to the music of other cultures. Although by the late 1940s the main elements of Messiaen’s ...

• Arts & Culture
• Classical
• Modern Era

In the twentieth century, Paris regained its place as the centre of musical innovation, especially in the years either side of World War I. In the late nineteenth century, Debussy’s influential musical innovations and explicitly anti-Wagnerian stance made Paris the centre of post-Wagnerian modernity. This was confirmed in the early modern period by the arrival of Serge Diaghilev ...