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Josephine Baker *VI 3 1906 — The Life You Give
Josephine Baker, born Freda Josephine McDonald, June 3, 1906, in St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.A., is the dancer and singer who symbolized the beauty and vitality of Black American culture, which took Paris by storm in the 1920s. Baker grew up fatherless and in poverty. Between the ages of 8 and 10 she was out of…
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Edward Elgar *VI 2 1857 — The Life You Give
Sir Edward Elgar, born Edward William Elgar, June 2, 1857, in Broadheath, Worcestershire, England, is the composer whose works in the orchestral idiom of late 19th-century Romanticism—characterized by bold tunes, striking colour effects, and mastery of large forms—stimulated a renaissance of English music. The son of an organist and music dealer, Elgar left school at…
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Mikhail Glinka *VI 1 1804 — The Life You Give
Mikhail Glinka, born Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka, May 21 [June 1, New Style], 1804, in Novospasskoye, Russia, is the first Russian composer to have won international recognition and the acknowledged founder of the Russian nationalist school. Glinka first became interested in music at age 10 or 11, when he heard his uncle’s private orchestra. He studied…
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John Bonham *V 31 1948 — The Life You Give
Drummer John Bonham, often referred to by his nickname “Bonzo,” was one of the most important and influential drummers of the 1960s and ’70s — as a member of Led Zeppelin, he was also a bona fide superstar for the last decade of his life and, along with Ringo Starr of the Beatles, Charlie Watts…
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Shirley Verrett *V 31 1931 — The Life You Give
Shirley Verrett was one of America’s finest opera stars and recital singers, and was one of the remarkable generation of great African-American singers who came to international prominence in the 1950s and 1960s. She studied voice in Los Angeles with Anna Fitziu and Hall Johnson. In 1955, she won the nationally broadcast CBS program Arthur…
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Agnès Varda *V 30 1928 — The Life You Give
Agnès Varda, born May 30, 1928, in Ixelles, Belgium, is the director and photographer whose first film, La Pointe Courte (1954), was a precursor of the French New Wave movies of the 1960s. Varda was a student at the Sorbonne and the École du Louvre and later became a photographer. As the official photographer of…
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Pauline Oliveros *V 30 1932 — The Life You Give / La Vida Que Das
Pauline Oliveros, born May 30, 1932, in Houston, Texas, U.S.A., is the composer and performer known for conceiving a unique, meditative, improvisatory approach to music called “deep listening.” Oliveros was raised in a family that encouraged involvement with music. At age 10 she was introduced to the accordion by her mother, who was a pianist.…
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Iannis Xenakis *V 29 1922 — The Life You Give
Iannis Xenakis, born May 29, 1922, in Brăila, Romania, is the Romanian-born French composer, architect, and mathematician who originated musique stochastique, music composed with the aid of electronic computers and based upon mathematical probability systems. Xenakis was born to a wealthy family of Greek ancestry, and he moved to Greece in 1932. He fought in…
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Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau *V 28 1925 — The Life You Give
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, born May 28, 1925, in Berlin, Germany, is the operatic baritone and preeminent singer of lieder, distinguished for his lyrical voice, commanding presence, and superb artistry. Fischer-Dieskau studied with Georg Walter before serving in World War II and with Hermann Weissenborn afterward. In 1947 he made his concert debut in Johannes Brahms’s Ein…
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György Ligeti *V 28 1923 — The Life You Give
György Ligeti, born György Sándor Ligeti, May 28, 1923, in Diciosânmartin [now Tîrnăveni], Transylvania, Romania, is a leading composer of the branch of avant-garde music concerned principally with shifting masses of sound and tone colours. Ligeti, the great-nephew of violinist Leopold Auer, studied and taught music in Hungary until the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, when…
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The multiflora roses have arrived (V 26 2026)
Rosa Multiflora ThunbergJapanese roseBaby roseEijitsu roseRambler rose
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Rubén González *V 26 1919 — The Life You Give
Rubén González was one of the last of Cuba’s great Afro-Cuban piano players. Although he had played and recorded with the band led by Enrique Jorrín, the creator of the cha-cha, for a quarter of a century, he had retired from music by the mid-’80s. Things began to change when González recorded with the Afro-Cuban…
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Miles Davis *V 26 1926 — The Life You Give
Davis’s early playing was sometimes tentative and not always fully in tune, but his unique, intimate tone and his fertile musical imagination outweighed his technical shortcomings. By the early 1950s Davis had turned his limitations into considerable assets. Rather than emulate the busy, wailing style of such bebop pioneers as Gillespie, Davis explored the trumpet’s…
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Teresa Stratas *V 26 1938 — The Life You Give
Stratas was one of the controversial stars of the latter half of the twentieth century, and one whose personality and life, like that of Callas, another great soprano of Greek descent, are inextricably linked with her performances in the minds of many members of the public. Also like Callas, she had a special magnetism as…
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