Celebration Day
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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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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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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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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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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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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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Rosario Castellanos *V 25 1925 — The Life You Give / La Vida Que Das
Rosario Castellanos, born May 25, 1925, in Mexico City, Mexico, is the novelist, short-story writer, poet, essayist, and diplomat who was probably the most important Mexican woman writer of the 20th century. Her 1950 master’s thesis, Sobre cultura femenina (“On Feminine Culture”), became a turning point for modern Mexican women writers, who found in it…
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Alicia de Larrocha *V 23 1923 — La Vida Que Das / The Life You Give
See biography in English below Alicia de Larrocha de la Calle nació el 23 de mayo de 1923, en el 4º piso de la calle Córcega nº 263 bis, esquina Calle Enrique Granados, de Barcelona. Fue la tercera de 4 hermanos (Teresa, Berta, Alicia, y Ramón). Sus padres fueron Eduardo de Larrocha y Teresa de…
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Carl Linnaeus *V 23 1707 — The Life You Give
Carolus Linnaeus, born on May 23, 1707, in Råshult, Småland, Sweden, is the naturalist and explorer who was the first to frame principles for defining natural genera and species of organisms and to create a uniform system for naming them (binomial nomenclature). Linnaeus was the son of a curate and grew up in Småland, a…
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Richard Wagner *V 22 1813 — The Life You Give
Richard Wagner, born Wilhelm Richard Wagner, on May 22, 1813, in Leipzig, Germany, is the dramatic composer and theorist whose operas and music had a revolutionary influence on the course of Western music, either by extension of his discoveries or reaction against them. Among his major works are The Flying Dutchman (1843), Tannhäuser (1845), Lohengrin…
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Albrecht Dürer *V 21 1471 — The Life You Give
Albrecht Dürer, born May 21, 1471, in the Imperial Free City of Nürnberg, Germany, is the painter and printmaker generally regarded as the greatest German Renaissance artist. His vast body of work includes altarpieces and religious works, numerous portraits and self-portraits, and copper engravings. His woodcuts, such as the Apocalypse series (1498), retain a more…
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Honoré de Balzac *V 20 1799 — The Life You Give
Honoré de Balzac, born May 20, 1799, in Tours, France, is the literary artist who produced a vast number of novels and short stories collectively called La Comédie humaine (The Human Comedy). He helped to establish the traditional form of the novel and is generally considered to be one of the greatest novelists of all…
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Erik Satie *V 17 1866 — The Life You Give
Erik Satie, born Eric Alfred Leslie Satie, on May 17, 1866, in Honfleur, Calvados, France, is the composer whose spare, unconventional, often witty style exerted a major influence on 20th-century music, particularly in France. Satie studied at the Paris Conservatory, dropped out, and later worked as a café pianist. About 1890 he became associated with…
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Robert Fripp *V 16 1946 / The Life You Give
A truly singular figure in rock music, Robert Fripp is a guitarist, composer, and bandleader who has brought a unique, strikingly intelligent perspective to his work. One of the most technically gifted guitarists in rock, Fripp is the thinking-person’s guitar hero, showing no interest in shredding but eager to challenge himself and blaze new trails…
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Brian Eno *V 15 1948 — The Life You Give
Brian Eno, born Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno, May 15, 1948, in Woodbridge, Suffolk, England, is producer, composer, keyboardist, and singer who helped define and reinvent the sound of some of the most popular bands of the 1980s and ’90s and who created the genre of ambient music. While…
Sila Blume 