Orchestra
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The Life You Give: Alban Berg *1885
Alban Berg, born Alban Maria Johannes Berg, on February 9 1885, in Vienna, Austria, is the composer who wrote atonal and 12-tone compositions that remained true to late 19th-century Romanticism. He composed orchestral music (including Five Orchestral Songs, 1912), chamber music, songs, and two groundbreaking operas, Wozzeck (1925) and Lulu (1937). Apart from a few…
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Weekly Woman & Virtuous Black VI: Florence Price, composer
Florence Beatrice Price, born on April 9 of 1887 in Little a rock, Pulaski County, Arkansas, USA, is the first black woman in the United States to have been recognized as a symphonic composer. Even though her training was steeped in European tradition, Price’s music consists of mostly the American idiom and reveals her Southern…
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The Life You Give: Witold Lutosławski *1913
Lutoslawski was the leading progressive figure in Polish music of the second half of the twentieth century. Born in Warsaw, he showed an exceptional musical talent at an early age, with his first compositions dating from 1922. He studied piano, violin, and composition (with Witold Maliszewski, a pupil of Rimsky-Korsakov), graduating from the Warsaw Conservatory…
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Weekly Woman: Gloria Coates *1938
An American composer who has made her career for the most part in Germany, Gloria Coates was born in Wisconsin in 1938. As a child, she sang on local radio and in her early teens, she took top honors at a National Federation of Music Clubs Composition Contest. This girl from rural Wisconsin headed over…
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The Life You Give: Anton Maria von Webern *1883
Anton Webern — Anton Friedrich Wilhelm von Webern — born Dec. 3, 1883, in Vienna, Austria, was a composer of the 12-tone Viennese school. He is known especially for his passacaglia for orchestra, his chamber music, and various songs (Lieder). Life and works Webern’s father, a mining engineer, rose to the highest rank of his…
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The Life You Give: Virgil Thomson *1896
Virgil Thomson, (born November 25, 1896, Kansas City, Missouri, USA ), American composer, conductor, and music critic whose forward-looking ideas stimulated new lines of thought among contemporary musicians. Thomson studied at Harvard University and later in Paris with Nadia Boulanger, a noted teacher of musical composition. There he was influenced by early 20th-century French composers,…
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Happy Birthday, Manuel de Falla! 1876
Manuel María de los Dolores Falla y Matheu was born November 23, 1876, in Cádiz, Spain, and is the most distinguished Spanish composer of the early 20th century. In his music he achieved a fusion of poetry, asceticism, and ardour that represents the spirit of Spain at its purest. Falla took piano lessons from his…
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“Peter Grimes” by Benjamin Britten
Join us in listening to this opera, in celebration of Benjamin Britten’s birthday today, at 1pm EST, at the Opera, Blood and Tears Club, on Clubhouse. Music: Benjamin BrittenLibretto: Montague Slater Musicians:Benjamin Britten – conductorPeter Pears – peter grimesClaire Watson – ellen orfordJames Pease – capitän balstrodeJean Watson – auntieDavid Kelly – hobsonOwen Brannigan -…
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Is it wise to “fall” asleep with a requiem on the ears?
Looked lightly at my small record collection, and picked a recording from 1954 — Bruno Walter conducting the New York Philharmonic playing the Requiem by Johannes Brahms. I did wonder, not intensively serious but with some depth, what is being conveyed to the sleeping living when the piece is for the non-living sleepers?
Sila Blume 