Personalities
-
Manitas de Plata *VIII 7 1921 / The Life You Give
When the guitarist Manitas de Plata became an international star in the 1960s, his was the name most widely associated with flamenco. At the time, music was classified as either popular or classical: the term “world music” had not been coined and the wizardry of the Gypsy from the south of France was regarded as…
-
Lucille Ball *VIII 6 1911 — The Life You Give
Lucille Ball, born August 6, 1911, in Jamestown, New York, is the radio and motion-picture actress and longtime comedy star of American television, best remembered for her classic television comedy series “I Love Lucy”. Ball determined at an early age to become an actress and left high school at age 15 to enroll in a…
-
Andy Warhol *VIII 6 1928 — The Life You Give
Andy Warhol, born Andrew Warhola Jr. on August 6, 1928, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S.A., is the artist and filmmaker, an initiator and leading exponent of the Pop art movement of the 1960s whose mass-produced art apotheosized the supposed banality of the commercial culture of the United States. An adroit self-publicist, he projected a concept of the…
-
Louis Armstrong *VIII 4 1901 — The Life You Give
Louis Armstrong, born August 4 1901, in New Orleans, Louisiana, U.S.A., was leading trumpeter and one of the most influential artists in jazz history. He grew up in dire poverty in New Orleans, Louisiana, when jazz was very young. As a child he worked at odd jobs and sang in a boys’ quartet. In 1913…
-
James Baldwin *VIII 2 1924 — The Life You Give
James Baldwin, born James Arthur Baldwin on August 2 1924 in New York, New York, is the essayist, novelist, and playwright whose eloquence and passion on the subject of race in the United States of America made him an important voice, particularly in the late 1950s and early 1960s, in the United States and, later,…
-
Ernst Jandl *VIII 1 1932 — Das Leben, das Du Gibst / The Life You Give
A biography in English is at the bottom Der österreichische Schriftsteller zählt zu den renommiertesten Repräsentanten der experimentellen Lyrik. Er hat sich vor allen Dingen einen Namen durch seine witzigen Sprachexperimente gemacht. Diesbezüglich ist seine Lyrik zu nennen, die durch die ausgesuchte Klangqualität an die dadaistische Strömung erinnern. Kennzeichnend für sein Schaffen waren die Experimente…
-
Geddy Lee *VII 29 1953 — The Life You Give
Few hard rock bassists have been as influential as Rush’s Geddy Lee. Born Gary Weinrib on July 29, 1953, in Toronto, his parents migrated from Europe to Canada and got his nickname “Geddy” from when his mother would try to pronounce “Gary” in her accent. Taking up bass as a teenager and influenced by the…
-
Marcel Duchamp *VII 28 1887 / The Life You Give
Marcel Duchamp, born July 28, 1887, in Blainville, France, is the artist who broke down the boundaries between works of art and everyday objects. After the sensation caused by Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) (1912), he painted few other pictures. His irreverence for conventional aesthetic standards led him to devise his famous ready-mades and…
-
Enrique Granados *VII 27 1867 / La Vida Que Das
See the biography in English below Enrique o Enric Granados y Campiña nacido en Lérida, 1867, en el canal de la Mancha, fue pianista y compositor español, hijo de padre cubano y de madre gallega. Su disposición para la música se reveló ya en su niñez; estudió los primeros elementos de solfeo y teoría, en…
-
Alexis Weissenberg *VII 26 1929 — The Life You Give
If one wanted to make a biographical feature film about a classical musician, the life of the Bulgarian-American-French pianist Alexis Weissenberg would furnish ideal subject material. Born in Sofia in 1929, Weissenberg was taught to play the piano by his mother. Several members of her family were Vienna Conservatory-trained musicians, and Weissenberg grew up in…
-
Stanley Kubrick *VII 26 1938 — The Life You Give
Stanley Kubrick, born July 26, 1928, in Bronx, New York, U.S.A., is the motion-picture director and writer whose films are characterized by his dramatic visual style, meticulous attention to detail, and a detached, often ironic or pessimistic perspective. An expatriate, Kubrick was nearly as well known for his reclusive lifestyle in the English countryside as…
-
Lovis Corinth *VII 21 1858 — The Life You Give
Lovis Corinth, born Franz Heinrich Louis on July 21, 1858, in Tapiau, East Prussia [now Gvardeysk, Russia], is the German painter known for his dramatic figurative and landscape paintings. Corinth underwent a lengthy period of academic artistic training that began in 1876, when he enrolled at the Academy of Königsberg. He studied in Munich from…
-
Carlos Santana *VII 20 1947 — The Life You Give / La Vida Que Das
– Lea la biografía en español abajo – Carlos Santana, born Carlos Humberto Santana Barragán, July 20, 1947, in Autlán de Navarro, Mexico), is the musician whose popular music combined rock, jazz, blues, and Afro-Cuban rhythms with a Latin sound. Santana began playing the violin at age five; by age eight, however, he had switched…
-
Brian May *VII 19 1947 — The Life You Give
Few rock guitarists possess a playing style as instantly recognizable as Queen’s Brian May. With his orchestrated guitar armies (multi-tracked guitar lines overdubbed on top of each other) and instantly memorable, well-constructed melodic leads, May is in a class all by himself. Born in Hampton, Middlesex, in July 1947, May showed an interest in music…
-
Evelyn Glennie *VII 19 1965 / The Life You Give
Evelyn Glennie is the world’s foremost, and first full-time, solo percussionist. She has been pivotal to the expansion of percussion as solo instruments, personally having commissioned over 200 new works. The recipient of enormous media attention due to her deafness, Glennie is likewise noteworthy for the variety of her repertoire and recording projects. Glennie was…
