celebration
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The Life You Give: Nostradamus *1503
Nostradamus (Michel de Notredame, born December 14, 1503, Saint-Rémy, France, was an astrologer and physician, and the most widely read seer of the Renaissance. Nostradamus began his medical practice in Agen, sometime in the 1530s, despite not only never having taken a medical degree but also apparently having been expelled from medical school. In 1544…
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The Life You Give: Antoni Tàpies *1923
Antoni Tàpies (Antoni Tàpies Puig, marqués de Tàpies), born December 13, 1923, in Barcelona, Spain, was a Catalan artist, credited with introducing contemporary abstract painting into Spain. He began as a Surrealist but developed into an abstract artist under the influence of French painting and achieved an international reputation. In 1943 Tàpies began studying for…
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Happy Birthday, Edvard Munch! *1863
Edvard Munch was a prolific yet perpetually troubled artist preoccupied with matters of human mortality such as chronic illness, sexual liberation, and religious aspiration. He expressed these obsessions through works of intense color, semi-abstraction, and mysterious subject matter. Following the great triumph of French Impressionism, Munch took up the more graphic, symbolist sensibility of the…
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Happy Birthday, Elliott Carter! *1908
Elliott Carter, born December 11, 1908, in New York, New York, was a composer, and musical innovator whose erudite style and novel principles of polyrhythm, called metric modulation, won worldwide attention. He was twice awarded the Pulitzer Prize for music, in 1960 and 1973.Carter, who was born of a wealthy family, was educated at Harvard…
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Happy Birthday, Willie Mae Thornton! *1926
Willie Mae (Big Mama) Thornton, born December 11, 1926, in Montgomery, Alabama, was an American blues musician. Her introduction to music, as with most fellow blues legends, started in the Baptist church. The daughter of a minister, she and her six siblings began to sing at a very early age. While still a child, Willie…
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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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I died for beauty but was scarce
I died for beauty but was scarceAdjusted in the tomb,When one who died for truth was lainIn an adjoining room. He questioned softly why I failed?“For beauty,” I replied.“And I for truth, the two are one;We brethren are,” he said. And so, as kinsmen met a night,We talked between the rooms,Until the moss had reached…
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The Life You Give: Elisabeth Schwarzkopf *1915
Dame Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, born Dec. 9, 1915, in Jarotschin, near Posen, Germany, [now Poznań, Poland] was a soprano who performed in the major opera houses of the Western world and is remembered especially for her mastery of German songs known as lieder. Schwarzkopf studied at the Berlin High School for Music from 1934, winning various…
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“When the music’s over”
When the music’s overWhen the music’s over, yeahTurn out the lightsTurn out the lightsFor the music is your special friendDance on fire as it intendsMusic is your only friendUntil the endUntil the endCancel my subscription to the resurrectionSend my credentials to the house of detentionI got some friends insideThe face in the mirror won’t stopThe…
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The Life You Give: Sammy Davis, Jr. *1925
Sammy Davis, Jr., born December 8, 1925 in New York, New York, was a singer, dancer, and entertainer. At age three Davis began performing in vaudeville with his father and uncle, Will Mastin, in the Will Mastin Trio. Davis studied tap dancing under Bill (“Bojangles”) Robinson but never received a formal education. After serving in…
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The Life You Give: Tom Waits *1949
Tom Waits, born December 7, 1949, in Pomona, California, is a singer-songwriter and actor whose gritty, sometimes romantic depictions of the lives of the urban underclass won him a loyal if limited following and the admiration of critics and prominent musicians who performed and recorded his songs. Born into a middle-class California family but enamoured…
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The Life You Give: Rainer Maria Rilke *1875
Rainer Maria Rilke, born December 4 1875, in Prague, Bohemia, Austria-Hungary [now in Czech Republic] was the poet who became internationally famous with such works as Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus. Rilke was the only son of a not-too-happy marriage. His father, Josef, a civil servant, was a man frustrated in his career; his…
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The Life You Give: Jean-Luc Godard *1930
Jean-Luc Godard, born December 3, 1930, Paris, France, is a French Swiss film director who came to prominence with the New Wave group in France during the late 1950s and the ’60s. Early life and career Godard’s first feature film, À bout de souffle (1960; Breathless), which was produced by François Truffaut, his colleague on…
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The Life You Give: Ozzy Osbourne *1948
Ozzy Osbourne, born John Michael Osbourne on December 3, 1948, Birmingham, England, is the musician who gained a loyal following as the vocalist for the heavy metal group Black Sabbath before embarking on a successful solo career. Raised in a working-class family, Osbourne dropped out of school at age 15 and held several low-paying jobs.…
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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…
Sila Blume 