Happy Birthday
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Florence Price *IV 9 1887 / The Life You Give
The first African-American woman whose music was played by a major symphony orchestra, Florence Price was a pioneering figure in 20th century American music. In the 21st century, her music has been performed increasingly often, especially since a large cache of her compositions was rediscovered in 2009. Price was born Florence Beatrice Smith in Little…
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Billie Holiday *IV 7 1915 — The Life You Give
Billie Holiday, born Elinore Harris, on April 7, 1915, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.A., is the jazz singer considered to have been one of the greatest from the 1930s to the ’50s. Eleanora (her preferred spelling) Harris was the daughter of Clarence Holiday, a professional musician who for a time played guitar with the Fletcher Henderson band.…
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Ravi Shankar *IV 7 1920 — The Life You Give
Ravi Shankar, born Ravindra Shankar Chowdhury, on April 7, 1920, Benares [now Varanasi], India, is the musician, player of the sitar, composer, and founder of the National Orchestra of India, who was influential in stimulating Western appreciation of Indian music. Born into a Bengali Brahman (highest social class in Hindu tradition) family, Shankar spent most…
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Maya Angelou *IV 4 1928 — The Life You Give
Maya Angelou, born Marguerite Annie Johnson, on April 4, 1928, in St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.A., is the poet, memoirist, and actress whose several volumes of autobiography explore the themes of economic, racial, and sexual oppression. Although born in St. Louis, Angelou spent much of her childhood in the care of her paternal grandmother in rural…
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Max Ernst *IV 2 1891 — The Life You Give
Max Ernst, born Maximilian Ethelbert Ernst, on April 2 1891, in Brühl, Germany, was painter, sculptor, graphic artist, and poet. A key member of first Dada and then Surrealism in Europe in the 1910s and 1920s, Max Ernst used a variety of mediums—painting, collage, printmaking, sculpture, and various unconventional drawing methods—to give visual form to…
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Milan Kundera *IV 1 1929 — The Life You Give
Milan Kundera, born April 1, 1929, in Brno, Czechoslovakia [now in Czech Republic]), is the novelist, short-story writer, playwright, essayist, and poet whose works combine erotic comedy with political criticism and philosophical speculation. The son of a noted concert pianist and musicologist, Ludvik Kundera, the young Kundera studied music but gradually turned to writing, and…
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Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin *IV 1 1755 — The Life You Give
Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, born April 1, 1755, in Belley, France, is the lawyer, politician, and author of the celebrated work on gastronomy, Physiologie du goût (The Physiology of Taste). Brillat-Savarin followed the family profession of law. A deputy of the Third Estate at the Estates-General of 1789, he was forced to flee the country during…
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Sergei Rachmaninoff *IV 1 1873 — The Life You Give
Sergey Rachmaninoff, born March 20 [April 1, New Style], 1873, in Oneg, near Semyonovo, Russia, is the composer who was the last great figure of the tradition of Russian Romanticism and a leading piano virtuoso of his time. He is especially known for his piano concerti and the piece for piano and orchestra titled Rhapsody…
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Nagisa Ōshima *III 31 1932 — The Life You Give
Nagisa Oshima’s interest in politics began at a young age. His father, a government official (reportedly of samurai lineage) who died when Oshima was six, left behind an extensive library of Socialist and Communist texts, which the young man read through as he came to maturity. He attended Kyoto University, studying law while dabbling in…
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Joseph Haydn *III 31 1732 — The Life You Give
Joseph Haydn, born Franz Joseph Haydn, on March 31, 1732, in Rohrau, Austria, is the composer who was one of the most important figures in the development of the Classical style in music during the 18th century. He helped establish the forms and styles for the string quartet and the symphony. Early years Haydn was…
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Pierre Boulez *III 26 1925 — The Life You Give
Pierre Boulez, born March 26, 1925, in Montbrison, France, is the most significant French composer of his generation, as well as a noted conductor and music theorist who championed the work of 20th-century composers. Boulez, the son of a steel manufacturer, majored in mathematics at the Collège de Saint-Étienne, where he also took music lessons;…
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Béla Bartók *March 25 1881 — The Life You Give
Béla Bartók, born March 25, 1881, in Nagyszentmiklós, Hungary, Austria-Hungary [now Sânnicolau Mare, Romania] is the composer, pianist, ethnomusicologist, and teacher, noted for the Hungarian flavour of his major musical works, which include orchestral works, string quartets, piano solos, several stage works, a cantata, and a number of settings of folk songs for voice and…
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Dolora Zajick *III 24 1952 — The Life You Give
Dolora Zajick (ZAH-chik) is among the world’s leading dramatic mezzo-sopranos, unsurpassed in Verdi’s mezzo roles. Birgit Nilsson in 1991 stated that “Zajick’s voice is the only one existing today without any competition in the world.” She comes from a large family of Czech descent. As a pre-medical student at the University of Nevada, she took…
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Dario Fo *III 24 1926 — The Life You Give
Dario Fo, born March 24, 1926, in Leggiuno-Sangiano, Italy, is the avant-garde playwright, manager-director, and actor-mime who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1997 though he often faced government censure as a theatrical caricaturist with a flair for social agitation. Fo’s first theatrical experience was collaborating on satirical revues for small cabarets and…
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Akira Kurosawa *III 23 1910 — The Life You Give
Kurosawa Akira, born March 23, 1910, in Tokyo, Japan, was the first Japanese film director to win international acclaim, with such films as Rashomon (1950), Ikiru (1952), Seven Samurai (1954), Throne of Blood (1957), Kagemusha (1980), and Ran (1985). Kurosawa’s father, who had once been an army officer, was a teacher who contributed to the…
Sila Blume 