Music
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Pinchas Zukerman *VII 16 1948 — The Life You Give
Pinchas Zukerman, born July 16, 1948, in Tel Aviv, Israel, is the violinist, violist, and conductor who earned widespread acclaim in a career that spanned more than five decades. Zukerman began playing at about the age of seven; when he was eight he entered the Tel Aviv Academy of Music. In 1962, sponsored by violinist…
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Linda Ronstadt *VII 15 1946 — The Life You Give
Linda Ronstadt, born Linda Marie Ronstadt, on July 15, 1946, in Tucson, Arizona, is the singer with a pure, expressive soprano voice and eclectic artistic tastes, whose performances called attention to a number of new songwriters and helped establish country rock music. After winning attention with a folk-oriented trio, the Stone Poneys, in California in…
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Carl Orff *VII 10 1895 — The Life You Give
Carl Orff, born July 10, 1895, in Munich, Germany, is the composer known particularly for his operas and dramatic works and for his innovations in music education. Orff studied at the Munich Academy of Music and with the German composer Heinrich Kaminski and later conducted in Munich, Mannheim, and Darmstadt. His Schulwerk, a manual describing…
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Gustav Mahler *VII 7 1860 — The Life You Give
Gustav Mahler, born July 7, 1860, in Kaliště, Bohemia, Austrian Empire, is the composer and conductor, noted for his 10 symphonies and various songs with orchestra, which drew together many different strands of Romanticism. Although his music was largely ignored for 50 years after his death, Mahler was later regarded as an important forerunner of…
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Harry Partch *VI 24 1901 — The Life You Give
Harry Partch, born June 24, 1901, in Oakland, Calif., U.S.A., is the visionary and eclectic composer and instrument builder, largely self-taught, whose compositions are remarkable for the complexity of their scores (each instrument has its own characteristic notation, often involving 43 tones to each octave) and their employment of unique instruments of his invention. Partch’s…
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Remembering James Levine *VI 23 1943
James Levine, born June 23, 1943, in Cincinnati, Ohio, U.S.A., is the conductor and pianist, especially noted for his work with the Metropolitan Opera (Met) of New York City. He was considered the preeminent American conductor of his generation. As a piano prodigy, Levine made his debut in 1953 with the Cincinnati Orchestra in Ohio.…
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Peter Pears *VI 22 1910 — The Life You Give
Sir Peter Pears, born Peter Neville Luard Pears, June 22, 1910, in Farnham, Surrey, England, is the tenor, a singer of outstanding skill and subtlety who was closely associated with the works of Sir Benjamin Britten. He received a knighthood in 1977. Pears studied at the University of Oxford, at the Royal College of Music,…
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Eliades Ochoa *VI 22 1946 — The Life You Give
From the outset of his career, Eliades Ochoa built his repertoire from Cuban traditional music, in particular son, guarachas, guajiras, and boleros. As a child, he learned to play guitar and tres (an adapted guitar), and also began singing. In 1958 he moved to the city of Santiago and during the following decade, developed a…
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Ray Davies *VI 21 1944 — The Life You Give
Ray Davies was the lead singer, chief songwriter, and rhythm guitarist in the Kinks, one of the most long-lived of the British Invasion rock groups of the 1960s. In effect, the Kinks had always been merely a backup group for Davies, who wrote and sang nearly all their songs with only the occasional contribution from…
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Charles Gounod *VI 17 1818 / The Life You Give
Charles Gounod, born Charles-françois Gounod, June 17, 1818, in Paris, France, is a composer noted particularly for his operas, of which the most famous is Faust. Gounod’s father was a painter, and his mother was a capable pianist who gave Gounod his early training in music. He was educated at the Lycée Saint-Louis, where he…
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Igor Stravinsky *VI 17 1882 — The Life You Give
Igor Stravinsky, born Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky, June 5 [June 17, New Style], 1882, Oranienbaum [now Lomonosov], near St. Petersburg, Russia, is the composer whose work had a revolutionary impact on musical thought and sensibility just before and after World War I, and whose compositions remained a touchstone of modernism for much of his long working…
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Edvard Grieg *VI 15 1843 — The Life You Give
Edvard Grieg, born Edvard Hagerup Grieg, June 15, 1843, in Bergen, Norway, is the composer who was a founder of the Norwegian nationalist school of music. His father, Alexander Grieg, was British consul at Bergen. The Grieg (formerly Greig) family was of Scottish origin, the composer’s grandfather having emigrated after the Battle of Culloden. His…
Sila Blume 