Music
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György Ligeti *V 28 1923 / The Life You Give
György Ligeti, born György Sándor Ligeti, May 28, 1923, in Diciosânmartin [now Tîrnăveni], Transylvania, Romania, is a leading composer of the branch of avant-garde music concerned principally with shifting masses of sound and tone colours. Ligeti, the great-nephew of violinist Leopold Auer, studied and taught music in Hungary until the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, when…
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Miles Davis *V 26 1926 / The Life You Give
Davis’s early playing was sometimes tentative and not always fully in tune, but his unique, intimate tone and his fertile musical imagination outweighed his technical shortcomings. By the early 1950s Davis had turned his limitations into considerable assets. Rather than emulate the busy, wailing style of such bebop pioneers as Gillespie, Davis explored the trumpet’s…
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Richard Wagner *V 22 1813 / The Life You Give
Richard Wagner, born Wilhelm Richard Wagner, on May 22, 1813, in Leipzig, Germany, is the dramatic composer and theorist whose operas and music had a revolutionary influence on the course of Western music, either by extension of his discoveries or reaction against them. Among his major works are The Flying Dutchman (1843), Tannhäuser (1845), Lohengrin…
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Brian Eno *V 15 1948 / The Life You Give
Brian Eno, born Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno, May 15, 1948, in Woodbridge, Suffolk, England, is producer, composer, keyboardist, and singer who helped define and reinvent the sound of some of the most popular bands of the 1980s and ’90s and who created the genre of ambient music. While…
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Claudio Monteverdi *V 15 1567 / The Life You Give
Claudio Monteverdi, baptized May 15, 1567, Cremona, Duchy of Milan [Italy], is the composer in the late Renaissance, seen as most important developer of the then new genre, the opera. He also did much to bring a “modern” secular spirit into church music. Monteverdi, the son of a barber-surgeon and chemist, studied with the director…
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Judith Weir *V 11 1954 / The Life You Give
Judith Weir was born May 11 1954 in Cambridge, England, into a Scottish family but grew up near London. She was an oboe player, performing with the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain, and studied composition with John Tavener during her schooldays. She went on to Cambridge University, where her composition teacher was Robin Holloway;…
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Billy Joel *V 9 1949 / The Life You Give
Billy Joel, born William Martin Joel, on May 9, 1949, in Bronx, New York, U.S.A., is singer, pianist, and songwriter in the pop ballad tradition whose numerous hit songs in the 1970s and ’80s made him an enduring favourite on the concert circuit. Joel, whose father was a German Jewish immigrant, was raised in Hicksville,…
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Pyotr Tchaikovsky *V 7 1840 / The Life You Give
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, also spelled Chaikovsky, Chaikovskii, or Tschaikowsky, born April 25 [May 7, New Style], 1840, in Votkinsk, Russia, is the most popular Russian composer of all time. His music has always had great appeal for the general public in virtue of its tuneful, open-hearted melodies, impressive harmonies, and colourful, picturesque orchestration, all of…
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Days with Richard Wagner
Richard Wagner was born two-hundred and eleven years ago this 22nd of May. Beyond, and because of being one of the most controversial creative minds known to man, he has forever shaped our music, and influenced society in politics, art, and thinking. Thus, we celebrate the man – in joy, and in difficulties – by…
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Johannes Brahms *V 7 1833 / The Life You Give
Johannes Brahms, (born May 7, 1833, Hamburg [Germany]—died April 3, 1897, Vienna, Austria-Hungary [now in Austria]), German composer and pianist of the Romantic period, who wrote symphonies, concerti, chamber music, piano works, choral compositions, and more than 200 songs. Brahms was the great master of symphonic and sonata style in the second half of the…
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“Tristan und Isolde”
“I fear the opera will be banned – unless the whole thing is parodied in a bad performance – only mediocre performances can save me! Perfectly good ones will be bound to drive people mad, – I cannot imagine it otherwise.”– Richard Wagner to Mathilde Wesendonck
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The Life You Give: Bartolomeo Cristofori *V 4 1655
Bartolomeo Cristofori, born Bartolomeo di Francesco Cristofori, May 4, 1655, in Padua, Republic of Venice, Italy, is the harpsichord maker generally credited with the invention of the piano, called in his time gravicembalo col piano e forte, or “harpsichord that plays soft and loud.” The name refers to the piano’s ability to change loudness according…
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James Brown *V 3 1933 / The Life You Give
James Brown, born May 3, 1933, in Barnwell, South Carolina, U.S.A., is the singer, songwriter, arranger, and dancer, who was one of the most important and influential entertainers in 20th-century popular music and whose remarkable achievements earned him the sobriquet “the Hardest-Working Man in Show Business.” James Brown and Luciano Pavarotti Brown was raised mainly…
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The Life You Give: Alessandro Scarlatti *V 2 1660
Alessandro Scarlatti, born Pietro Alessandro Gaspare Scarlatti, May 2, 1660, Palermo, Sicily, Kingdom of the Two Sicilies [now in Italy], was a composer of operas and religious works. Scarlatti was sent to Rome at about the age of 12; there he met Bernardo Pasquini, by whom he was greatly influenced. The first of his 115…
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Tim Hodgkinson *V 1 1949 / The Life You Give
Tim Hodgkinson (b. 1949) studied social anthropology at Cambridge, and co-founded the politically and musically radical group HENRY COW with Fred Frith in 1968. In addition to composing, he has a long involvement in improvisation, and came back to anthropology in the 1990’s with research into music and shamanism in Siberia. He has participated in…
Sila Blume 