Music
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The Life You Give: Eddie van Halen *1955
Eddie Van Halen belongs in a rarefied group of musicians who changed the very notion of the possibilities of their chosen instrument. In Van Halen’s case, he was a guitarist of superlative imagination and skill, innovating and introducing a number of techniques that would soon become part of the arsenal of many guitarists, including finger-tapping,…
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The Life You Give: Witold Lutosławski *1913
Lutoslawski was the leading progressive figure in Polish music of the second half of the twentieth century. Born in Warsaw, he showed an exceptional musical talent at an early age, with his first compositions dating from 1922. He studied piano, violin, and composition (with Witold Maliszewski, a pupil of Rimsky-Korsakov), graduating from the Warsaw Conservatory…
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The Life You Give: Neil Diamond *1941
Neil Diamond, born Neil Leslie Diamond on January 24, 1941, Brooklyn, New York, U.S.A. is singer-songwriter who began his career writing pop songs for other musicians and then launched a solo recording career that spanned more than five decades. Diamond’s interest in music began at age 16, when he obtained his first guitar. After graduating…
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patience, handwritten (in German)
“Geduld” which translates from the German language into English as patience, is the word I used for my second writing performance in the early 1990s. In an effort to give more meaning to a single action, I did several sound-performances which consisted of such acoustic writings, using a number of materials, words, phrases and sentences.…
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love, handwritten
The Aristipposian Poet presents National Handwriting Day celebrating by handwriting January 23 at 9:30pm EST on Clubhouse
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Martha Argerich — Early Recordings
A prodigy, Argerich was performing professionally by age eight. In 1955 she went to Europe, where her teachers included Friedrich Gulda and Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli. She won two prestigious competitions in 1957 at age 16: the Geneva International Music Competition and the Ferruccio Busoni International Piano Competition. In 1965 she won the Chopin Piano Competition…
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The Chorus
In drama and music, the chorus refers to those who perform vocally in a group as opposed to those who perform singly. The chorus in Classical Greek drama was a group of actors who described and commented upon the main action of a play with song, dance, and recitation. Greek tragedy had its beginnings in…
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Music is Love
Yes! Music is love, and only love In voice, drums, hums, and words Billions of pieces of music are on the praise, the need, the beauty of love
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The Life You Give: Maurizio Pollini *1942
Pollini made his debut at age nine. He graduated from the Milan Conservatory in 1959 and won the Ettore Pozzoli Competition that same year, followed by the Warsaw Chopin Competition in 1960. He appeared on the stage more frequently during the second half of the 1960s, playing in the United States for the first time…
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The Life You Give: Nikolai Medtner *1880
Russian composer Nikolai Karlovich Medtner (or Metner) was born January 4 1880 in Moscow, to parents of German descent who had lived in Russia for several generations. The family background was musical; his mother’s brother was Fedor Gedike (Theodore Goedicke), a minor Romantic composer and professional pianist. He received early piano lessons from his mother…
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The Life You Give: Earle Brown *1926
Earle Brown, born Earle Appleton Brown on December 26, 1926, Lunenburg, Massachusetts, was one of the leading American composers of avant-garde music, best known for his development of graphic notation and the open-form system of composition. Brown had been trained in engineering and mathematics before he began to study music theory and composition. In 1952…
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Mauricio Kagel *1931
Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Kagel proved to be one of the most versatile, creative, and witty composers to come of age in the second half of the twentieth century. He studied piano, theory, violoncello, organ, singing, and conducting, and was self-taught as a composer. Kagel also studied philosophy and literature extensively during his college…
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The Life You Give: Teresa Carreño *1853
Teresa Carreño, born María Teresa Gertrudis de Jesús Carreño García on December 22, 1853 in Caracas, is the celebrated Venezuelan pianist of great power and spirit, who was known to her public as the “Valkyrie of the piano.” She was given her first piano lessons by her father, Manuel Antonio Carreño, a politician and talented…
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“The Idol of My Youth” (Zappa on Varèse)
Edgard Varèse: The Idol of My YouthBy Frank ZappaStereo Review, June, 1971 I have been asked to write about Edgard Varèse. I am in no way qualified to. I can’t even pronounce his name right. The only reason I have agreed to is because I love his music very much, and if by some chance…
Sila Blume 