Music
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Kate Bush *VII 30 1958 — The Life You Give
Throughout the entirety of a one-of-a-kind creative journey, Kate Bush has achieved the rare feat of making innovative, fearlessly experimental work that’s also wildly successful. From the start, Bush’s music was ambitious and strange, and her mélange of art rock, pop hooks, theatrical twists, fantastical vocal performances, and complex musicianship resulted in hits. She became…
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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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Ruth Crawford Seeger *VII 3 1901 — The Life You Give
Ruth Crawford Seeger, born July 3, 1901, in East Liverpool, Ohio, U.S.A., studied piano as a child and was self-taught as a composer until she entered the American Conservatory. After early works influenced by Alexander Scriabin, she wrote several astonishing serial pieces, including her String Quartet (1931). She married the musicologist Charles Seeger (1886–1979) in…
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Leoš Janáček *VII 3 1854 — The Life You Give
Leoš Janáček, born July 3, 1854, in Hukvaldy, Moravia, Austrian Empire, is a composer who counts as one of the most important exponents of musical nationalism of the 20th century. Janáček was a choirboy at Brno and studied at the Prague, Leipzig, and Vienna conservatories. In 1881 he founded a college of organists at Brno,…
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Debbie Harry * VII 1 1945 — The Life You Give
Artists going into the music industry are not usually equipped for the sudden onslaught of fame. Although it may seem alluring to the casual musician to have millions of people singing songs back to them every time they play live, things get a bit complicated when everything they thought was private becomes lost instantly. While…
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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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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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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,…
Sila Blume 