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Ernest Bour
Ernest Bour (20 April 1913 - 20 June 2001) was a noted conductor. Born in Thionville, Moselle (in north-eastern Lorraine, then part of Germany), Bour studied at both the University and the Conservatoire of Strasbourg. His conducting teachers included Fritz Münch and Hermann Scherchen. Perhaps his most heard recording is of Ligeti's ''Atmospheres'' with the Southwest German Radio Symphony Orchestra aka Sinfonieorchester des Südwestfunks Baden-Baden heard on the soundtrack to 2001: A Space Odyssey. After serving as chorus master for the radio choruses of Geneva and Strasbourg, he was appointed conductor of the Orchestre de Mulhouse in 1941. In 1950 he became conductor of the Strasbourg Philharmonic Orchestra and in 1955 of the Strasbourg Opera House, where he had conducted the premiere of Delannoy's '' Puck'' in 1949. He was principal conductor of the SWF Symphony Orchestra in Baden-Baden from 1964 to 1979. He conducted the European premiere of Berio's Sinfonia during the 1 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Thionville
Thionville (; ; german: Diedenhofen ) is a city in the northeastern French department of Moselle. The city is located on the left bank of the river Moselle, opposite its suburb Yutz. History Thionville was settled as early as the time of the Merovingians. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the region was inhabited by the Germanic Alamanni. It was known in the Latin of that era as ''Theudonevilla'' or ''Totonisvilla''. King Pepin the Short had a royal palace constructed here. The Synod of Thionville was held here beginning on February 2, 835. It reinstated Emperor Louis the Pious and reversed his former conviction on crimes — none of which he actually committed — and deposed the Archbishop of Rheims, Ebbo. The Synod was composed of 43 bishops. On February 28, 835, in Mainz, Ebbo admitted that Louis had not committed the crimes of which he had been indicted and for which he had been deposed as Holy Roman Emperor. From the 10th century onward, the area was ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sinfonia (Berio)
''Sinfonia'' (Symphony) is a composition by the Italian composer Luciano Berio which was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic for its 125th anniversary. Composed in 1968–69 for orchestra and eight amplified voices, it incorporates musical quotations to represent an abstract and distorted history of culture. The eight voices are not incorporated classically but rather speak, whisper and shout excerpts from texts including Claude Lévi-Strauss' '' The Raw and the Cooked'', Samuel Beckett's novel '' The Unnamable'', instructions from the scores of Gustav Mahler and other writings. Leonard Bernstein states in the text version of his Charles Eliot Norton Lectures from 1973 that ''Sinfonia'' was representative of the new direction classical music was taking after the pessimistic decade of the sixties. Premieres Originally commissioned by the New York Philharmonic for its 125th anniversary, ''Sinfonia'' was premiered on October 10, 1968 by the orchestra and The Swingle Sing ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
André Jolivet
André Jolivet (; 8 August 1905 – 20 December 1974) was a French composer. Known for his devotion to French culture and musical thought, Jolivet drew on his interest in acoustics and atonality, as well as both ancient and modern musical influences, particularly on instruments used in ancient times. He composed in a wide variety of forms for many different types of ensembles. Life André Jolivet was born on 8 August 1905, at rue Versigny in Montmartre, Paris, the son of Victor-Ernest Jolivet and Madeleine Perault; his father an artist, his mother a pianist. Jolivet developed an interest in the arts early in his life, taking up painting and cello lessons at the age of 14. However, he was encouraged by his parents to become a teacher, going to teachers' college and teaching primary school in Paris (taking three years in between to serve in the military). One of his own teachers, however, believed Jolivet had a future in music, strongly encouraged him to pursue composition, and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
François Couperin
François Couperin (; 10 November 1668 – 11 September 1733) was a French Baroque composer, organist and harpsichordist. He was known as ''Couperin le Grand'' ("Couperin the Great") to distinguish him from other members of the musically talented Couperin family. Life Couperin was born in Paris, into a prominent musical family. His father Charles was organist at the Church of Saint-Gervais in the city, a position previously held by Charles's brother Louis Couperin, the esteemed keyboard virtuoso and composer whose career was cut short by an early death. As a boy François must have received his first music lessons from his father, but Charles died in 1679 leaving the position at Saint-Gervais to his son, a common practice known as ''survivance'' that few churches ignored. With their hands tied, the churchwardens at Saint-Gervais hired Michel Richard Delalande to serve as new organist on the understanding that François would replace him at age 18. However, it is likely Couper ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
William Susman
William Joseph Susman (born August 29, 1960) is an American composer of concert and film music and a pianist. He has written orchestral and chamber music as well as documentary film scores. Music Susman's music is inspired by Afro-Cuban montuño, medieval hocket and isorhythm. In addition to performances of his music in the U.S. and Europe, his compositions have been broadcast, for example his piano concerto on WQXR, in ''New Sounds'' on WNYC, ''Echoes'' on NPR and Concertzender. He founded the record label Belarca Records to distribute his material. Influences Susman's earliest orchestral works were influenced by Iannis Xenakis and György Ligeti. He is interested in algorithmic composition, following his composition teacher Herbert Brun at the University of Illinois. His microtonal compositions were influenced by Ben Johnston. He also studied piano with Pauline Lindsey (a student of Artur Schnabel), Steve Behr (pianist with Louis Armstrong) and Alan Swain. Awards * A ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Igor Stravinsky
Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky (6 April 1971) was a Russian composer, pianist and conductor, later of French (from 1934) and American (from 1945) citizenship. He is widely considered one of the most important and influential composers of the 20th century and a pivotal figure in modernist music. Stravinsky's compositional career was notable for its stylistic diversity. He first achieved international fame with three ballets commissioned by the impresario Sergei Diaghilev and first performed in Paris by Diaghilev's Ballets Russes: '' The Firebird'' (1910), '' Petrushka'' (1911), and '' The Rite of Spring'' (1913). The last transformed the way in which subsequent composers thought about rhythmic structure and was largely responsible for Stravinsky's enduring reputation as a revolutionary who pushed the boundaries of musical design. His "Russian phase", which continued with works such as '' Renard'', '' L'Histoire du soldat,'' and '' Les noces'', was followed in the 1920s by a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Paul Hindemith
Paul Hindemith (; 16 November 189528 December 1963) was a German composer, music theorist, teacher, violist and conductor. He founded the Amar Quartet in 1921, touring extensively in Europe. As a composer, he became a major advocate of the ''Neue Sachlichkeit'' (new objectivity) style of music in the 1920s, with compositions such as '' Kammermusik'', including works with viola and viola d'amore as solo instruments in a neo-Bachian spirit. Other notable compositions include his song cycle '' Das Marienleben'' (1923), '' Der Schwanendreher'' for viola and orchestra (1935), the opera ''Mathis der Maler'' (1938), the '' Symphonic Metamorphosis of Themes by Carl Maria von Weber'' (1943), and the oratorio '' When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd'', a requiem based on Walt Whitman's poem (1946). Life and career Hindemith was born in Hanau, near Frankfurt, the eldest child of the painter and decorator Robert Hindemith from Lower Silesia and his wife Marie Hindemith, née Warne ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Iannis Xenakis
Giannis Klearchou Xenakis (also spelled for professional purposes as Yannis or Iannis Xenakis; el, Γιάννης "Ιωάννης" Κλέαρχου Ξενάκης, ; 29 May 1922 – 4 February 2001) was a Romanian-born Greek-French avant-garde composer, music theorist, architect, performance director and engineer. After 1947, he fled Greece, becoming a naturalised citizen of France eighteen years later. Xenakis pioneered the use of mathematical models in music such as applications of set theory, stochastic processes and game theory and was also an important influence on the development of electronic and computer music. He integrated music with architecture, designing music for pre-existing spaces, and designing spaces to be integrated with specific music compositions and performances. Among his most important works are '' Metastaseis'' (1953–54) for orchestra, which introduced independent parts for every musician of the orchestra; percussion works such as '' Psappha'' (1 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Karlheinz Stockhausen
Karlheinz Stockhausen (; 22 August 1928 – 5 December 2007) was a German composer, widely acknowledged by critics as one of the most important but also controversial composers of the 20th and early 21st centuries. He is known for his groundbreaking work in electronic music, for introducing controlled chance ( aleatory techniques) into serial composition, and for musical spatialization. He was educated at the Hochschule für Musik Köln and the University of Cologne, later studying with Olivier Messiaen in Paris and with Werner Meyer-Eppler at the University of Bonn. One of the leading figures of the Darmstadt School, his compositions and theories were and remain widely influential, not only on composers of art music, but also on jazz and popular music. His works, composed over a period of nearly sixty years, eschew traditional forms. In addition to electronic music—both with and without live performers—they range from miniatures for musical boxes through works for sol ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Wolfgang Rihm
Wolfgang Rihm (born 13 March 1952) is a German composer and academic teacher. He is musical director of the Institute of New Music and Media at the University of Music Karlsruhe and has been composer in residence at the Lucerne Festival and the Salzburg Festival. He was honoured as Officier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2001. His musical work includes more than 500 works. In 2012, The Guardian wrote: "enormous output and bewildering variety of styles and sounds". Career Rihm was born on 13 March 1952, in Karlsruhe. He finished both his school and his studies in music theory and composition at the Hochschule für Musik Karlsruhe with in 1972, two years before the premiere of his early work ''Morphonie'' at the 1974 Donaueschingen Festival launched his career as a prominent figure in the European new music scene. Rihm's early work, combining contemporary techniques with the emotional volatility of Mahler and of Schoenberg's early expressionist period, was regarded by ma ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Henryk Górecki
Henryk Mikołaj Górecki ( , ; 6 December 1933 – 12 November 2010) was a Polish composer of contemporary classical music. According to critic Alex Ross, no recent classical composer has had as much commercial success as Górecki. He became a leading figure of the Polish avant-garde during the post-Stalin cultural thaw. His Anton Webern-influenced serialist works of the 1950s and 1960s were characterized by adherence to dissonant modernism and influenced by Luigi Nono, Karlheinz Stockhausen,Thomas (1997), 17 Krzysztof Penderecki and Kazimierz Serocki. He continued in this direction throughout the 1960s, but by the mid-1970s had changed to a less complex sacred minimalist sound, exemplified by the transitional Symphony No. 2 and the Symphony No. 3 (''Symphony of Sorrowful Songs''). This later style developed through several other distinct phases, from such works as his 1979 '' Beatus Vir'',Cummings (2000), 241 to the 1981 choral hymn '' Miserere'', the 1993 ''Kleines Requi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Brian Ferneyhough
Brian John Peter Ferneyhough (; born 16 January 1943) is an English composer. Ferneyhough is typically considered the central figure of the New Complexity movement. Ferneyhough has taught composition at the Hochschule für Musik Freiburg and the University of California, San Diego; he teaches at Stanford University and is a regular lecturer in the summer courses at Darmstädter Ferienkurse. He has resided in California since 1987. Life Ferneyhough was born in Coventry and received formal musical training at the Birmingham School of Music and the Royal Academy of Music from 1966 to 1967, where he studied with Lennox Berkeley. Ferneyhough was awarded the Mendelssohn Scholarship in 1968 and moved to mainland Europe to study with Ton de Leeuw in Amsterdam, and later with Klaus Huber in Basel. Between 1973 and 1986 he taught composition at the Hochschule für Musik Freiburg, Germany, Richard Toop, "Ferneyhough, Brian", ''Grove Music Online'' (Updated 22 October 2008), edited ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
