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Symphonic Dances From West Side Story
Leonard Bernstein's ''Symphonic Dances from West Side Story'' was scored in 1960. It is an orchestral suite in nine movements adapted for large symphony orchestra from parts of his musical ''West Side Story''. In the published score, Bernstein thanked Sid Ramin and Irwin Kostal, who prepared the expanded orchestration under his supervision, and who had orchestrated the musical. The suite was premiered by the New York Philharmonic, conducted by Lukas Foss, at New York's Carnegie Hall on February 13, 1961. It was subsequently recorded by Bernstein and others. Background ''West Side Story'' is a musical adaptation of Shakespeare’s ''Romeo and Juliet''. Set on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City in the mid-20th century, the musical was inspired by tensions between gangs in the city, which were most commonly divided by race. The Montagues and Capulets of ''Romeo and Juliet'' are replaced in the musical by two gangs: the Jets (whites) and the Sharks (Puerto Ricans ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Leonard Bernstein
Leonard Bernstein ( ; born Louis Bernstein; August 25, 1918 – October 14, 1990) was an American conductor, composer, pianist, music educator, author, and humanitarian. Considered to be one of the most important conductors of his time, he was the first American-born conductor to receive international acclaim. Bernstein was "one of the most prodigiously talented and successful musicians in American history" according to music critic Donal Henahan. List of awards and nominations received by Leonard Bernstein, Bernstein's honors and accolades include seven Emmy Awards, two Tony Awards, and 16 Grammy Awards (including the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, Lifetime Achievement Award) as well as an Academy Award for Best Original Score, Academy Award nomination. He received the Kennedy Center Honor in 1981. As a composer, Bernstein wrote in many genres, including symphonic and orchestral music, ballet, film and theatre music, choral works, opera, chamber music, and pieces for the pian ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Stateside Puerto Ricans
Stateside Puerto Ricans (), also ambiguously known as Puerto Rican Americans (, ), or Puerto Ricans in the United States, are Puerto Ricans who reside in the Contiguous United States, mainland United States. Pursuant to the Jones–Shafroth Act, all Puerto Ricans born on the island have Citizenship of the United States, US citizenship. At 9.3% of the Hispanic population in the United States, Puerto Ricans are the second largest Hispanic and Latino Americans#Demographics, Hispanic group nationwide after Mexicans, and are 1.78% of the entire population of the United States. Stateside Puerto Ricans are also the largest West Indian Americans, Caribbean-origin group in the country, representing over one-third of people with origins in the geographic Caribbean region. While the 2020 Census counted the number of Puerto Ricans living in the States at 5.6 million, estimates in 2022 show the Puerto Rican population to be 5.91 million. Despite newer migration trends, the New Yo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cha-cha-cha (dance)
The cha-cha-cha (also called cha-cha) is a dance of Cuban origin. It is danced to cha-cha-cha music introduced by the Cuban composer and violinist Enrique Jorrin in the early 1950s. This rhythm was developed from the danzón-mambo. The name of the dance is an onomatopoeia derived from the shuffling sound of the dancers' feet when they dance two consecutive quick steps that characterize the dance. In the early 1950s, Enrique Jorrín worked as a violinist and composer with the charanga group Orquesta América. The group performed at dance halls in Havana where they played danzón, danzonete, and danzon-mambo for dance-oriented crowds. Jorrín noticed that many of the dancers at these gigs had difficulty with the syncopated rhythms of the danzón-mambo. To make his music more appealing to dancers, Jorrín began composing songs where the melody was marked strongly on the first downbeat and the rhythm was less syncopated. When Orquesta América performed these new compositions ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mambo (dance)
Mambo is a Latin dance of Cuba which was developed in the 1940s when the Mambo (music), music genre of the same name became popular throughout Latin America. The original ballroom dance which emerged in Cuba and Mexico was related to the danzón, albeit faster and less rigid. In the United States, it replaced rhumba as the most fashionable Latin dance. Later on, with the advent of salsa music, salsa and its more salsa dance, sophisticated dance, a new type of mambo dance including breaking steps was popularized in New York. This form received the name of "salsa on 2", "mambo on 2" or "modern mambo". History Origins In the mid-1940s, bandleaders devised a dance for a new form of music known as mambo (music), mambo, taking its name from the 1938 song ''Mambo'', a charanga (Cuba), charanga composed by Orestes Lopez which had popularized a new form of danzon which later was known as danzon mambo. This style was a syncopated, less rigid form of the danzón which allowed the dancers t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Scherzo
A scherzo (, , ; plural scherzos or scherzi), in western classical music, is a short composition – sometimes a movement from a larger work such as a symphony or a sonata. The precise definition has varied over the years, but scherzo often refers to a movement that replaces the minuet as the third movement in a four-movement work, such as a symphony, sonata, or string quartet. The term can also refer to a fast-moving humorous composition that may or may not be part of a larger work. Origins The Italian word ''scherzo'' means " joke" or "jest." More rarely, the similar-meaning word ''badinerie'' (also spelled ''battinerie''; from French, "jesting") has been used. Sometimes the word ''scherzando'' ("joking") is used in musical notation to indicate that a passage should be executed in a playful manner. An early use of the word ''scherzo'' in music is in light-hearted madrigals of the early baroque period, which were often called ''scherzi musicali'', for example: * Claud ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Somewhere (song)
"Somewhere", sometimes referred to as "Somewhere (There's a Place for Us)" or simply "There's a Place for Us", is a song from the 1957 Broadway musical ''West Side Story'' that was made into films in 1961 and 2021. The music is composed by Leonard Bernstein with lyrics by Stephen Sondheim. In a 1998 interview for a documentary on Bernstein, Sondheim expressed dissatisfaction with his lyrics for the song, going so far as to call them "embarrassing". He stated that he did not like the fact that in the opening line, the stressed note falls on the word "a" - in his view, the least significant word. In West Side Story Stage musical In the stage musical, the song appears in the second act of the show during the Somewhere Ballet. It is performed by an off-stage soprano singer and is later reprised by the entire company. In the original Broadway production, "Somewhere" was sung by Reri Grist who played the role of Consuelo. At the end of the show, when Tony is shot, Maria sings ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Syncopated
In music, syncopation is a variety of rhythms played together to make a piece of music, making part or all of a tune or piece of music off-beat (music), off-beat. More simply, syncopation is "a disturbance or interruption of the regular flow of rhythm": a "placement of rhythmic stresses or accents where they wouldn't normally occur". It is the correlation of at least two sets of time intervals. Syncopation is used in many musical styles, such as electronic dance music. According to music producer Rick Snoman, “All dance music makes use of syncopation, and it’s often a vital element that helps tie the whole track together”. Syncopation can also occur when a strong harmony is simultaneous with a weak Beat (music), beat, for instance, when a 7th chord, 7th-chord is played on the second beat of a measure or a dominant chord is played at the fourth beat of a measure. The latter occurs frequently in tonal cadences for 18th- and early-19th-century music and is the usual conclu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tritone
In music theory, the tritone is defined as a interval (music), musical interval spanning three adjacent Major second, whole tones (six semitones). For instance, the interval from F up to the B above it (in short, F–B) is a tritone as it can be decomposed into the three adjacent whole tones F–G, G–A, and A–B. Narrowly defined, each of these whole tones must be a step in the scale (music), scale, so by this definition, within a diatonic scale there is only one tritone for each octave. For instance, the above-mentioned interval F–B is the only tritone formed from the notes of the C major scale. More broadly, a tritone is also commonly defined as any interval with a width of three whole tones (spanning six semitones in the chromatic scale), regardless of scale degrees. According to this definition, a diatonic scale contains two tritones for each octave. For instance, the above-mentioned C major scale contains the tritones F–B (from F to the B above it, also called augment ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Anacrusis
In poetic and musical meter, and by analogy in publishing, an anacrusis (from , , literally: 'pushing up', plural ''anacruses'') is a brief introduction. In music, it is also known as a pickup beat, or fractional pick-up, i.e. a note or sequence of notes, a motif, which precedes the first downbeat in a bar in a musical phrase. It is a set of syllables or notes, or a single syllable or note, which precedes what is considered the first foot of a poetic line (or the first syllable of the first foot) in poetry and the first beat (or the first beat of the first measure) in music that is not its own phrase, section, or line and is not considered part of the line, phrase, or section which came before, if any. Poetry In poetry, a set of extrametrical syllables at the beginning of a verse is said to stand in anacrusis ( "pushing up"). "An extrametrical prelude to the verse," or, "extrametrical unstressed syllables preceding the initial lift." The technique is seen in Old Engli ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
San Francisco Symphony
The San Francisco Symphony, founded in 1911, is an American orchestra based in San Francisco, California. Since 1980 the orchestra has been resident at the Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall in the city's Hayes Valley, San Francisco, Hayes Valley neighborhood. The San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra (founded in 1981) and the San Francisco Symphony Chorus (1972) are part of the organization. Michael Tilson Thomas became the orchestra's music director in 1995, and concluded his tenure in 2020 when Esa-Pekka Salonen took over the position. Among the orchestra's awards and honors are an Emmy Award and 15 Grammy Awards in the past 26 years. History The early years In 1909 the Musical Association (MA) was founded by a group of San Francisco citizens with the goal of establishing a professional symphony orchestra in San Francisco. Among the founding board members of the MA was composer, lawyer, and opera librettist Joseph Redding. Redding played an instrumental role in steering the M ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Broadway Theatre
Broadway theatre,Although ''theater'' is generally the spelling for this common noun in the United States (see American and British English spelling differences#-re, -er, American and British English spelling differences), many of the List of Broadway theaters, extant or closed Broadway venues use or used the spelling ''Theatre'' as the proper noun in their names. Many performers and trade groups for live dramatic presentations also use the spelling ''theatre''. or Broadway, is a theatre genre that consists of the theatrical performances presented in 41 professional Theater (structure), theaters, each with 500 or more seats, in the Theater District, Manhattan, Theater District and Lincoln Center along Broadway (Manhattan), Broadway, in Midtown Manhattan, New York City. Broadway and London's West End theatre, West End together represent the highest commercial level of live theater in the English-speaking world. While the Broadway (Manhattan), Broadway thoroughfare is eponymous ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Encyclopædia Britannica
The is a general knowledge, general-knowledge English-language encyclopaedia. It has been published by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. since 1768, although the company has changed ownership seven times. The 2010 version of the 15th edition, which spans 32 volumes and 32,640 pages, was the last printed edition. Since 2016, it has been published exclusively as an online encyclopedia, online encyclopaedia. Printed for 244 years, the ''Britannica'' was the longest-running in-print encyclopaedia in the English language. It was first published between 1768 and 1771 in Edinburgh, Scotland, in three volumes. The encyclopaedia grew in size; the second edition was 10 volumes, and by its fourth edition (1801–1810), it had expanded to 20 volumes. Its rising stature as a scholarly work helped recruit eminent contributors, and the 9th (1875–1889) and Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, 11th editions (1911) are landmark encyclopaedias for scholarship and literary ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
