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Xylorimba
The xylorimba (sometimes referred to as xylo-marimba or marimba-xylophone) is a pitched percussion instrument similar to an extended-range xylophone with a range identical to some 5-octave celestas or 5-octave marimbas, though typically an octave higher than the latter. Despite its name, it is not a combination of a xylophone and a marimba; its name has been a source of confusion, as many composers have called for a 'xylorimba', including Alban Berg, Pierre Boulez and Olivier Messiaen, but for parts requiring only a four-octave xylophone. However, Pierre Boulez wrote for two five-octave xylorimbas in . Like the xylophone and marimba, the xylorimba consists of a series of wooden bars laid out like a piano keyboard "with a compass sufficiently large to embrace the low-sounding bars of the marimba and the highest-sounding bars of the xylophone." The lower notes of the xylorimba are described as sounding closer to a xylophone than a marimba, on account of its bars being both thicker ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Le Marteau Sans Maître
''Le Marteau sans maître'' (; The Hammer without a Master) is a chamber cantata by French composer Pierre Boulez. The work, which received its premiere in 1955, sets surrealist poetry by René Char for contralto and six instrumentalists. It is among his most acclaimed compositions. History Before ''Le Marteau'', Boulez had established a reputation as the composer of Modernism (music), modernist and Serialism, serialist works such as ''Structures (Boulez), Structures I'', ''Polyphonie X'', as well as his infamously "unplayable" Piano sonatas (Boulez), Second Piano Sonata. ''Le Marteau'' was first written as a six-movement composition between 1953 and 1954, and was published in that form in the latter year, "imprimée pour le Donaueschingen Festival, festival de musique, 1954, Donaueschingen" (though in the end it was not performed there) in a photographic reproduction of the composer's manuscript by Universal Edition, given the catalog number UE 12362. In 1955 Boulez revised ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Xylophone
The xylophone (; ) is a musical instrument in the percussion family that consists of wooden bars struck by mallets. Each bar is an idiophone tuned to a pitch of a musical scale, whether pentatonic or heptatonic in the case of many African and Asian instruments, diatonic in many western children's instruments, or chromatic for orchestral use. The term ''xylophone'' may be used generally, to include all such instruments such as the marimba, balafon and even the semantron. However, in the orchestra, the term ''xylophone'' refers specifically to a chromatic instrument of somewhat higher pitch range and drier timbre than the marimba, and these two instruments should not be confused. A person who plays the xylophone is known as a ''xylophonist'' or simply a ''xylophone player''. The term is also popularly used to refer to similar instruments of the lithophone and metallophone types. For example, the Pixiphone and many similar toys described by the makers as xylophones have b ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gruppen
''Gruppen'' ( German for "Groups") for three orchestras (1955–57) is amongst the best-known compositions of German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, and is Work Number 6 in the composer's catalog of works. ''Gruppen'' is "a landmark in 20th-century music ... probably the first work of the post-war generation of composers in which technique and imagination combine on the highest level to produce an undisputable masterpiece". History Early in 1955 Stockhausen received a commission from WDR for a new orchestral composition, but his ongoing work on '' Gesang der Jünglinge'' prevented him from starting right away. In August and September, he took the opportunity to retreat to an inexpensive rented room in the attic of a parsonage in Paspels, Switzerland, recommended to him by a colleague, Paul Gredinger. Surrounded by the splendour of the Graubünden alps, he created the entire plan of ''Gruppen'', "with a completely new conception of musical time". The surroundings provided mor ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Marimba
The marimba ( ) is a musical instrument in the percussion family that consists of wooden bars that are struck by mallets. Below each bar is a resonator pipe that amplifies particular harmonics of its sound. Compared to the xylophone, the marimba has a lower range. Typically, the bars of a marimba are arranged chromatically, like the keys of a piano. The marimba is a type of idiophone. Today, the marimba is used as a solo instrument, or in ensembles like orchestras, marching bands (typically as a part of the front ensemble), percussion ensembles, brass band, brass and concert bands, and other traditional ensembles. Etymology and terminology The term ''marimba'' refers to both the traditional version of this instrument and its modern form. Its first documented use in the English language dates back to 1704. The term is of Bantu languages, Bantu origin, deriving from the prefix meaning 'many' and meaning 'xylophone'. The term is akin to kongo languages, Kikongo and Swahili ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pierre Boulez
Pierre Louis Joseph Boulez (; 26 March 19255 January 2016) was a French composer, conductor and writer, and the founder of several musical institutions. He was one of the dominant figures of post-war contemporary classical music. Born in Montbrison, Loire, Montbrison, in the Loire department of France, the son of an engineer, Boulez studied at the Conservatoire de Paris with Olivier Messiaen, and privately with Andrée Vaurabourg and René Leibowitz. He began his professional career in the late 1940s as music director of the Renaud-Barrault theatre company in Paris. He was a leading figure in avant-garde music, playing an important role in the development of integral serialism in the 1950s, Aleatoric music, controlled chance music in the 1960s and the electronic transformation of instrumental music in real time from the 1970s onwards. His tendency to revise earlier compositions meant that his body of work was relatively small, but it included pieces considered landmarks of twent ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Olivier Messiaen
Olivier Eugène Prosper Charles Messiaen (, ; ; 10 December 1908 – 27 April 1992) was a French composer, organist, and ornithology, ornithologist. One of the major composers of the 20th-century classical music, 20th century, he was also an outstanding teacher of composition and musical analysis. Messiaen entered the Conservatoire de Paris at age 11 and studied with Paul Dukas, Maurice Emmanuel, Charles-Marie Widor and Marcel Dupré, among others. He was appointed organist at the Église de la Sainte-Trinité, Paris, in 1931, a post he held for 61 years, until his death. He taught at the Schola Cantorum de Paris during the 1930s. After the Battle of France, fall of France in 1940, Messiaen was interned for nine months in the German prisoner of war camp Stalag VIII-A, where he composed his (''Quartet for the End of Time'') for the four instruments available in the prison—piano, violin, cello and clarinet. The piece was first performed by Messiaen and fellow prisoners for an ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Carlos Stella
Carlos Stella (born 1961 in Buenos Aires) is an Argentine composer. Self-taught in composition, Stella studied piano at the Buenos Aires National Conservatory of Music and in 1985 he was invited by Krzysztof Penderecki to the Cracow Academy of Music. Back in Buenos Aires he received other scholarships from the Fondo Nacional de las Artes and the Fundación Antorchas and began to work for the Teatro del Sur with director Alberto Félix Alberto. He lives in Berlin, Germany, since 1999. His style is notable for combining multiple elements of heterogeneous musical traditions like gagaku, Noh and kabuki, sequences and tropes, ragam thanam pallavi, baroque and rococo, kebyar, military bands, Thai piphat, circus music, gamelan, organa, tango, Tibetan ritual music, etc. and for exploring the possibilities of variation, imitation, parody, montage, transcription, copy, quotation, paraphrase, trope and recurrence. Typical is also his use of ideas like kaleidoscope, labyrinth, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Saint François D'Assise
''Saint François d'Assise : Scènes Franciscaines'' (English: Franciscan Scenes of Saint Francis of Assisi), or simply ''Saint François d'Assise'', is an opera in three acts and eight scenes by French composer Olivier Messiaen, who was also its librettist; written from 1975 to 1979, with orchestration and copying from 1979 to 1983. It concerns Saint Francis of Assisi, the titular character, and displays Messiaen's devout Catholicism. The premiere was given by the Paris Opera at the Palais Garnier on 28 November 1983. The work was published eight years later in 1991. Messiaen's only opera, it is considered his ''magnum opus''. Composition history Despite his studies of Mozart and Wagner operas and his famous fascination with Debussy's '' Pelléas et Mélisande'', Messiaen thought he would never compose an opera. When Rolf Liebermann, general manager of the Paris Opera, commissioned an opera from Messiaen in 1971 the composer refused. Messiaen changed his mind when Lieberm ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
La Transfiguration De Notre Seigneur Jésus-Christ
''La Transfiguration de Notre Seigneur Jésus-Christ'' ("The Transfiguration of Our Lord Jesus Christ") is an oratorio written between 1965 and 1969 by Olivier Messiaen. Based on the account found in the synoptic gospels of Jesus' transfiguration, its writing is on a colossal scale, requiring around two-hundred performers. The forces required include a mixed choir, seven instrumental soloists and a large orchestra; only being surpassed by his opera ''Saint François d'Assise''. Background On hearing "an old priest deliver a sermon on the light and the filiation", Messiaen began ruminating on the transfiguration story in the 1940s. By the time he began to write the music, he had not composed vocal music for seventeen years, since his solo choral work ''Cinq rechants''. Warmer tonal harmonies reappeared in this work, in contrast to the harmonies he had been using for other works of the period. Messiaen makes extensive use of birdsong throughout the piece, including the songs of the ... [...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, having been called the "father of electronic music", for introducing controlled chance ( aleatory techniques) into serial composition, and for musical spatialization. Stockhausen 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. As 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 musicboth with and without live performersthe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
A Musical Play
A, or a, is the first letter and the first vowel letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, and others worldwide. Its name in English is '' a'' (pronounced ), plural ''aes''. It is similar in shape to the Ancient Greek letter alpha, from which it derives. The uppercase version consists of the two slanting sides of a triangle, crossed in the middle by a horizontal bar. The lowercase version is often written in one of two forms: the double-storey and single-storey . The latter is commonly used in handwriting and fonts based on it, especially fonts intended to be read by children, and is also found in italic type. In English, '' a'' is the indefinite article, with the alternative form ''an''. Name In English, the name of the letter is the ''long A'' sound, pronounced . Its name in most other languages matches the letter's pronunciation in open syllables. History The earliest known ancestor of A is ''aleph''—the first letter of the Phoenician ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
