Top 20th/21st Century Artists on Rhapsody Online

Claude Debussy

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 16:26:19 +0000

Claude Debussy (1862-1918) was the first composer to radically break with the Romantic tradition, giving rise to the explorations of sound and form that dominated the twentieth century. In sharp contrast to the Wagnerian attention to leitmotif and development, Debussy's music deals with light, color and mood. Startling dissonances alternate with Eastern-influenced pentatonic harmonies and rich chordal textures that later influenced jazz. His non-linear structures move mysteriously from one sound-image to the next, leaving the listener on his own to find an overall unity or pattern. Scholars have found in his pieces the Golden Ratio, a common pattern in nature which gives Debussy's music its natural, organic quality. Critics dubbed Debussy's style Impressionism after the mysterious, sensuous landscapes of Monet and Cezanne. Debussy believed his music captured the essence of French culture, emphasizing clarity, natural beauty and elegance over the solemnity and over-ripe developments of the Romantic composers. - NENELOW

Jean-Yves Thibaudet

Sat, 11 May 2013 05:48:10 +0000

Jean-Yves Thibaudet is a French/German piano prodigy who has written soundtrack scores for films like "Pride and Prejudice." Thibaudet learned to play piano and violin at five, had his first recital at seven and his first concerto appearance at nine. At 15, Jean-Yves Thibaudet won the Prix du Conservatoire before winning the Viotti, Casadesus, and Busoni competitions. Thibaudet studied at the Paris Conservatoire with Aldo Ciccolini. - ESHEA

George Gershwin

Wed, 8 May 2013 08:34:40 +0000

One of the true giants of American music, George Gershwin combined exceptional songcraft with a keen interest in both the new jazz and European experimental scenes, and in the process forever changed the way songs are written and performed. Gershwin brought sophisticated song structures to the dozens of great standards he wrote with his brother Ira -- "They Can't Take That Away From Me," "I Got Rhythm," and "Someone To Watch Over Me" are among his many classics. His depression-era political satire, "Of Thee I Sing," won the first Pulitzer Prize for a musical entry. He dazzled audiences with his longer pieces, "Rhapsody in Blue" and "An American in Paris," as well as with his tenacious piano playing. He wrote what may be the only great American opera, "Porgy and Bess." The fact that he did all this in a mad rush is all the more impressive, as the young composer died of a brain tumor in 1937. - NDEDINA

Aaron Copland

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 05:44:42 +0000

In the first half of the twentieth century, Aaron Copland was at the forefront of American music. He was a skillful and determined composer who incorporated jazz, European post-Romanticism, and even serialism into his works. But it was his distinctively American pieces that have made him famous -- they're vigorous, energetic, highly rhythmic and extremely accessible, and Copland's original audiences loved them. Listeners still do: Fanfare for the Common Man and the ballets Billy the Kid, Rodeo and Appalachian Spring are burned into the American psyche. But the appeal he has as a popular artist does not make for work of poor quality. Even the most ostensibly jingoistic or simplistic of his pieces is multilayered, incredibly dense and harmonically sophisticated, revealing a formidable mind at work. For instance, the composer's best-known ballet Appalachian Spring is a powerful and emotional document of the pioneer spirit that subtly moves from austere phrases to full, lush textures. The piece flirts with dissonance, quotes from traditional folk tunes and utilizes effective and propulsive changes in meter. Copland was shrewd enough to craft art that still touches people, and talented enough to ensure it lasted beyond his lifetime. - WLERNER

Sergei Rachmaninov

Fri, 17 May 2013 01:57:08 +0000

Sergei Rachmaninov's music is so lushly sensual that even the middlebrow Tom Ewell played it in a vain attempt to seduce Marilyn Monroe in The Seven Year Itch. While "Chopsticks" turned out to float Miss Monroe's beautiful boat, the rest of us can sink into the plush splendor of Rachmaninov's musical world. A disciple of Tchaikovsky, he was one of the 20th Century's few great composers who stayed true to classical ideals rather than expanding the form. His most famous works, like the exquisite "Vocalise" for example, sound far removed from the avant-garde world of Stravinsky. A brilliant pianist whose massive hands allowed for an expansive reach across the keys, many of Rachmaninov's pieces have become musical decathlons of technical prowess. This was illustrated to sweat-popping effect in the hit film Shine. - NDEDINA

Philip Glass

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 02:42:24 +0000

Although he's one of the most influential figures in twentieth century music, Philip Glass has nevertheless earned the ire of some of his fellow Avant-Gardists for both his enormous success and his coinage of minimalist theory. A Julliard-trained classical musician whose ideas were greatly transformed when he was hired to transcribe Ravi Shankar's work, Glass embraced rhythm and repetition over the standard classical rules -- rules which had previously applied even to Avant-Garde classical. He was met with massive success during the '70s and '80s, working in concert halls, theatre, opera, film and even on pop recordings. Though often accused of overt repetition, it must be noted that Glass' music has become increasingly rich over the years, while still managing to maintain a certain accessibility on a basic, emotional level. His advances have trickled down into both the popular music we hear (David Bowie, Aphex Twin) and the alternate musical avenues that post-Glass artists are free to explore. - NDEDINA

Leonard Bernstein

Mon, 6 May 2013 04:20:20 +0000

Brian Crain

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 21:15:02 +0000

Brian Crain is a Hollywood-based pianist and composer known for his mellifluous, emotional style of new classical and new age music. Aside from piano lessons as a child, he never studied music seriously, but he is said to have made up his own melodies, whistling, even as a young child. As a teenager, he began working on audio production for film, eventually building his own high-end studio, where his aimless piano improvisations eventually developed into fully fledged compositions. He has a significant fan base in Asia, where his music has been widely used in television commercials and programming. - PSHERBURNE

Igor Stravinsky

Thu, 9 May 2013 03:53:01 +0000

Amongst composers who operated in the first half of the 20th century, Igor Stravinsky has few peers. The Russian-born student of Rimsky-Korsakov was born in 1882 and rose to fame through three extraordinary pieces for Ballets Russes -- 1910's The Firebird, 1911's Patrushka, and 1913's The Rite of Spring. The thundering bass drum of The Rite, which literally incited a riot at its opening, marked a lasting sea change for Western music: its supreme dissonance broke down the last walls of modernism. World War I prevented the ballet from touring, so he wrote chamber works and took a startling interest in 18th-century Italian music, resulting in a revivalist movement known as neo-classicism (best heard in 1920's Pulcinella). Even though he held French and, later, American citizenship, his Russian roots were deep, as heard in orchestrations of Tchaikovsky, settings of Russian folk tunes, and his return to the Orthodox Church. In 1939, he moved to the US, producing late works in The Rake's Progress and 1945's Symphony in Three Movements. He conducted and made recordings until his death in 1971. - NCAVALIERI

Ralph Vaughan Williams

Sun, 5 May 2013 23:19:22 +0000

Ralph Vaughn Williams was an influential English composer, savior of British folk music and song, and blood relative to Charles Darwin. He studied at the Royal Conservatory and Cambridge, then later with Bruch and Ravel.

In 1904, he became a major champion and preservationist of English folk songs, which were fast becoming extinct due to the widespread circulation of printed music in rural areas. Visiting the countryside, he transcribed and preserved many songs himself, and his fascination with the beauty of the music and its anonymous history greatly shaped his own compositions. In part due to his close study of his country's folk music, Vaughan Williams' music has often been said to be characteristically English, which may have been best categorized by Fuller Maitland, who noted that when confronted with Vaughan Williams' style "one is never quite sure whether one is listening to something very old or very new." - NCAVALIERI

Geoff Zanelli

Tue, 7 May 2013 12:51:55 +0000

Erik Satie

Thu, 9 May 2013 17:44:20 +0000

Few composers deserve the phrase "ahead of his time" more than the French composer Erik Satie (1866-1925). Ideologically committed to a life of poverty, the composer removed his art from the unconscious confinements of class and the corruptible influences of popular acceptance. Though he did study briefly at the Conservatoire de Musique et de Declamation, Satie was primarily self-taught, a luxury that freed him to explore ideas as he found them. As a result, he broke with convention to such an extent as to become the conceptual godfather of the twentieth century's Avant-Garde movement. In an environment where Impressionism and Wagnerism ruled, Satie injected his work with dry, ironic wit and deceptively simplistic progressions. Yet underneath his seemingly casual whimsy lie crisp conceptual models explored with such discipline as to become vaguely spiritual. "Trois Gymnopedies," one of his most well-known works, depicts ancient Greek gymnastic exercises. "Vexations," made famous by a John Cage performance, consists of 152 notes and is to be played 840 times -- a process which lasts over eighteen hours. Godfather of the Avant-Garde, indeed. - DRUSSELL

H2 Quartet

Sat, 11 May 2013 05:41:16 +0000

Benjamin Britten

Wed, 8 May 2013 12:57:07 +0000

Although Benjamin Britten's best known work may be The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra, much of his remarkable orchestral technique, broad musical palette and ability to revive the most traditional formal elements leave him with few peers in the 20th century.

Educated at the Royal Conservatory of Music, he signaled a second coming of English opera with his first major work for the stage, Peter Grimes. His other notable operas, still in wide performance today, include Billy Budd (1951), the The Turn of the Screw (1954), and Death in Venice (1973). His controversial War Requiem (1961) is also ubiquitously performed, as is his sophisticated work for chorus. His closing masterpiece was the abstract in the String Quartet no.3 (1975). After declining knighthood, Britten accepted a life peerage in 1976 and died later that year of heart failure. - NCAVALIERI

Garrett Fisher

Tue, 7 May 2013 03:46:30 +0000

David Darling

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 21:15:00 +0000

Listening to David Darling, you get a sense of an elderly classical musician slowly drawing his bow across his cello for the last time, drowning in a sea of self-pity so viscous that it's almost pleasurable. This is misery that likes company, and manages to sound pretty in the process. - SBARDEEN

Samuel Barber

Sat, 11 May 2013 16:16:51 +0000

Though the structural logic of American-born composer Samuel Barber proves him to be a dutiful student of Bach, the emotional potency of his most famous works -- namely Overture to the School for Scandal (Op. 5, 1931), Second Essay for Orchestra (Op. 17, 1942), and the ubiquitous Adagio for strings (Op. 11, 1938) -- evidence a great devotion to Brahms' dramatic romanticism. Born in West Chester, Penn., on March 9, 1910, Barber entered the Curtis Institute at 14. There, he met his lifelong lover and collaborator, Gian Carlo Menotti, who supplied libretti for Barber's operas, including Vanessa, which won the Pulitzer. During the '30s and '40s, Barber was among the most successful and widely-performed American composers, and many of his works, including his Violin Concerto (Op. 14, 1939) and a setting of James Agee's Knoxville: Summer of 1915 (Op. 24, 1948), are widely performed today. Though his 1966 opera, Anthony and Cleopatra, debuted at the opening of the Metropolitan Opera House, it was so poorly received that he was discouraged and unproductive during his final years. He died in New York on January 23, 1981. - NCAVALIERI

David Dunn

Thu, 9 May 2013 14:13:10 +0000

Maurice Ravel

Sat, 11 May 2013 12:40:11 +0000

Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) was a paramount French composer who had an incredible ability to write works for orchestra and solo piano with equal aptitude. Brought up in Paris, he studied at the Conservatoire from 1889-'95, when he met two heroes, Chabrier and Satie. As a young man, his piano pieces and songs established his precise, imitative styles and, though he failed to win the Prix de Rome in five consecutive attempts, he left the Conservatoire to produce defining works of French impressionism, neo-classicism, and highly imaginative music that explored the dangers and delights of far-flung corners of the globe. After a long illness he died in Paris in 1937. - NCAVALIERI

Dustin O'Halloran

Mon, 6 May 2013 22:36:41 +0000

The Berlin-based composer Dustin O'Halloran doesn't shy away from overtly emotive gestures. His music is generally scored for piano, strings and subtle electronic processing. It elegantly balances Romantic elements with an almost songwriterly quality. He also plays with A Winged Victory For The Sullen, a duo with Stars of the Lid's Adam Wiltzie. His film work includes the Sundance Jury Prize-winning 2011 film Like Crazy. - PSHERBURNE

Carl Orff

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 11:07:56 +0000

Most people know German composer Carl Orff (1895-1982) through his remarkably popular 1937 work for chorus and orchestra Carmina burana. Orff was born, lived, and died in Munich, receiving much of his early training at the Munich Academy under Kaminski. In 1924 he co-founded a school for gymnastics, music and dance, which led inevitably to his pedagogical devices for young children to make music, a method still widely practiced that utilizes simple percussion instruments. His adult works also sought musical primitivism, as represented by pulsing ostinatos that bear the influence of Stravinsky. All his major works, including Carmina burana and several Greek tragedies, were designed as pageants for the stage. - NCAVALIERI

Tim Story

Mon, 25 Feb 2013 03:38:58 +0000

The uninitiated have a nasty habit of assuming pop tarts like Yanni, Enya and John Tesh are somehow representative of all New Age artists. But as with most music genres, it has both a mainstream and an underground vein. Award-winning Tim Story definitely belongs to the latter. A self-taught musician, composer and recording engineer from northwest Ohio, he creates impressionistic and often somber ambient work that echoes the genre's now-shrouded roots in first-wave minimalism, Krautrock, progressive electronics and avant-garde classical music. After releasing a handful of albums in the early 1980s, including an excellent debut titled In Another Country, he signed on with Windham Hill (which would become one of New Age music's major players by decade's end). Since the early 1990s, however, Story has released albums on several labels, including Hearts of Space, Narada and Barking Green Records. Though he isn't as productive as some of his peers (more than a few New Age artists are record-producing machines), just about everything he has released is of the highest quality. In 2003, Story released Lunz with Kosmische Musik icon and Cluster alumnus Hans-Joachim Roedelius. - JFARRAR

Hauschka

Thu, 9 May 2013 16:14:35 +0000

Francis Poulenc

Wed, 8 May 2013 13:50:03 +0000

(born: Paris, 7 Jan 1899; died: there, 30 Jan 1963).
French composer. His background gave him a musical and literary sophistication from boyhood, and he was already a publicly noted composer by the time he took lessons with Koechlin (1921-4): such works as his Apollinaire song cycle Le bestiaire (1919) and Sonata for two clarinets (1918) had shown the Stravinsky-Satie inclinations that assure him a place among Les Six. His ballet Les biches (1924), written for Dyagilev, established his mastery of the emotions and musical tastes of the smart set, opening a world of suavity and irony that he went on to explore in a sequence of concertante pieces: the Concert champêtre for harpsichord, the Aubade with solo piano and the Concerto for two pianos.
Around 1935 there came a change in his personal and spiritual life, reflected in a sizable output of religious music, a much greater productivity and an important contribution to French song (from this time he gave recitals with the baritone Pierre Bernac). Yet the basis of his style was unchanged: Stravinsky, Fauré and contemporary popular music continued to be his sources, even in the devotional music (Litanies à la vierge noire for female voices and organ) and the larger sacred works (Stabat mater, Gloria). The songs include four cycles. But his output of instrumental music, apart from the many piano pieces of a private character, continued to be modest: his most important later orchestral piece is the G minor organ concerto with strings and timpani (1938), which journeys between Bach and the fairground, while his main chamber works were the sonatas for flute, oboe and clarinet.
Music for the stage also continued to occupy him. There was another ballet, Les animaux modèles (1942), scores for plays and films, and a new departure into opera, begun with the absurd Apollinaire piece Les mamelles de Tirésias and pursued with more seriousness in his deeply felt tragedy of martyrdom, Dialogues des Carmélites (1957), as well as a setting of Cocteau's telephone monologue La voix humaine (1959). - MUZE_REVIEW

Pegboard Nerds

Fri, 3 May 2013 04:55:48 +0000

Sergey Prokofiev

Tue, 7 May 2013 13:33:09 +0000

A brilliant pianist and composer of symphonies, concertos, ballets, operas, film scores and more, Prokofiev lived and worked during a tumultuous time in Russia, writing mostly from the 1920s through the '40s. He started his career with adventurous pieces, progressively altering highly chromatic harmonies for a sound that was very modern at the time. Socialist realism forced Prokofiev to simplify his style in order to reflect the simplicity of the common man -- an image of the proletariat that Stalin was impressing on all artists at the time (those who didn't cooperate often "disappeared" permanently). Romeo and Juliet, Peter and the Wolf and Alexander Nevsky are perfect examples of Prokofiev's ability to obey Stalin's dictates while (somewhat subversively) maintaining his artistic integrity. He injected warmth and freshness into his pieces using strong, unclouded melodies with progressive orchestration and harmony. - JTERRY

Anne-Sophie Mutter

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 10:32:55 +0000

E.S. Posthumus

Fri, 5 Aug 2011 03:53:49 +0000

Bela Bartok

Sun, 12 May 2013 01:06:10 +0000

A laundry list of words can be associated with Bela Bartok: daring, uncompromising, nationalistic, revolutionary. There's no question that this Hungarian composer was a visionary: along with friend Zoltan Kodaly, he is noted as being one of the first ethnomusicologists, going out into the countryside and documenting countless folk songs and all the varying folk idioms in existence. He then absorbed these elements and created music that was as original and unheard of as anything composed in the early part of the twentieth century. Pieces such as Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta and the Concerto for Orchestra -- easily two of his most famous works -- are simply stunning for their vigor, their heightened emotional states, and their unique and often disturbing sense of melodic and harmonic structure. The Allegro movement of the former, for example, is a cataclysm of cascading scales and jagged themes, an unparalleled whirlwind of sound. An accomplished pianist, Bartok composed a series of works entitled Mikrokosmos -- a whopping 153 pieces of keyboard music intended to adjust the student's ear to the sounds and rhythms of the "new." Bartok's music was not always accepted or played. Like Schoenberg, he was disdainful of ensembles that would take liberties with his work, and it wasn't until his final, ailing years in the United States that he had his greatest successes. Today, no one could possibly deny the inherent genius or far-reaching scope of his music, or the influence that his work has had on countless composers. - WLERNER

Steve Reich

Thu, 9 May 2013 05:17:11 +0000

Famous for his work with phasing, Reich has become one of the most recognized and popular of the American Minimalists, alongside Philip Glass. Reich's early phasing experiments involved playing several tape loops simultaneously, letting them gradually fall out of phase over a period of time. The result was a dynamic generation and degeneration of unexpected rhythms and harmonies. This technique is most directly illustrated in It's Gonna Rain (1965) and Come Out (1966). During the late 1960s and into the '70s, Reich applied the technique to acoustic instruments, composing Violin Phase (1967) and the popular Drumming (1971). By Music for 18 Musicians (1976), the composer had garnered both critical and popular praise, which gave him license to explore more personal subjects. Tehillim (1981), Different Trains (1988) and his multimedia opera The Cave (1990-93) all explore aspects of his Jewish heritage. Though phasing techniques figure prominently in these works, the Minimalist preoccupation with process shares the stage with content, a marriage which has earned him enormous record sales and praise from listeners who tend to approach new music with extreme caution. - DRUSSELL

Dub Step

Fri, 3 May 2013 22:22:57 +0000

Sonia Rubinsky

Tue, 7 May 2013 08:17:56 +0000

A stunning Brazilian pianist with flawless technique and a full, robust tone. She works mostly with Romantic and Modern compositions, recording on the Naxos label. - JTERRY

Antonymes

Mon, 4 Feb 2013 10:44:34 +0000

Arvo Part

Tue, 7 May 2013 22:05:55 +0000

One of contemporary classical's bestsellers, this Estonian composer's body of work is both heartbreakingly fragile and deeply contemplative. He began his career as a staunch serialist, using the style's dissonance as protest against his Soviet government. However, by the end of the '60s, Part's style shifted to what he calls "tintinnabulation," or the sound of bells. Marked by a minimalist focus on subtle, exact tone, his musical language harkens back to the simple, deep harmonies of early music while remaining absolutely modern. The music does not change key throughout the course of a given composition, giving the work its characteristic timeless, meditative quality. Themes of repentance and rebirth surround much of his work, which, choral work in particular, is unabashedly spiritual and absolutely sublime. - DRUSSELL

Astor Piazzolla

Fri, 17 May 2013 02:40:06 +0000

Probably the most famous artist to ever emerge from Argentina, Astor Piazzolla was the creator of the nuevo Tango. Long before bringing the tensions of the street corner into the genteel salons where Tango was sheltered, he learned to play the bandoneon (a button accordion) as a child in New York, where he also got his first taste of jazz. He formed the Octeto Buenos Aires in 1955 and, in 1960, his Quinteto Nuevo Tango, an ensemble composed of violin, guitar, bass, piano and bandoneon. His sense of modernity and understanding of jazz were incorporated into bold arrangements that ebb and flow between gentle melodic phrases and tempestuous crescendos. The 1970s and '80s found him playing to larger worldwide audiences and finally attaining respect at home in Argentina. A prolific composer and recording artist, Piazzolla's popularity after his 1992 death continues to grow as fans explore the labyrinth of passion on display in his music. This legend breathed new, vital life into an old form. - RLEAVER

Alexandre Tharaud

Tue, 7 May 2013 10:11:30 +0000

Pianist Tharaud shines in his interpretations of the French Impressionists, as seen in his performances of Darius Milhaud works. Gentle, tender pieces are handled with deft grace while jazzier-flavored works are given the appropriate buoyancy and rhythm. - WLERNER

Alexander Scriabin

Fri, 10 May 2013 08:16:42 +0000

The musical language of Alexander Scriabin was unique and exotic from the outset, and over the course of his career became even more so. This Russian pianist/composer born in 1871 was deeply influenced by the spiritual mysticism of his day, and explored an otherly world through his music. Compositions such as his Third Symphony, The Divine Poem deal with subjects like pantheism vs. monotheism, and late in life his intentions were to create holistic religious events, not unlike ancient Mediterranean pagan rites, infused with music, dancing, colors, and smells. Part of his eccentricity was his claim to experience synesthesia, the bleeding of one sensory experience into another; thus he equated colors, as in red, blue, or yellow, with certain tones and key relationships. F sharp, for example, he experienced as blue, and C major as red. This experience inspired the creation of a color organ, a keyboard type device that projected colors upon a screen, depending upon the chords played. However, it wasn't until the 1970s that a similar device actually succeeded at a performance, due to the necessary technology involved. His influence upon the Western tradition is perhaps felt mostly in spirit, rather than in his unique and fascinating harmonic language. - HBONO

John Adams

Sat, 11 May 2013 22:35:40 +0000

John Adams is one of the most popular of contemporary composers, but this should hardly come as a surprise, as his work is vibrant, propulsive, exuberant and muscular. Unlike his Minimalist forebears -- Terry Riley, La Monte Young, Steve Reich -- Adams is loathe to work only within the confines of a system marked by its static nature, relying as it does upon repetition. The composer is a self-described "post-Minimalist," as much of his work utilizes the hypnotic, circular and (of course) repetitive rhythms found in the genre. However, it also displays ample variety in terms of sweeping dynamic shifts, changes in tonality and a willingness to indulge in decidedly dramatic developments. This is evident in his wonderful 1985 work Harmonielehre, in which the opening chords crash upon the listener with all the impact of an 18-wheeler being driven through a wall, leaving you with the same breathless feeling a Beethoven symphony can produce. The rush provided by the first movement is contrasted with the more subdued, lush and almost neo-Romantic second movement. In the third and final section, Adams allows for more than one tonal center, creating a kind of struggle that pushes the music forward with unshakeable vigor. - WLERNER

Alex Kidd

Sun, 12 May 2013 03:14:02 +0000

Orchestra

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 16:28:28 +0000

Workout Hits Remixed

Tue, 7 May 2013 22:57:23 +0000

Swans

Sun, 12 May 2013 01:28:12 +0000

Strikes of blunt percussion repeat relentlessly. Drone-scapes of acoustic and electric instruments create both warm, familiar nostalgic sounds of the past and cold, and alien music we hope the future will never bring. Producing the heaviest sound imaginable, Swans' auricular hypnosis is overwhelmingly forceful, leaving no space for the self, only the corporeal remains to react and recoil. Each song comes in waves of rhythm, undulating at the sexual pace of unwholesome, depraved bodies. Swans possess the brutality of Einsturzende Neubauten's less Industrial output and the dark classical bombast of Dead Can Dance. Michael Gira's fiendish groans and Jarboe's spritely voice emit elegant words so grave, you may wish you couldn't hear them so clearly. Swans have created the Requiem for the Self. - MKATE

Colin Stetson

Thu, 9 May 2013 02:19:00 +0000

Clogs

Tue, 7 May 2013 14:17:50 +0000

Julissa

Tue, 7 May 2013 04:13:20 +0000

Michael Nyman

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 07:24:24 +0000

Michael Nyman is one of those rare composers whose scholarly and musical accomplishments have both brought him considerable fame. A film composer of the finest caliber, Nyman has contributed scores to several Peter Greenway films, including The Cook, The Thief, Her Wife and His Lover, and Prospero's Books, his modular style providing the perfect complement to director's beautifully composed images. His non-film music falls on the lighter side of the Avant-Garde, abandoning the bold, abstract statements of Stockhausen in favor the more accessible ethnic sound of "The Michael Nyman Band." But just as important as his musical work is his scholarly work. His 1974 book Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond has become an essential text for both casual connoisseurs of the genre to well-versed academics. And, lest we forget, Nyman coined the universally accepted musical term which many use to classify some of his own work: minimalism. - DRUSSELL

Anggun

Wed, 8 May 2013 21:52:36 +0000

John Dahlback

Tue, 14 May 2013 15:54:06 +0000

Deep Space

Thu, 9 May 2013 20:07:55 +0000

Gustav Holst

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 14:20:25 +0000

Born in Cheltenham, England, on September 21, 1874, Gustav Holst's reputation today rests on his powerful 1916 work for orchestra, the Planets. He studied at the Royal Conservatory where he began a lifelong friendship with Vaughan Williams. Like Vaughan Williams, much of his work shows interest in traditional English folksongs, but, as a professional trombonist, Holst's orchestral scores also favor forceful brass writing in the style of Wagner, Strauss, and Stravinsky. His eclectic output also includes concertos written in confident neo-classical style, impressionistic operas and the widely-performed 1917 cantata the Hymn of Jesus. He died in London on May 25, 1934. - NCAVALIERI