Suzanne Valadon (September 23, 1865 – April 7, 1938) was a French painter. Born Marie-Clémentine Valadon at Bessines-sur-Gartempe, Haute-Vienne, France the daughter of an unmarried laundress, Suzanne Valadon became a circus acrobat at the age of 15 until a fall ended her career. In the Montmartre Quarter of Paris she pursued her interest in art. […]
Erik Alfred Leslie Satie (May 17, 1866 – July 1, 1925) was a French composer. Born in Honfleur, Basse-Normandie, France, Satie was a music composer, and a performing pianist, though mainly for café and cabaret audiences. Satie wrote theatre and ballet music, as well as piano music. His compositions are original, humorous, often bizarre, and […]
Minimalism describes movements in various forms of art, especially visual art and music, where the work is stripped down to its most fundamental features. In other fields of art, it has been used to describe the plays of Samuel Beckett, or the films of Robert Bresson, or the stories of Raymond Carver, for example. Visual […]
The term relative pitch may denote: the distance of a musical note from a set point of reference, e.g. “three octaves above middle C” a musician’s ability to identify the intervals between given tones, regardless of their relation to concert pitch (A = 440Hz) the skill used by singers to correctly sing a melody, following […]
Absolute pitch is either the exact pitch of a note described by its number of vibrations per second, or the ability, commonly referred to as perfect pitch, to identify a note by name without the benefit of a reference note. A person with perfect pitch will be able to, at minimum, know when a piece […]
An idiophone is any musical instrument which creates sound primarily by way of the instrument itself vibrating, without the use of strings or membranes. It is one of the four main divisions in the original Hornbostel-Sachs scheme of musical instrument classification, the others being membranophone, chordophone and aerophone (a fifth division, electrophone, was added in […]
Nikolay Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov, also Nikolai, Nicolai, and Rimsky-Korsakoff, (March 18, 1844 – June 21, 1908) was a Russian composer and teacher of classical music particularly noted for his fine orchestration, which may have been influenced by his synaesthesia. Born at Tikhvin, near Novgorod, into an aristocratic family, Rimsky-Korsakov showed musical ability from an early age, […]
Igor Fyodorovitch Stravinsky (Игорь Федорович Стравинский) (June 17, 1882 – April 6, 1971) was a composer of modern classical music, best known for his work The Rite of Spring. Stravinsky was born in Oranienbaum (now Lomonosov), near Saint Petersburg, Russia. He died in New York City on April 6, 1971 and was buried in Venice, […]
The Rite of Spring is a ballet with music by the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky. Its Russian title, Vesna svyashchennaya literally means Spring the Sacred – the English title is translated from the French that the work was premiered under, Le Sacre du printemps. It has the subtitle “Pictures from Pagan Russia”. The work was […]
Biography of russian composer and pianist Alexander Scriabin. Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin (sometimes transliterated as Skryabin) (January 6, 1872 – April 27, 1915) was a Russian composer and pianist. Scriabin was born in Moscow. He studied the piano from an early age, taking lessons with Nikolay Zverev who was teaching Sergei Rachmaninov at the same time. […]