Leonard Bernstein (August 25, 1918 – October 14, 1990) was an American composer and orchestra conductor. Biography Bernstein was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts and studied at Harvard and the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. He was highly regarded as a conductor, composer, pianist, and educator. He is probably best known to the public as […]
Darius Milhaud (September 4, 1892 – June 22, 1974) was a French composer and teacher. He was a member of Les Six and one of the most prolific composers of the 20th century. Milhaud was born in Aix-en-Provence and studied in Paris under Charles Widor and Vincent d’Indy. He emigrated to America in 1940, where […]
Claude Debussy (August 22, 1862 – March 25, 1918), composer of impressionistic classical music. Born in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Yvelines, France, Claude Debussy studied with Guiraud and others at the Paris Conservatoire (1872-84) and as an 1884 Prix de Rome winner, went to Rome, Italy (1885-7), though more important impressions came from his visits to Bayreuth (1888, […]
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, […]
