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A Toccata Of Galuppi's
"A Toccata of Galuppi's" is a poem by Robert Browning, originally published in the 1855 collection ''Men and Women''. The title refers to the fact that the speaker is either playing or listening to a toccata by the 18th-century Venetian composer Baldassare Galuppi. The poem consists of fifteen rhymed tercets; its prevailing meter is trochaic octameter catalectic. Musical background It is not known whether Browning was thinking of any one piece by Galuppi; in Galuppi's time, the terms "toccata" and " sonata" were less clearly differentiated than they later became, and were used interchangeably. A number of Galuppi's sonatas have been suggested as Browning's inspiration, but as Charles van den Borren wrote in ''The Musical Times'', "every poet has the right to evade the prosaic minutiae of fact", and it is impossible to state with confidence that one Galuppi piece has more claim than another to be the inspiration for the poem.Borren, Charles van den, trans. Richard Capell"Round ...
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Robert Browning
Robert Browning (7 May 1812 – 12 December 1889) was an English poet and playwright whose dramatic monologues put him high among the Victorian poets. He was noted for irony, characterization, dark humour, social commentary, historical settings and challenging vocabulary and syntax. His early long poems ''Pauline'' (1833) and ''Paracelsus'' (1835) were acclaimed, but his reputation dwindled for a time – his 1840 poem ''Sordello'' was seen as wilfully obscure – and took over a decade to recover, by which time he had moved from Shelleyan forms to a more personal style. In 1846 he married fellow poet Elizabeth Barrett and moved to Italy. By her death in 1861 he had published the collection ''Men and Women'' (1855). His ''Dramatis Personae'' (1864) and book-length epic poem ''The Ring and the Book'' (1868–1869) made him a leading poet. By his death in 1889 he was seen as a sage and philosopher-poet who had fed into Victorian social and political discourse. Societies for ...
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Men And Women (poetry Collection)
''Men and Women'' is a collection of fifty-one poems in two volumes by Robert Browning, first published in 1855. While now generally considered to contain some of the best of Browning's poetry, at the time it was not received well and sold poorly. Background information ''Men and Women'' was Browning's first published work after a five year hiatus, and his first collection of shorter poems since his marriage to Elizabeth Barrett in 1846. His reputation had still not recovered from the disastrous failure of ''Sordello'' fifteen years previously, and Browning was at the time comprehensively overshadowed by his wife in terms of both critical reception and commercial success. Away from the spotlight, Browning was able to work on a long-considered project. He had long been associated with the dramatic monologue, having written two early volumes of poems entitled ''Dramatic Lyrics'' and ''Dramatic Romances and Lyrics'', but with ''Men and Women'' he took the concept a step further. Brow ...
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Toccata
Toccata (from Italian ''toccare'', literally, "to touch", with "toccata" being the action of touching) is a virtuoso piece of music typically for a keyboard or plucked string instrument featuring fast-moving, lightly fingered or otherwise virtuosic passages or sections, with or without imitative or fugal interludes, generally emphasizing the dexterity of the performer's fingers. Less frequently, the name is applied to works for multiple instruments (the opening of Claudio Monteverdi's opera ''L'Orfeo'' being a notable example). History Renaissance The form first appeared in the late Renaissance period. It originated in northern Italy. Several publications of the 1590s include toccatas, by composers such as Claudio Merulo, Andrea and Giovanni Gabrieli, Adriano Banchieri, and Luzzasco Luzzaschi. These are keyboard compositions in which one hand, and then the other, performs virtuosic runs and brilliant cascading passages against a chordal accompaniment in the other hand. Among the ...
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Venice
Venice ( ; it, Venezia ; vec, Venesia or ) is a city in northeastern Italy and the capital of the Veneto Regions of Italy, region. It is built on a group of 118 small islands that are separated by canals and linked by over 400 bridges. The islands are in the shallow Venetian Lagoon, an enclosed bay lying between the mouths of the Po River, Po and the Piave River, Piave rivers (more exactly between the Brenta (river), Brenta and the Sile (river), Sile). In 2020, around 258,685 people resided in greater Venice or the ''Comune di Venezia'', of whom around 55,000 live in the historical island city of Venice (''centro storico'') and the rest on the mainland (''terraferma''). Together with the cities of Padua, Italy, Padua and Treviso, Italy, Treviso, Venice is included in the Padua-Treviso-Venice Metropolitan Area (PATREVE), which is considered a statistical metropolitan area, with a total population of 2.6 million. The name is derived from the ancient Adri ...
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Baldassare Galuppi
Baldassare Galuppi (18 October 17063 January 1785) was an Italian composer, born on the island of Burano in the Venetian Republic. He belonged to a generation of composers, including Johann Adolph Hasse, Giovanni Battista Sammartini, and C. P. E. Bach, whose works are emblematic of the prevailing galant music that developed in Europe throughout the 18th century. He achieved international success, spending periods of his career in Vienna, London and Saint Petersburg, but his main base remained Venice, where he held a succession of leading appointments. In his early career Galuppi made a modest success in ''opera seria'', but from the 1740s, together with the playwright and librettist Carlo Goldoni, he became famous throughout Europe for his comic operas in the new ''dramma giocoso'' style. To the succeeding generation of composers, he was known as "the father of comic opera". Some of his mature ''opere serie'', for which his librettists included the poet and dramatist Me ...
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Sonata
Sonata (; Italian: , pl. ''sonate''; from Latin and Italian: ''sonare'' rchaic Italian; replaced in the modern language by ''suonare'' "to sound"), in music, literally means a piece ''played'' as opposed to a cantata (Latin and Italian ''cantare'', "to sing"), a piece ''sung''. The term evolved through the history of music, designating a variety of forms until the Classical era, when it took on increasing importance. Sonata is a vague term, with varying meanings depending on the context and time period. By the early 19th century, it came to represent a principle of composing large-scale works. It was applied to most instrumental genres and regarded—alongside the fugue—as one of two fundamental methods of organizing, interpreting and analyzing concert music. Though the musical style of sonatas has changed since the Classical era, most 20th- and 21st-century sonatas still maintain the same structure. The term sonatina, pl. ''sonatine'', the diminutive form of sonata, is of ...
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Richard Capell
Richard Capell (23 March 188521 June 1954) was a British journalist who was music critic for the ''Daily Mail'' (1911–1933) and thereafter at ''The Daily Telegraph''."Obituary in ''The Times'', ''Mr. Richard Capell'', 22 June 1954, p.10 Biography Capell was born in Northampton and educated at Bedford Modern School. He then studied the cello in London and Lille, before becoming a journalist. He served in France during the First World War; he was awarded a Military Medal for gallantry at the Battle of Vimy Ridge.Brown, Maurice J.E" Capell, Richard" ''Grove Music Online'', Oxford Music Online, accessed 23 April 2012 From 1928 to 1933 he worked on the ''Monthly Musical Record'', where, according to ''Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians'', his abilities as an editor were evident. He became chief music critic of ''The Daily Telegraph'' from 1933 until his death in 1954. In 1937 he took on the proprietorship of the journal ''Music and Letters'', and he was its editor from 195 ...
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Deryck Cooke
Deryck Cooke (14 September 1919 – 26 October 1976) was a British musician, musicologist, broadcaster and Gustav Mahler expert. Life Cooke was born in Leicester to a poor, working-class family; his father died when he was a child, but his mother was able to afford piano lessons. Cooke acquired a brilliant technique and began to compose. From Wyggeston Grammar School for Boys he won an organ scholarship to Selwyn College, Cambridge, where he was taught by Patrick Hadley and Robin Orr. His undergraduate studies were interrupted by the Second World War, during which he served in the Royal Artillery and took part in the invasion of Italy. Towards the end of the war he became pianist in an army dance band. Back in Cambridge, a number of his compositions were successfully performed, but he was insecure about their unfashionably conservative idiom, and eventually destroyed most of his works. After graduating in 1947 Cooke joined the BBC; apart from an interlude (1959–65) working as a f ...
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Dominick Argento
Dominick Argento (October 27, 1927 – February 20, 2019) was an American composer known for his lyric operatic and choral music. Among his best known pieces are the operas '' Postcard from Morocco'', '' Miss Havisham's Fire'', ''The Masque of Angels'', and '' The Aspern Papers.'' He also is known for the song cycles ''Six Elizabethan Songs'' and ''From the Diary of Virginia Woolf''; the latter earned him the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1975. In a predominantly tonal context, his music freely combines tonality, atonality and a lyrical use of twelve-tone writing. None of Argento's music approaches the experimental, stringent ''avant-garde'' fashions of the post-World War II era.Saya, Virginia. "Dominick Argento," ''Grove Music Online'', ed. L. Macy. (Accessed 15 December 2006). As a student in the 1950s, Argento divided his time between the United States and Italy, and his music is greatly influenced by both his instructors in the United States and his personal affection for Italy ...
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Kris Delmhorst
Kris Delmhorst is an American singer-songwriter and musician. Originally from Brooklyn, New York City, United States, she now lives in Western Massachusetts, is an active member of the Boston folk scene, and tours internationally. She has released eight full-length solo albums and two EPs on Signature Sounds Recordings. Biography Delmhorst released '' Appetite'', her first album, in 1998, the same year she was involved in producing the ''Respond'' compilation, a fundraiser for domestic violence groups. It included her song ''Weatherman''. In 1999, she released a live album with The Vinal Avenue String Band, consisting of herself, Sean Staples, and Ry Cavanaugh. Her second solo album, '' Five Stories'', was released in 2001 and was well received. In 2005, Delmhorst, Jeffrey Foucault, and Peter Mulvey released an album entitled ''Redbird''. The trio released a live album in 2011. In 2006, Delmhorst took the words of poems by writers such as Lord Byron, George Eliot and Edna S ...
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Strange Conversation
''Strange Conversation'' is an album by singer/songwriter Kris Delmhorst, released in 2006. History Multi-instrumentalist and songwriter Delmhorst takes on setting some works of famous poets to music along with her own original compositions. The lead off track is named after Italian composer Baldassare Galuppi. Inspired by and quoting heavily from the Robert Browning poem A Toccata of Galuppi's, Delmhorst reflects on the composers times and style: "And the minor third so bitter, the six chord like a sigh, suspension, solution, asking must we die, must we die must we die? And the seventh says well fellas, life might not last, but we can try…" ''Strange Conversations'' was recorded at the same time as Delmhorst's follow up CD, '' Shotgun Singer''. Reception Critic Joe Viglione of Allmusic called ''Strange Conversation'' "an impressive and ambitious work that is evidence of the sophistication enveloping the Kris Delmhorst catalog and one hopes that these important musings get no ...
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