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Awadagin Pratt
Awadagin Pratt (; born March 6, 1966) is a concert pianist born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Life Awadagin Pratt began piano lessons at six with Leslie Sompong and violin lessons at age nine, having moved to Normal, Illinois. With a violin scholarship he enrolled in University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; he then transferred to the Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore as a pianist and as a violinist. In 1992 Pratt became the first African-American pianist to win the Naumburg International Piano Competition since then, "he has performed with nearly every major orchestra in this country United_States.html"_;"title="he_United_States">he_United_States_at_the_Bill_Clinton.html" ;"title="United_States">he_United_States.html" ;"title="United_States.html" ;"title="he United States">he United States">United_States.html" ;"title="he United States">he United States at the Bill Clinton">Clinton White House, Obama White House and on ''Sesame Street''" (Cruice 2000). Winning th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Alisa Weilerstein
Alisa Weilerstein (born April 14, 1982) is an American classical cellist. She was named a 2011 MacArthur Fellow. Life and career Weilerstein was born in Rochester, New York. to a secular Jewish family. She started playing the cello at age four. She made her debut at age 13 with the Cleveland Orchestra playing Tchaikovsky's Variations on a Rococo Theme. As a soloist she has performed with a number of other major orchestras on four continents. She also is active in chamber music and performs with her parents, violinist Donald Weilerstein (the founding first violinist of the Cleveland Quartet) and pianist Vivian Hornik Weilerstein, as the Weilerstein Trio. The trio currently resides at the New England Conservatory in Boston. Her brother is the violinist and conductor Joshua Weilerstein (born in 1987). She is married to Venezuelan conductor Rafael Payare. Weilerstein has received a number of honors. In 2000–2001 she won an Avery Fisher Career Grant and was selected to play in t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Normal, Illinois
Normal is a town in McLean County, Illinois, United States. As of the 2020 census, the town's population was 52,736. Normal is the smaller of two principal municipalities of the Bloomington–Normal metropolitan area, and Illinois' seventh most populous community outside the Chicago metropolitan area. As of 2022, Chris Koos has been Normal's mayor since 2003. The main campus of Illinois' oldest public university, Illinois State University, a fully accredited four-year institution, is in Normal, as is Heartland Community College, a fully accredited two-year institution. There was also a satellite campus of Lincoln College, which offered associate degrees as well as four-year programs. History The town was laid out with the name North Bloomington on June 7, 1854 by Joseph Parkinson. From its founding, it was generally recognized that Jesse W. Fell was the force behind the creation of the town. He had arranged for the new railroad, which would soon become the Chicago and Alton R ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Piano
The piano is a stringed keyboard instrument in which the strings are struck by wooden hammers that are coated with a softer material (modern hammers are covered with dense wool felt; some early pianos used leather). It is played using a keyboard, which is a row of keys (small levers) that the performer presses down or strikes with the fingers and thumbs of both hands to cause the hammers to strike the strings. It was invented in Italy by Bartolomeo Cristofori around the year 1700. Description The word "piano" is a shortened form of ''pianoforte'', the Italian term for the early 1700s versions of the instrument, which in turn derives from ''clavicembalo col piano e forte'' (key cimbalom with quiet and loud)Pollens (1995, 238) and ''fortepiano''. The Italian musical terms ''piano'' and ''forte'' indicate "soft" and "loud" respectively, in this context referring to the variations in volume (i.e., loudness) produced in response to a pianist's touch or pressure on the keys: the grea ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Joshua Bell
Joshua David Bell (born December 9, 1967) is an American violinist and conductor. He plays the Gibson Stradivarius. Early life and education Bell was born in Bloomington, Indiana, to Shirley Bell, a therapist, and Alan P. Bell, a psychologist, professor emeritus at Indiana University (IU), and former Kinsey researcher. His father is of Scottish descent and his mother is Jewish (her father was born in Mandatory Palestine and her mother was from Minsk). Bell began playing the violin at age four after his mother discovered that he had taken rubber bands from around the house and stretched them across the handles of his nine dresser drawers to pluck out music he had heard her play on the piano. His parents got a scaled-to-size violin for him when he was five and started giving him lessons. Bell took to the instrument but had an otherwise normal Indiana childhood, playing video games and excelling at sports, especially tennis and bowling. He placed in a national tennis tournament ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hail To The Chief
"Hail to the Chief" is the personal anthem of the president of the United States, adapted by James Sanderson from an original Scottish Gaelic melody. The song's playing accompanies the appearance of the president of the United States at many public events; it is also played at inauguration ceremonies. For major official occasions, the United States Marine Band and other military ensembles are generally the performers, so directives of the United States Department of Defense have, since 1954, been the main basis for according it official status."Hail to the chief (Song Collection)" in '' Performing Arts Encyclopedia'' It is preceded ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Barack Obama
Barack Hussein Obama II ( ; born August 4, 1961) is an American politician who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, Obama was the first African-American president of the United States. He previously served as a U.S. senator from Illinois from 2005 to 2008 and as an Illinois state senator from 1997 to 2004, and previously worked as a civil rights lawyer before entering politics. Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii. After graduating from Columbia University in 1983, he worked as a community organizer in Chicago. In 1988, he enrolled in Harvard Law School, where he was the first black president of the '' Harvard Law Review''. After graduating, he became a civil rights attorney and an academic, teaching constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School from 1992 to 2004. Turning to elective politics, he represented the 13th district in the Illinois Senate from 1997 until 2004, when he ran for the U ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
United States President
The president of the United States (POTUS) is the head of state and head of government of the United States of America. The president directs the executive branch of the federal government and is the commander-in-chief of the United States Armed Forces. The power of the presidency has grown substantially since the first president, George Washington, took office in 1789. While presidential power has ebbed and flowed over time, the presidency has played an increasingly strong role in American political life since the beginning of the 20th century, with a notable expansion during the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt. In contemporary times, the president is also looked upon as one of the world's most powerful political figures as the leader of the only remaining global superpower. As the leader of the nation with the largest economy by nominal GDP, the president possesses significant domestic and international hard and soft power. Article II of the Constitution establish ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Passacaglia And Fugue In C Minor, BWV 582
''Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor'' (BWV 582) is an organ piece by Johann Sebastian Bach. Presumably composed early in Bach's career, it is one of his most important and well-known works, and an important influence on 19th and 20th century passacaglias: Robert Schumann described the variations of the passacaglia as "intertwined so ingeniously that one can never cease to be amazed." History The autograph manuscript of BWV 582 is currently considered lost; the work, as is typical for pieces by Bach and his contemporaries, is known only through a number of copies. There is some evidence that the original was notated in organ tablature.Williams, 182. It is not known precisely when Bach composed the work, but the available sources point to the period between 1706 and 1713. It is possible that BWV 582 was composed in Arnstadt soon after Bach's return from Lübeck (where he may have studied Buxtehude's ostinato works). The first half of the passacaglia's ostinato, which also serves as ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Johann Sebastian Bach
Johann Sebastian Bach (28 July 1750) was a German composer and musician of the late Baroque period. He is known for his orchestral music such as the '' Brandenburg Concertos''; instrumental compositions such as the Cello Suites; keyboard works such as the ''Goldberg Variations'' and ''The Well-Tempered Clavier''; organ works such as the '' Schubler Chorales'' and the Toccata and Fugue in D minor; and vocal music such as the ''St Matthew Passion'' and the Mass in B minor. Since the 19th-century Bach revival he has been generally regarded as one of the greatest composers in the history of Western music. The Bach family already counted several composers when Johann Sebastian was born as the last child of a city musician in Eisenach. After being orphaned at the age of 10, he lived for five years with his eldest brother Johann Christoph, after which he continued his musical education in Lüneburg. From 1703 he was back in Thuringia, working as a musician for Protestant c ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Wine
Wine is an alcoholic drink typically made from fermented grapes. Yeast consumes the sugar in the grapes and converts it to ethanol and carbon dioxide, releasing heat in the process. Different varieties of grapes and strains of yeasts are major factors in different styles of wine. These differences result from the complex interactions between the biochemical development of the grape, the reactions involved in fermentation, the grape's growing environment (terroir), and the wine production process. Many countries enact legal appellations intended to define styles and qualities of wine. These typically restrict the geographical origin and permitted varieties of grapes, as well as other aspects of wine production. Wines not made from grapes involve fermentation of other crops including rice wine and other fruit wines such as plum, cherry, pomegranate, currant and elderberry. Wine has been produced for thousands of years. The earliest evidence of wine is from the Caucasus ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chess
Chess is a board game for two players, called White and Black, each controlling an army of chess pieces in their color, with the objective to checkmate the opponent's king. It is sometimes called international chess or Western chess to distinguish it from related games, such as xiangqi (Chinese chess) and shogi (Japanese chess). The recorded history of chess goes back at least to the emergence of a similar game, chaturanga, in seventh-century India. The rules of chess as we know them today emerged in Europe at the end of the 15th century, with standardization and universal acceptance by the end of the 19th century. Today, chess is one of the world's most popular games, played by millions of people worldwide. Chess is an abstract strategy game that involves no hidden information and no use of dice or cards. It is played on a chessboard with 64 squares arranged in an eight-by-eight grid. At the start, each player controls sixteen pieces: one king, one queen, two rooks, t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ohio
Ohio () is a state in the Midwestern region of the United States. Of the fifty U.S. states, it is the 34th-largest by area, and with a population of nearly 11.8 million, is the seventh-most populous and tenth-most densely populated. The state's capital and largest city is Columbus, with the Columbus metro area, Greater Cincinnati, and Greater Cleveland being the largest metropolitan areas. Ohio is bordered by Lake Erie to the north, Pennsylvania to the east, West Virginia to the southeast, Kentucky to the southwest, Indiana to the west, and Michigan to the northwest. Ohio is historically known as the "Buckeye State" after its Ohio buckeye trees, and Ohioans are also known as "Buckeyes". Its state flag is the only non-rectangular flag of all the U.S. states. Ohio takes its name from the Ohio River, which in turn originated from the Seneca word ''ohiːyo'', meaning "good river", "great river", or "large creek". The state arose from the lands west of the Appalachian Mountai ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
