An Ancient Muse
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An Ancient Muse
''An Ancient Muse'' is the seventh full-length studio album of the Canadian singer, songwriter, accordionist, harpist, and pianist, Loreena McKennitt. It was released on November 20, 2006, internationally, and November 21, 2006, in the United States and Canada. It was her first studio album after a 9-year gap. It has sold over a half a million copies worldwide since its release. Overview Work on ''An Ancient Muse'' started in 2005. According to reports on McKennitt's Quinlan Road website, most of the inspiration for the tracks of the album came from the music of Greece, Turkey, the Middle East and the Far East. Most of the tracks, with the exception of three revealed at the mid-September concerts in the Alhambra of Granada in Spain, were completely unknown until the release. ''An Ancient Muse'' debuted on the U.S. ''Billboard'' 200 at number 83, with about 19,000 copies sold in its first week. This was also its peak position on the chart. Track listing All music and lyrics ...
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Album
An album is a collection of audio recordings issued on compact disc (CD), Phonograph record, vinyl, audio tape, or another medium such as Digital distribution#Music, digital distribution. Albums of recorded sound were developed in the early 20th century as individual Phonograph record#78 rpm disc developments, 78 rpm records collected in a bound book resembling a photograph album; this format evolved after 1948 into single vinyl LP record, long-playing (LP) records played at  revolutions per minute, rpm. The album was the dominant form of recorded music expression and consumption from the mid-1960s to the early 21st century, a period known as the album era. Vinyl LPs are still issued, though album sales in the 21st-century have mostly focused on CD and MP3 formats. The 8-track tape was the first tape format widely used alongside vinyl from 1965 until being phased out by 1983 and was gradually supplanted by the cassette tape during the 1970s and early 1980s; the populari ...
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Sir Walter Scott
Sir Walter Scott, 1st Baronet (15 August 1771 – 21 September 1832), was a Scottish novelist, poet, playwright and historian. Many of his works remain classics of European and Scottish literature, notably the novels '' Ivanhoe'', '' Rob Roy'', ''Waverley'', ''Old Mortality'', '' The Heart of Mid-Lothian'' and ''The Bride of Lammermoor'', and the narrative poems '' The Lady of the Lake'' and '' Marmion''. He had a major impact on European and American literature. As an advocate, judge and legal administrator by profession, he combined writing and editing with daily work as Clerk of Session and Sheriff-Depute of Selkirkshire. He was prominent in Edinburgh's Tory establishment, active in the Highland Society, long a president of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (1820–1832), and a vice president of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland (1827–1829). His knowledge of history and literary facility equipped him to establish the historical novel genre as an exemplar of Europ ...
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Hurdy-gurdy
The hurdy-gurdy is a string instrument that produces sound by a hand-crank-turned, rosined wheel rubbing against the strings. The wheel functions much like a violin bow, and single notes played on the instrument sound similar to those of a violin. Melodies are played on a keyboard that presses ''tangents''—small wedges, typically made of wood—against one or more of the strings to change their pitch. Like most other acoustic stringed instruments, it has a sound board and hollow cavity to make the vibration of the strings audible. Most hurdy-gurdies have multiple drone strings, which give a constant pitch accompaniment to the melody, resulting in a sound similar to that of bagpipes. For this reason, the hurdy-gurdy is often used interchangeably or along with bagpipes. It is mostly used in Occitan, Aragonese, Cajun French, Asturian, Cantabrian, Galician, Hungarian, and Slavic folk music. One or more of the drone strings usually passes over a loose bridge that can be made ...
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Nigel Eaton
Nigel Eaton is a British multi-instrumentalist and composer best known for playing the hurdy-gurdy. Born in Lyndhurst, Eaton played the piano and cello before switching to the hurdy-gurdy in 1981 when his father, Christopher Eaton, began manufacturing them. Eaton has been described as the "foremost hurdy-gurdy player in popular music in North America and Europe". Career Eaton has performed as a member of a number of different bands, including Whirling Pope Joan (with Julie Murphy), Blowzabella, Ancient Beatbox, The Duellists, and Firestarters of Leiden. He has released two solo albums, ''The Music of the Hurdy-Gurdy'' (1987) and ''Pandemonium'' (2002), and the collaborative album ''Panic at the Café'' (1993) with Andy Cutting. As a session musician, Eaton has contributed to the film scores for ''Robin Hood'', ''The Shipping News'', ''Kingdom of Heaven'', ''Aliens'', ''Mansfield Park,'' ''Tulip Fever'', and Carl Davis's 1980 score for the 1927 silent film ''Napoléon''. Eat ...
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Kanun (instrument)
The qanun, kanun, ganoun or kanoon ( ar, قانون, qānūn; hy, քանոն, k’anon; ckb, قانون, qānūn; el, κανονάκι, kanonáki; he, קָאנוּן, ''qanun''; fa, , ''qānūn''; tr, kanun; az, qanun; ) is a string instrument played either solo, or more often as part of an ensemble, in much of the Middle East, North Africa, West Africa, Central Asia, Armenia, and Greece. The name derives ultimately from Ancient Greek: κανών kanōn, meaning "rule, law, norm, principle". The qanun traces one of its origins to a stringed Assyrian instrument from the Old Assyrian Empire, specifically from the nineteenth century BC in Mesopotamia. This instrument came inscribed on a box of elephant ivory found in the old Assyrian capital Nimrud (ancient name: ''Caleh''). The instrument is a type of large zither with a thin trapezoidal soundboard that is famous for its unique melodramatic sound. Regional variants and technical specifications Arabic qanuns are usually ...
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Clive Deamer
Get the Blessing (previously known as the Blessing) are a jazz rock quartet based in Bristol, England. The band formed in 2000 when Jim Barr (bass guitar) and Clive Deamer (drums), who had played with Portishead, joined Jake McMurchie (saxophone) and Pete Judge (trumpet) over their appreciation of Ornette Coleman. Get the Blessing have released six albums; their debut '' All Is Yes'' won best album at the 2008 BBC Jazz Awards. Their album ''Bristopia'' was released in 2018. Style Get the Blessing combines jazz and rock. Most of their songs are instrumental, although there have been guest singers such as Tammy Payne on "The Unnameable" and "Music Style Product" and Deamer on "Bugs in Amber". For promotional pictures and record covers, they often cover their heads with orange cellophane. The ''Guardian'' wrote that the band's music contains "horn laments and full-on free thrashes". The ''Times'' described their live performances have been described as "technically audacious, my ...
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Bumbass
The bladder fiddle was a folk instrument used throughout Europe and in the Americas. The instrument was originally a simple large stringed fiddle (a musical bow) made with a long stick, one or more thick gut Strings (music), strings, and a pig's bladder, pig's-bladder resonator. It was bowed with either a notched stick or a horsehair bow (music), bow. Changes in the instrument have produced two distinct variations. Besides the bowed instrument which has been preserved in the 21st century in Lithuania (and possibly Estonia and Flanders), a percussion instrument is used widely internationally, including Europe, North America and Australia. Evolution from fiddle to drum set The instrument was originally a fiddle. It used a flexible stick, a musical bow, as the instrument's body and neck. The resonator, at first an inflated animal bladder, was held between the stick and the bowstring. Versions in Poland, Lithuania and the Netherlands had as many as three strings, but pictures of the F ...
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Percussion Instrument
A percussion instrument is a musical instrument that is sounded by being struck or scraped by a beater including attached or enclosed beaters or rattles struck, scraped or rubbed by hand or struck against another similar instrument. Excluding zoomusicological instruments and the human voice, the percussion family is believed to include the oldest musical instruments.''The Oxford Companion to Music'', 10th edition, p.775, In spite of being a very common term to designate instruments, and to relate them to their players, the percussionists, percussion is not a systematic classificatory category of instruments, as described by the scientific field of organology. It is shown below that percussion instruments may belong to the organological classes of ideophone, membranophone, aerophone and cordophone. The percussion section of an orchestra most commonly contains instruments such as the timpani, snare drum, bass drum, tambourine, belonging to the membranophones, and cym ...
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Drum Kit
A drum kit (also called a drum set, trap set, or simply drums) is a collection of drums, cymbals, and other auxiliary percussion instruments set up to be played by one person. The player ( drummer) typically holds a pair of matching drumsticks, one in each hand, and uses their feet to operate a foot-controlled hi-hat and bass drum pedal. A standard kit may contain: * A snare drum, mounted on a stand * A bass drum, played with a beater moved by a foot-operated pedal * One or more tom-toms, including rack toms and/or floor toms * One or more cymbals, including a ride cymbal and crash cymbal * Hi-hat cymbals, a pair of cymbals that can be manipulated by a foot-operated pedal The drum kit is a part of the standard rhythm section and is used in many types of popular and traditional music styles, ranging from rock and pop to blues and jazz. __TOC__ History Early development Before the development of the drum set, drums and cymbals used in military and orchestral m ...
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ITunes Store
The iTunes Store is a digital media store operated by Apple Inc. It opened on April 28, 2003, as a result of Steve Jobs' push to open a digital marketplace for music. As of April 2020, iTunes offered 60 million songs, 2.2 million apps, 25,000 TV shows, and 65,000 films. When it opened, it was the only legal digital catalog of music to offer songs from all five major record labels. The iTunes Store is available on most Apple devices, including the Mac (inside the Music app), the iPhone, the iPad, the iPod touch, and the Apple TV, as well as on Windows (inside iTunes). Video purchases from the iTunes Store are viewable on the Apple TV app on Roku and Amazon Fire TV devices and certain smart televisions. While initially a dominant player in digital media, by the mid-2010s, streaming media services were generating more revenue than the buy-to-own model used by the iTunes Store. Apple now operates its own subscription-based streaming music service, Apple Music alongside the ...
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Barnes & Noble
Barnes & Noble Booksellers is an American bookseller. It is a Fortune 1000 company and the bookseller with the largest number of retail outlets in the United States. As of July 7, 2020, the company operates 614 retail stores across all 50 U.S. states. Barnes & Noble operates mainly through its Barnes & Noble Booksellers chain of bookstores. The company's headquarters are at 33 E. 17th Street on Union Square in New York City. After a series of mergers and bankruptcies in the American bookstore industry since the 1990s, Barnes & Noble stands alone as the United States' largest national bookstore chain. Previously, Barnes & Noble operated the chain of small B. Dalton Bookseller stores in malls until they announced the liquidation of the chain. The company was also one of the nation's largest manager of college textbook stores located on or near many college campuses when that division was spun off as a separate public company called Barnes & Noble Education in 2015. During the ...
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On Raglan Road
"On Raglan Road" is a well-known Irish song from a poem written by Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh named after Raglan Road in Ballsbridge, Dublin. In the poem, the speaker recalls, while walking on a "quiet street," a love affair that he had with a much younger woman. Although he knew he'd risk being hurt if he initiated a relationship, he did so anyway. History As a poem It was first published as a poem in ''The Irish Press'' on 3 October 1946 under the title "Dark Haired Miriam Ran Away." Peter Kavanagh, Patrick's brother, said that "it was written about Patrick's girlfriend Hilda but to avoid embarrassment he used the name of my girlfriend in the title". Her real name was Dr Hilda Moriarty, then a medical student from County Kerry. Though she regarded Kavanagh as a friend, her feelings were not romantic and in 1947 she married Donogh O'Malley, who later became Fianna Fáil Minister for Education. In 1987, Moriarty was interviewed by the Irish broadcaster RTÉ for a documenta ...
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