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Howard Ferguson (composer)
Howard Ferguson (21 October 1908 – 31 October 1999) was an Irish composer and musicologist from Belfast. He composed instrumental, chamber, orchestral and choral works. While his music is not widely known today, his Piano Sonata in F minor, Op. 8 and his ''Five Bagatelles'', Op. 9, for piano are still performed. His works represent some of the most important 20th-century music to emerge from Northern Ireland. Biography Ferguson was born in Belfast and attended Rockport School in Holywood, County Down, where his musical talent was recognized, leading to several school prizes. The pianist Harold Samuel heard him in 1922 and encouraged his parents to allow him to travel to London to become his pupil. Following further studies at Westminster School, Ferguson entered the Royal College of Music in 1924 to study composition with R. O. Morris and Ralph Vaughan Williams. He also studied conducting with Malcolm Sargent and formed a lifelong friendship with fellow-student Gerald Finzi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Musicology
Musicology (from Greek μουσική ''mousikē'' 'music' and -λογια ''-logia'', 'domain of study') is the scholarly analysis and research-based study of music. Musicology departments traditionally belong to the humanities, although some music research is scientific in focus (psychological, sociological, acoustical, neurological, computational). Some geographers and anthropologists have an interest in musicology so the social sciences also have an academic interest. A scholar who participates in musical research is a musicologist. Musicology traditionally is divided in three main branches: historical musicology, systematic musicology and ethnomusicology. Historical musicologists mostly study the history of the western classical music tradition, though the study of music history need not be limited to that. Ethnomusicologists draw from anthropology (particularly field research) to understand how and why people make music. Systematic musicology includes music theory, aesthe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Octet (Schubert)
The Octet in F major, D. 803 was composed by Franz Schubert in March 1824. It was commissioned by the renowned clarinetist Ferdinand Troyer and came from the same period as two of Schubert's other major chamber works, the 'Rosamunde' and 'Death and the Maiden' string quartets. Structure Consisting of six movements, the Octet takes almost an hour to perform. #''Adagio – Allegro – Più allegro'' #''Adagio'' #''Allegro vivace – Trio – Allegro vivace'' #''Andante – variations. Un poco più mosso – Più lento'' #''Menuetto. Allegretto – Trio – Menuetto – Coda'' #''Andante molto – Allegro – Andante molto – Allegro molto'' The Octet boasts the largest scale for any chamber work by Schubert. It is scored for a clarinet, a bassoon, a horn, two violins, a viola, a cello, and a double bass. This instrumentation is similar to that of the Beethoven Septet, differing only by the addition of a second violin. Background In response to a reported request by Troyer f ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Brass Butterfly
"Envoy Extraordinary" is a 1956 novella by British writer William Golding, first published by Eyre & Spottiswoode as one third of the collection '', Never'', alongside "Consider Her Ways" by John Wyndham and "Boy in Darkness" by Mervyn Peake. It was later published in 1971 as the second of three novellas in Golding's collection '' The Scorpion God''. The story concerns an inventor who anachronistically brings the steam engine to ancient Rome, along with three of the Four Great Inventions of China (gunpowder, the compass, and the printing press). Golding later adapted "Envoy Extraordinary" into a play called ''The Brass Butterfly'', first performed in Oxford in 1958 starring Alistair Sim and George Cole. Leighton Hodson compares it to "The Rewards of Industry" from Richard Garnett's 1888 collection '' The Twilight of the Gods and Other Tales'', in which three Chinese brothers bring printing, gunpowder and chess to the West, but only chess is accepted. Plot A Greek libraria ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
William Golding
Sir William Gerald Golding (19 September 1911 – 19 June 1993) was a British novelist, playwright, and poet. Best known for his debut novel ''Lord of the Flies'' (1954), he published another twelve volumes of fiction in his lifetime. In 1980, he was awarded the Booker Prize for ''Rites of Passage (novel), Rites of Passage'', the first novel in what became his sea trilogy, ''To the Ends of the Earth''. He was awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize in Literature. As a result of his contributions to literature, Golding was Knight Bachelor, knighted in 1988. The house was known as ''Karenza'', the Cornish language, Cornish word for ''love'', and he spent many childhood holidays there. He grew up in Marlborough, Wiltshire, where his father, Alec Golding, was a science master at Marlborough Grammar School (1905 to retirement), the school the young Golding and his elder brother Joseph attended. His mother, Mildred (Curnoe), kept house at 29, The Green, Marlborough, and was a campaigner for f ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cambridge
Cambridge ( ) is a university city and the county town in Cambridgeshire, England. It is located on the River Cam approximately north of London. As of the 2021 United Kingdom census, the population of Cambridge was 145,700. Cambridge became an important trading centre during the Roman and Viking ages, and there is archaeological evidence of settlement in the area as early as the Bronze Age. The first town charters were granted in the 12th century, although modern city status was not officially conferred until 1951. The city is most famous as the home of the University of Cambridge, which was founded in 1209 and consistently ranks among the best universities in the world. The buildings of the university include King's College Chapel, Cavendish Laboratory, and the Cambridge University Library, one of the largest legal deposit libraries in the world. The city's skyline is dominated by several college buildings, along with the spire of the Our Lady and the English Martyrs ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ivor Gurney
Ivor Bertie Gurney (28 August 1890 – 26 December 1937) was an English poet and composer, particularly of songs. He was born and raised in Gloucester. He suffered from bipolar disorder through much of his life and spent his last 15 years in psychiatric hospitals. Critical evaluation of Gurney has been complicated by this, and also by the need to assess both his poetry and his music. Gurney himself thought of music as his true vocation: "The brighter visions brought music; the fainter verse". Life Ivor Gurney was born at 3 Queen Street, Gloucester, in 1890, as the second of four surviving children of David Gurney, a tailor, and his wife Florence, a seamstress. He showed musical ability at an early age. He sang as a chorister at Gloucester Cathedral from 1900 to 1906, when he became an articled pupil of Dr Herbert Brewer at the cathedral. There he met a fellow composer, Herbert Howells, who became a lifelong friend. Alongside Gurney and Howells, Brewer's third pupil at this ti ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Piano Sonata
A piano sonata is a sonata written for a solo piano. Piano sonatas are usually written in three or four movements, although some piano sonatas have been written with a single movement ( Scarlatti, Liszt, Scriabin, Medtner, Berg), others with two movements (Haydn, Beethoven), some contain five (Brahms' Third Piano Sonata) or even more movements. The first movement is generally composed in sonata form. The Baroque keyboard sonata In the Baroque era, the use of the term "sonata" generally referred to either the sonata da chiesa (church sonata) or sonata da camera (chamber sonata), both of which were sonatas for various instruments (usually one or more violins plus basso continuo). The keyboard sonata was relatively neglected by most composers. The sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti (of which there are over 500) were the hallmark of the Baroque keyboard sonata, though they were, for the most part, unpublished during Scarlatti's lifetime. The majority of these sonatas are in one-m ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Anton Webern
Anton Friedrich Wilhelm von Webern (3 December 188315 September 1945), better known as Anton Webern (), was an Austrian composer and conductor whose music was among the most radical of its milieu in its sheer concision, even aphorism, and steadfast embrace of then novel atonal and twelve-tone techniques. With his mentor Arnold Schoenberg and his colleague Alban Berg, Webern was at the core of those within the broader circle of the Second Viennese School. Little known in the earlier part of his life, mostly as a student and follower of Schoenberg, but also as a peripatetic and often unhappy theater music director with a mixed reputation as an exacting conductor, Webern came to some prominence and increasingly high regard as a vocal coach, choirmaster, conductor, and teacher during Red Vienna. With Schoenberg away at the Prussian Academy of Arts (and with the benefit of a publication agreement secured through Universal Edition), Webern began writing music of increasing confidenc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Denton Welch
Maurice Denton Welch (29 March 1915 – 30 December 1948) was a British writer and painter, admired for his vivid prose and precise descriptions. Life Welch was born in Shanghai, China, to Arthur Joseph Welch, a wealthy British rubber merchant, and his American wife of Christian Science faith, Rosalind Bassett from New Bedford, Massachusetts. The youngest of four sons, Welch, was sent to a boarding school at the age of 11, after his mother died from wasting kidney disease. After a brief time at prep school in London, Welch was sent to Repton, where he was a contemporary of the writer Roald Dahl and actor Geoffrey Lumsden. By his and others' accounts, his time there was miserable, and he ran away prior to his last term. After leaving Repton, he studied art at Goldsmiths' in London with the intention of becoming a painter. Welch spent part of his pre-school childhood in China, and returned for a longer spell after he left Repton. He recorded this episode in his fictionalised auto ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cornelius Cardew
Cornelius Cardew (7 May 193613 December 1981) was an English experimental music composer, and founder (with Howard Skempton and Michael Parsons) of the Scratch Orchestra, an experimental performing ensemble. He later rejected experimental music, explaining why he had "discontinued composing in an avantgarde idiom" in his own programme notes to his Piano Album 1973. Biography Cardew was born in Winchcombe, Gloucestershire. He was the second of three sons whose parents were both artists—his father was the potter Michael Cardew. The family moved to Wenford Bridge Pottery Cornwall a few years after his birth where he was first nurtured as a chorister at Canterbury Cathedral, and later at The King's School, Canterbury which had evacuated to the Carlyon Bay Hotel for the war. His musical career thus began as a chorister. From 1953 to 1957, Cardew studied piano, cello, and composition at the Royal Academy of Music in London. Career Having won a scholarship to study at the recently es ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Richard Rodney Bennett
Sir Richard Rodney Bennett (29 March 193624 December 2012) was an English composer of film, TV and concert music, and also a jazz pianist and occasional vocalist. He was based in New York City from 1979 until his death there in 2012.Zachary Woolfe"Richard Rodney Bennett, British Composer, Dies at 76" ''New York Times'', 30 December 2012 Life and career Bennett was born at Broadstairs, Kent, but was raised in Devon during World War II. His mother, Joan Esther, née Spink (1901–1983) was a pianist who had trained with Gustav Holst and sang in the first professional performance of ''The Planets''. His father, Rodney Bennett (1890–1948), was a children's book author, poet and lyricist, who worked with Roger Quilter on his theatre works and provided new words for some of the numbers in the ''Arnold Book of Old Songs''. Bennett was a pupil at Leighton Park School. He later studied at the Royal Academy of Music with Howard Ferguson, Lennox Berkeley and Cornelius Cardew. Ferguson ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Royal Academy Of Music
The Royal Academy of Music (RAM) in London, England, is the oldest conservatoire in the UK, founded in 1822 by John Fane and Nicolas-Charles Bochsa. It received its royal charter in 1830 from King George IV with the support of the first Duke of Wellington. Famous academy alumni include Sir Simon Rattle, Sir Harrison Birtwistle, Sir Elton John and Annie Lennox. The academy provides undergraduate and postgraduate training across instrumental performance, composition, jazz, musical theatre and opera, and recruits musicians from around the world, with a student community representing more than 50 nationalities. It is committed to lifelong learning, from Junior Academy, which trains musicians up to the age of 18, through Open Academy community music projects, to performances and educational events for all ages. The academy's museum houses one of the world's most significant collections of musical instruments and artefacts, including stringed instruments by Stradivari, Guarneri, an ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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