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Jean Françaix
Jean René Désiré Françaix (; 23 May 1912, in Le Mans – 25 September 1997, in Paris) was a French neoclassicism (music), neoclassical composer, piano, pianist, and orchestration, orchestrator, known for his prolific output and vibrant style. Life Françaix's natural gifts were encouraged from an early age by his family. His father, Director of the Conservatoire of Le Mans, was a musicology, musicologist, composer, and pianist, and his mother was a teacher of singing. Jean Françaix studied at the Conservatoire of Le Mans and then at the Conservatoire de Paris, Paris Conservatory, and was only six when he took up composing, with a style heavily influenced by Ravel."Françaix, Jean René (23 May 1912, Le Mans)." ''Harvard Biographical Dictionary of Music''. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003. Credo Reference. Web. 1 October 2012. Françaix's first publication, in 1922, caught the attention of a composer working for the publishing house, who steered the gifted boy toward a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Le Mans
Le Mans (, ) is a city in northwestern France on the Sarthe River where it meets the Huisne. Traditionally the capital of the province of Maine, it is now the capital of the Sarthe department and the seat of the Roman Catholic diocese of Le Mans. Le Mans is a part of the Pays de la Loire region. Its inhabitants are called ''Manceaux'' (male) and ''Mancelles'' (female). Since 1923, the city has hosted the 24 Hours of Le Mans, the world's oldest active endurance sports car race. History First mentioned by Claudius Ptolemy, the Roman city ''Vindinium'' was the capital of the Aulerci, a sub tribe of the Aedui. Le Mans is also known as ''Civitas Cenomanorum'' (City of the Cenomani), or ''Cenomanus''. Their city, seized by the Romans in 47 BC, was within the ancient Roman province of Gallia Lugdunensis. A 3rd-century amphitheatre is still visible. The ''thermae'' were demolished during the crisis of the third century when workers were mobilized to build the city's defensive walls ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Francis Poulenc
Francis Jean Marcel Poulenc (; 7 January 189930 January 1963) was a French composer and pianist. His compositions include songs, solo piano works, chamber music, choral pieces, operas, ballets, and orchestral concert music. Among the best-known are the piano suite '' Trois mouvements perpétuels'' (1919), the ballet ''Les biches'' (1923), the ''Concert champêtre'' (1928) for harpsichord and orchestra, the Organ Concerto (1938), the opera ''Dialogues des Carmélites'' (1957), and the '' Gloria'' (1959) for soprano, choir, and orchestra. As the only son of a prosperous manufacturer, Poulenc was expected to follow his father into the family firm, and he was not allowed to enrol at a music college. Largely self-educated musically, he studied with the pianist Ricardo Viñes, who became his mentor after the composer's parents died. Poulenc also made the acquaintance of Erik Satie, under whose tutelage he became one of a group of young composers known collectively as ''Les Six''. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Igor Stravinsky
Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky (6 April 1971) was a Russian composer, pianist and conductor, later of French (from 1934) and American (from 1945) citizenship. He is widely considered one of the most important and influential composers of the 20th century and a pivotal figure in modernist music. Stravinsky's compositional career was notable for its stylistic diversity. He first achieved international fame with three ballets commissioned by the impresario Sergei Diaghilev and first performed in Paris by Diaghilev's Ballets Russes: ''The Firebird'' (1910), ''Petrushka'' (1911), and ''The Rite of Spring'' (1913). The last transformed the way in which subsequent composers thought about rhythmic structure and was largely responsible for Stravinsky's enduring reputation as a revolutionary who pushed the boundaries of musical design. His "Russian phase", which continued with works such as '' Renard'', ''L'Histoire du soldat,'' and ''Les noces'', was followed in the 1920s by a period ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Emmanuel Chabrier
Alexis-Emmanuel Chabrier (; 18 January 184113 September 1894) was a French Romantic music, Romantic composer and pianist. His Bourgeoisie, bourgeois family did not approve of a musical career for him, and he studied law in Paris and then worked as a civil servant until the age of thirty-nine while immersing himself in the modernist artistic life of the French capital and composing in his spare time. From 1880 until his final illness he was a full-time composer. Although known primarily for two of his orchestral works, ''España (Chabrier), España'' and ''Joyeuse marche'', Chabrier left a List of operas and operettas by Emmanuel Chabrier, corpus of operas (including ''L'étoile (opera), L'étoile''), songs, and piano music, but no symphonies, concertos, quartets, sonatas, or religious or liturgical music. His lack of academic training left him free to create his own musical language, unaffected by established rules, and he was regarded by many later composers as an important inno ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sacha Guitry
Alexandre-Pierre Georges "Sacha" Guitry (; 21 February 188524 July 1957) was a French stage actor, film actor, director, screenwriter, and playwright of the boulevard theatre. He was the son of a leading French actor, Lucien Guitry, and followed his father into the theatrical profession. He became known for his stage performances, particularly in boulevardier roles. He was also a prolific playwright, writing 115 plays throughout his career. He was married five times, always to rising actresses whose careers he furthered. Probably his best-known wife was Yvonne Printemps to whom he was married between 1919 and 1932. Guitry's plays range from historical dramas to contemporary light comedies. Some have musical scores, by composers including André Messager and Reynaldo Hahn. When silent films became popular Guitry avoided them, finding the lack of spoken dialogue fatal to dramatic impact. From the 1930s to the end of his life he enthusiastically embraced the cinema, making as many ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Atonal Music
Atonality in its broadest sense is music that lacks a tonal center, or key. ''Atonality'', in this sense, usually describes compositions written from about the early 20th-century to the present day, where a hierarchy of harmonies focusing on a single, central triad is not used, and the notes of the chromatic scale function independently of one another. More narrowly, the term ''atonality'' describes music that does not conform to the system of tonal hierarchies that characterized European classical music between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. "The repertory of atonal music is characterized by the occurrence of pitches in novel combinations, as well as by the occurrence of familiar pitch combinations in unfamiliar environments". The term is also occasionally used to describe music that is neither tonal nor serial, especially the pre-twelve-tone music of the Second Viennese School, principally Alban Berg, Arnold Schoenberg, and Anton Webern. However, "as a categorica ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cantata
A cantata (; ; literally "sung", past participle feminine singular of the Italian verb ''cantare'', "to sing") is a vocal composition with an instrumental accompaniment, typically in several movements, often involving a choir. The meaning of the term changed over time, from the simple single-voice madrigal of the early 17th century, to the multi-voice "cantata da camera" and the "cantata da chiesa" of the later part of that century, from the more substantial dramatic forms of the 18th century to the usually sacred-texted 19th-century cantata, which was effectively a type of short oratorio. Cantatas for use in the liturgy of church services are called church cantata or sacred cantata; other cantatas can be indicated as secular cantatas. Several cantatas were, and still are, written for special occasions, such as Christmas cantatas. Christoph Graupner, Georg Philipp Telemann and Johann Sebastian Bach composed cycles of church cantatas for the occasions of the liturgical year. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ballet (music)
Ballet as a music form progressed from simply a complement to dance, to a concrete compositional form that often had as much value as the dance that went along with it. The dance form, originating in France during the 17th century, began as a theatrical dance. It was not until the 19th century that ballet gained status as a “classical” form. In ballet, the terms ‘classical’ and ‘romantic’ are chronologically reversed from musical usage. Thus, the 19th century Classical period in ballet coincided with the 19th century Romantic era in music. Ballet music composers from the 17th–20th centuries, including the likes of Jean-Baptiste Lully, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Igor Stravinsky, and Sergei Prokofiev, were predominantly in France and Russia. Yet with the increased international notoriety seen in Tchaikovsky's and Stravinsky's lifetime, ballet music composition and ballet in general spread across the western world. History Until about the second half of the 19th century, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Theatre
Theatre or theater is a collaborative form of performing art that uses live performers, usually actors or actresses, to present the experience of a real or imagined event before a live audience in a specific place, often a stage. The performers may communicate this experience to the audience through combinations of gesture, speech, song, music, and dance. Elements of art, such as painted scenery and stagecraft such as lighting are used to enhance the physicality, presence and immediacy of the experience. The specific place of the performance is also named by the word "theatre" as derived from the Ancient Greek θέατρον (théatron, "a place for viewing"), itself from θεάομαι (theáomai, "to see", "to watch", "to observe"). Modern Western theatre comes, in large measure, from the theatre of ancient Greece, from which it borrows technical terminology, classification into genres, and many of its themes, stock characters, and plot elements. Theatre artist Patrice ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Opera
Opera is a form of theatre in which music is a fundamental component and dramatic roles are taken by singers. Such a "work" (the literal translation of the Italian word "opera") is typically a collaboration between a composer and a librettist and incorporates a number of the performing arts, such as acting, scenery, costume, and sometimes dance or ballet. The performance is typically given in an opera house, accompanied by an orchestra or smaller musical ensemble, which since the early 19th century has been led by a conductor. Although musical theatre is closely related to opera, the two are considered to be distinct from one another. Opera is a key part of the Western classical music tradition. Originally understood as an entirely sung piece, in contrast to a play with songs, opera has come to include numerous genres, including some that include spoken dialogue such as '' Singspiel'' and '' Opéra comique''. In traditional number opera, singers employ two styles of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Symphony
A symphony is an extended musical composition in Western classical music, most often for orchestra. Although the term has had many meanings from its origins in the ancient Greek era, by the late 18th century the word had taken on the meaning common today: a work usually consisting of multiple distinct sections or movement (music), movements, often four, with the first movement in sonata form. Symphonies are almost always scored for an orchestra consisting of a string section (violin, viola, cello, and double bass), Brass instrument, brass, Woodwind instrument, woodwind, and Percussion instrument, percussion Musical instrument, instruments which altogether number about 30 to 100 musicians. Symphonies are notated in a Full score, musical score, which contains all the instrument parts. Orchestral musicians play from parts which contain just the notated music for their own instrument. Some symphonies also contain vocal parts (e.g., Ludwig van Beethoven, Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 (Bee ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Concerti
A concerto (; plural ''concertos'', or ''concerti'' from the Italian plural) is, from the late Baroque era, mostly understood as an instrumental composition, written for one or more soloists accompanied by an orchestra or other ensemble. The typical three- movement structure, a slow movement (e.g., lento or adagio) preceded and followed by fast movements (e.g. presto or allegro), became a standard from the early 18th century. The concerto originated as a genre of vocal music in the late 16th century: the instrumental variant appeared around a century later, when Italians such as Giuseppe Torelli started to publish their concertos. A few decades later, Venetian composers, such as Antonio Vivaldi, had written hundreds of violin concertos, while also producing solo concertos for other instruments such as a cello or a woodwind instrument, and concerti grossi for a group of soloists. The first keyboard concertos, such as George Frideric Handel's organ concertos and Johann ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
