|
Lewis Allan
Abel Meeropol (February 10, 1903 – October 29, 1986)Baker, Nancy Kovaleff, "Abel Meeropol (a.k.a. Lewis Allan): Political Commentator and Social Conscience," '' American Music'' 20/1 (2002), pp. 25–79, ; see especially note 3. was an American songwriter and poet whose works were published under his pseudonym, Lewis Allan. He wrote the poem "Strange Fruit" (1937), which was recorded by Billie Holiday. Meeropol was a member of the American Communist Party, but later quit. Biography Early life Meeropol was born in 1903 to Russian Jewish immigrants in The Bronx, New York City. Meeropol graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School in 1921 (his classmate Countee Cullen graduated in 1922); he earned a B.A. degree from City College of New York, and an M.A. from Harvard. He taught English at DeWitt Clinton High School for 17 years. During his tenure he taught the notable author and racial justice advocate James Baldwin. Song writing and poetry Meeropol wrote the anti-lynching poem "St ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
New York City
New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the List of United States cities by population density, most densely populated major city in the United States, and is more than twice as populous as second-place Los Angeles. New York City lies at the southern tip of New York (state), New York State, and constitutes the geographical and demographic center of both the Northeast megalopolis and the New York metropolitan area, the largest metropolitan area in the world by urban area, urban landmass. With over 20.1 million people in its metropolitan statistical area and 23.5 million in its combined statistical area as of 2020, New York is one of the world's most populous Megacity, megacities, and over 58 million people live within of the city. New York City is a global city, global Culture of New ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Harvard
Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and one of the most prestigious and highly ranked universities in the world. The university is composed of ten academic faculties plus Harvard Radcliffe Institute. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences offers study in a wide range of undergraduate and graduate academic disciplines, and other faculties offer only graduate degrees, including professional degrees. Harvard has three main campuses: the Cambridge campus centered on Harvard Yard; an adjoining campus immediately across Charles River in the Allston neighborhood of Boston; and the medical campus in Boston's Longwood Medical Area. Harvard's endowment is valued at $50.9 billion, making it the wealthiest academic institution in the world. Endowment inco ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Peggy Lee
Norma Deloris Egstrom (May 26, 1920 – January 21, 2002), known professionally as Peggy Lee, was an American jazz and popular music singer, songwriter, composer, and actress, over a career spanning seven decades. From her beginning as a vocalist on local radio to singing with Benny Goodman's big band, Lee created a sophisticated persona, writing music for films, acting, and recording conceptual record albums combining poetry and music. Called the "Queen of American pop music," Lee recorded over 1,100 masters and composed over 270 songs. Early life Lee was born Norma Deloris Egstrom in Jamestown, North Dakota, United States, on May 26, 1920, the seventh of the eight children of Selma Emele (née Anderson) Egstrom and Marvin Olaf Egstrom, a station agent for the Midland Continental Railroad. Her family were Lutherans. Her father was Swedish-American and her mother was Norwegian-American. After her mother died when Lee was four, her father married Minnie Schaumberg Wiese. Lee an ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
New York City Opera
The New York City Opera (NYCO) is an American opera company located in Manhattan in New York City. The company has been active from 1943 through 2013 (when it filed for bankruptcy), and again since 2016 when it was revived. The opera company, dubbed "the people's opera" by New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, was founded in 1943. The company's stated purpose was to make opera accessible to a wide audience at a reasonable ticket price. It also sought to produce an innovative choice of repertory, and provide a home for American singers and composers. The company was originally housed at the New York City Center theater on West 55th Street in Manhattan. It later became part of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts at the New York State Theater from 1966 to 2010. During this time it produced autumn and spring seasons of opera in repertory, and maintained extensive education and outreach programs, offering arts-in-education programs to 4,000 students in over 30 schools. In 2011, th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Good Soldier Schweik (opera)
''The Good Soldier Schweik'' is an opera in 2 acts by Robert Kurka with an English language libretto by Lewis Allan based on Jaroslav Hašek's 1921 novel ''The Good Soldier Švejk''. Premiered by the New York City Opera just four months after the composer's death in 1958, the work uses some musical material from Kurka's earlier instrumental piece ''The Good Soldier Schweik Suite'', which was premiered by The Little Orchestra Society in 1952. At the time of his death, Kurka had completed the opera in piano score form but had not fully completed the opera's orchestrations. His friend, the composer Hershy Kay, completed the orchestrations for the last scenes of the opera based on ideas for instrumentation that Kurka had written into the piano score with red pen. The work is scored for a small ensemble of just 16 instruments, which consist solely of woodwinds, brass, and percussion. The music has its roots in Czech folk and dance music with traditional forms like the polka and furiant ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Robert Kurka
Robert Frank Kurka (December 22, 1921 – December 12, 1957) was an American composer, who also taught and conducted his own works. Biography Kurka was born in Cicero, Illinois. He was mostly self-taught as a musician. He studied for short periods under Darius Milhaud and Otto Luening, and received his Master of Arts degree in music from Columbia University in 1948. After that he lived most of his life in New York. Kurka held teaching positions at City College of New York, Queens College and Dartmouth College. He wrote a total of two symphonies, five string quartets, six violin sonatas, and other works for piano, voice, and chorus. He is probably best known for the instrumental suite, ''The Good Soldier Schweik.'' This was inspired by Jaroslav Hašek's anti-war novel ''The Good Soldier Schweik'', published in English translation in 1956. Kurka expanded his music for an opera of the same name, completed just before his death in 1957. The libretto was written by Abe Meeropol of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Libretto
A libretto (Italian for "booklet") is the text used in, or intended for, an extended musical work such as an opera, operetta, masque, oratorio, cantata or Musical theatre, musical. The term ''libretto'' is also sometimes used to refer to the text of major liturgical works, such as the Mass (liturgy), Mass, requiem and sacred cantata, or the story line of a ballet. ''Libretto'' (; plural ''libretti'' ), from Italian, is the diminutive of the word ''wiktionary:libro#Italian, libro'' ("book"). Sometimes other-language equivalents are used for libretti in that language, ''livret'' for French works, ''Textbuch'' for German and ''libreto'' for Spanish. A libretto is distinct from a synopsis or scenario of the plot, in that the libretto contains all the words and stage directions, while a synopsis summarizes the plot. Some ballet historians also use the word ''libretto'' to refer to the 15 to 40 page books which were on sale to 19th century ballet audiences in Paris and contained a ve ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Guardian
''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers ''The Observer'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the Guardian Media Group, owned by the Scott Trust. The trust was created in 1936 to "secure the financial and editorial independence of ''The Guardian'' in perpetuity and to safeguard the journalistic freedom and liberal values of ''The Guardian'' free from commercial or political interference". The trust was converted into a limited company in 2008, with a constitution written so as to maintain for ''The Guardian'' the same protections as were built into the structure of the Scott Trust by its creators. Profits are reinvested in journalism rather than distributed to owners or shareholders. It is considered a newspaper of record in the UK. The editor-in-chief Katharine Viner succeeded Alan Rusbridger in 2015. Since 2018, the paper's main news ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Josh White
Joshua Daniel White (February 11, 1914 – September 5, 1969) was an American singer, guitarist, songwriter, actor and civil rights activist. He also recorded under the names Pinewood Tom and Tippy Barton in the 1930s. White grew up in the South during the 1920s and 1930s. He became a prominent race records artist, with a prolific output of recordings in genres including Piedmont blues, country blues, gospel music, and social protest songs. In 1931, White moved to New York, and within a decade his fame had spread widely. His repertoire expanded to include urban blues, jazz, traditional folk songs, and political protest songs, and he was in demand as an actor on radio, Broadway, and film. However, White's anti-segregationist and international human rights political stance presented in many of his recordings and in his speeches at rallies were subsequently used by McCarthyites as a pretext for labeling him a communist to slander and harass him. From 1947 through the mid-1960s ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Frank Sinatra
Francis Albert Sinatra (; December 12, 1915 – May 14, 1998) was an American singer and actor. Nicknamed the "Honorific nicknames in popular music, Chairman of the Board" and later called "Ol' Blue Eyes", Sinatra was one of the most popular entertainers of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. He is among the List of best-selling music artists, world's best-selling music artists with an estimated 150 million record sales. Born to Italian immigrants in Hoboken, New Jersey, Sinatra was greatly influenced by the intimate, easy-listening vocal style of Bing Crosby and began his musical career in the swing era with bandleaders Harry James and Tommy Dorsey. He found success as a solo artist after signing with Columbia Records in 1943, becoming the idol of the "Bobby soxer (music), bobby soxers". Sinatra released his debut album, ''The Voice of Frank Sinatra'', in 1946. When his film career stalled in the early 1950s, Sinatra turned to Las Vegas, where he became one of its best-known concert ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sonny White
Ellerton Oswald White (November 11, 1917, Panama City, Panama - April 28, 1971, New York City), better known as Sonny White, was a jazz pianist. White took on the nickname Sonny while a member of Jesse Stone's band in the middle of the 1930s. Later in the decade he played with Willie Bryant, Sidney Bechet, Teddy Hill (whose band at the time also included Dizzy Gillespie and Kenny Clarke), and Frankie Newton. White recorded several sessions with Billie Holiday, with whom he had a yearlong affair in 1939, and their engagement was announced in '' Melody Maker'' that May. White was a member of different line-ups backing Holiday in New York between January 1939 and October 1940, including the classic recording of " Strange Fruit"; in her autobiography, '' Lady Sings the Blues'', Holiday mistakenly credits White with having co-written the music, to a poem by Lewis Allan. In the 1940s he spent time in the bands of Artie Shaw, Benny Carter, with whom he played both directly before and d ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lady Sings The Blues (book)
''Lady Sings the Blues'' (1956) is an autobiography by jazz singer Billie Holiday, which was co-authored by William Dufty. The book formed the basis of the 1972 film '' Lady Sings the Blues'' starring Diana Ross. Overview The life story of jazz singer Billie Holiday told in her own words. Holiday writes candidly of sexual abuse, confinement to institutions, heroin addiction, and the struggles of being African American before the rise of the Civil Rights Movement. According to an article in the ''San Francisco Chronicle'', Dufty's aim was "to let Holiday tell her story her way. Fact checking wasn't his concern." Since its publication, the book has been criticized for factual inaccuracies. In his introduction to the 2006 edition of ''Lady Sings the Blues'', music biographer David Ritz writes: "(Holiday's) voice, no matter how the Dufty/Holiday interviewing process went, is as real as rain." Despite some factual inaccuracies, according to Ritz, "in the mythopoetic sense, Holiday's ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
.jpg "Click for more on -> New York City Opera")
.jpg "Click for more on -> Josh White")
