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Slonimsky's Earbox
''Slonimsky's Earbox'' is an orchestral work written in 1996 by American composer John Adams. The world premiere was given by the Halle Orchestra, conducted by Kent Nagano on September 11, 1996 as part of the opening night celebrations for Manchester's Bridgewater Hall. The piece is based on Igor Stravinsky's work ''Le chant du rossignol'', as Adams was drawn to the modal harmonies that Stravinsky employed. It is a step toward integrating standard minimalist techniques with a more complex contrapuntal style. It is approximately 13 minutes in length. Adams wrote the piece in tribute to his friend, the Russian-American composer, critic and musicologist Nicolas Slonimsky, who had recently died. Slonimsky, the long-time editor of '' Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians,'' was the author of ''The Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns,'' a book of which Adams has made frequent use. Adams describes Slonimsky as "a character of mind-boggling ability", and says that ''Slon ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Adams (composer)
John Coolidge Adams (born February 15, 1947) is an American composer and conductor whose music is rooted in minimalism. Among the most regularly performed composers of contemporary classical music, he is particularly noted for his operas, which are often centered around recent historical events. Apart from opera, his ''oeuvre'' includes orchestral, concertante, vocal, choral, chamber, electroacoustic and piano music. Born in Worcester, Massachusetts, Adams grew up in a musical family, being regularly exposed to classical music, jazz, musical theatre and rock music. He attended Harvard University, studying with Kirchner, Sessions and Del Tredici among others. Though his earliest work was aligned with modernist music, he began to disagree with its tenets upon reading John Cage's '' Silence: Lectures and Writings''. Teaching at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, Adams developed his own minimalist aesthetic, which was first fully realized in ''Phrygian Gates'' (1977) a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Halle
''The'' () is a grammatical article in English, denoting persons or things that are already or about to be mentioned, under discussion, implied or otherwise presumed familiar to listeners, readers, or speakers. It is the definite article in English. ''The'' is the most frequently used word in the English language; studies and analyses of texts have found it to account for seven percent of all printed English-language words. It is derived from gendered articles in Old English which combined in Middle English and now has a single form used with nouns of any gender. The word can be used with both singular and plural nouns, and with a noun that starts with any letter. This is different from many other languages, which have different forms of the definite article for different genders or numbers. Pronunciation In most dialects, "the" is pronounced as (with the voiced dental fricative followed by a schwa) when followed by a consonant sound, and as (homophone of the archaic pr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kent Nagano
Kent George Nagano GOQ, MSM (born November 22, 1951) is an American conductor and opera administrator. Since 2015, he has been Music Director of the Hamburg State Opera and was Music Director of the Montreal Symphony Orchestra from 2006 to 2020. Early life and education Nagano was born in Berkeley, California, while his parents were in graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a ''sansei'' (third-generation) Japanese-American. He grew up in Morro Bay, a city located on the Central Coast of California in San Luis Obispo County. He studied sociology and music at the University of California, Santa Cruz. After graduation, he moved to San Francisco State University to study music. While there, he took composition courses from Grosvenor Cooper and Roger Nixon. He also studied at the École Normale de Musique de Paris. Career Nagano's first conducting job was with the Opera Company of Boston, where he was assistant conductor to Sarah Caldwell. In 1978, he ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Manchester
Manchester () is a city in Greater Manchester, England. It had a population of 552,000 in 2021. It is bordered by the Cheshire Plain to the south, the Pennines to the north and east, and the neighbouring city of Salford to the west. The two cities and the surrounding towns form one of the United Kingdom's most populous conurbations, the Greater Manchester Built-up Area, which has a population of 2.87 million. The history of Manchester began with the civilian settlement associated with the Roman fort ('' castra'') of ''Mamucium'' or ''Mancunium'', established in about AD 79 on a sandstone bluff near the confluence of the rivers Medlock and Irwell. Historically part of Lancashire, areas of Cheshire south of the River Mersey were incorporated into Manchester in the 20th century, including Wythenshawe in 1931. Throughout the Middle Ages Manchester remained a manorial township, but began to expand "at an astonishing rate" around the turn of the 19th century. Manchest ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bridgewater Hall
The Bridgewater Hall is a concert venue in Manchester city centre, England. It cost around £42 million to build in the 1990s, and hosts over 250 performances a year. It is home to the 165-year-old Hallé Orchestra as well as to the Hallé Choir and Hallé Youth Orchestra and it serves as the main concert venue for the BBC Philharmonic. The building sits on a bed of 280 springs intended to insulate it from external sound. The hall is named after the Third Duke of Bridgewater who commissioned the eponymous Bridgewater Canal that crosses Manchester, although the hall and waterside frontage is situated on a specially constructed arm of the Rochdale Canal. History Proposals to replace the concert venue in the Free Trade Hall were made after it was damaged in the Second World War, but the hall, which was home to The Hallé orchestra was repaired and renovated in the 1950s. Despite being a popular venue, the Free Trade Hall, built in the 1850s, had poor acoustics and outd ... [...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] |
Le Chant Du Rossignol
''Le chant du rossignol'' (English: ''The Song of the Nightingale'') is a symphonic poem written by Igor Stravinsky in 1917. The score is adapted from his earlier work, ''Le rossignol'' (''The Nightingale''), an opera from 1914. The opera, based on Hans Christian Andersen's 1843 tale " The Nightingale", is set in three acts, told from the point of view of a Chinese fisherman. In the orchestral version, Stravinsky mostly uses music from acts two and three. Opera The opera ''Le rossignol'', the first act written in 1908 and the later two in 1913–14, was Stravinsky's first opera. The delay between writing the first and the latter acts was caused by his commissions to write ''The Firebird'', ''Petrushka'', and ''The Rite of Spring'' for impresario Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. After this lapse of time, during which Stravinsky established himself as a ballet composer, he was unsure of returning to ''Le rossignol'', and although he did finish it, he chose to also create a purely ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Musical Mode
In music theory, the term mode or ''modus'' is used in a number of distinct senses, depending on context. Its most common use may be described as a type of musical scale coupled with a set of characteristic melodic and harmonic behaviors. It is applied to major and minor keys as well as the seven diatonic modes (including the former as Ionian and Aeolian) which are defined by their starting note or tonic. (Olivier Messiaen's modes of limited transposition are strictly a scale type.) Related to the diatonic modes are the eight church modes or Gregorian modes, in which authentic and plagal forms of scales are distinguished by ambitus and tenor or reciting tone. Although both diatonic and gregorian modes borrow terminology from ancient Greece, the Greek ''tonoi'' do not otherwise resemble their mediaeval/modern counterparts. In the Middle Ages the term modus was used to describe both intervals and rhythm. Modal rhythm was an essential feature of the modal notation system o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Minimalism
In visual arts, music and other media, minimalism is an art movement that began in post–World War II in Western art, most strongly with American visual arts in the 1960s and early 1970s. Prominent artists associated with minimalism include Donald Judd, Agnes Martin, Dan Flavin, Carl Andre, Robert Morris, Anne Truitt and Frank Stella. The movement is often interpreted as a reaction against abstract expressionism and modernism; it anticipated contemporary postminimal art practices, which extend or reflect on minimalism's original objectives. Minimalism in music often features repetition and gradual variation, such as the works of La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Julius Eastman and John Adams. The term ''minimalist'' often colloquially refers to anything or anyone that is spare or stripped to its essentials. It has accordingly been used to describe the plays and novels of Samuel Beckett, the films of Robert Bresson, the stories of Raymond Carver, an ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Contrapuntal
In music, counterpoint is the relationship between two or more musical lines (or voices) which are harmonically interdependent yet independent in rhythm and melodic contour. It has been most commonly identified in the European classical tradition, strongly developing during the Renaissance and in much of the common practice period, especially in the Baroque period. The term originates from the Latin ''punctus contra punctum'' meaning "point against point", i.e. "note against note". In Western pedagogy, counterpoint is taught through a system of species (see below). There are several different forms of counterpoint, including imitative counterpoint and free counterpoint. Imitative counterpoint involves the repetition of a main melodic idea across different vocal parts, with or without variation. Compositions written in free counterpoint often incorporate non-traditional harmonies and chords, chromaticism and dissonance. General principles The term "counterpoint" has been use ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Russian-American
Russian Americans ( rus, русские американцы, r=russkiye amerikantsy, p= ˈruskʲɪje ɐmʲɪrʲɪˈkant͡sɨ) are Americans of full or partial Russians, Russian ancestry. The term can apply to recent Russian diaspora, Russian immigrants to the United States, as well as to those who settled in the 19th-century Russian America, Russian possessions in northwestern America. Russian Americans comprise the largest Eastern European and East Slavs, East Slavic population in the U.S., the second-largest Slavic Americans, Slavic population generally, the nineteenth-largest ancestry group overall, and the eleventh-largest from Europe. In the mid-19th century, waves of Russian immigrants fleeing religious persecution settled in the U.S., including Russian Jews and Spiritual Christians. These groups mainly settled in coastal cities, including Alaska, Brooklyn (New York City) on the Northeastern United States, East Coast, and Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Portland, Oregon, on ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nicolas Slonimsky
Nicolas Slonimsky ( – December 25, 1995), born Nikolai Leonidovich Slonimskiy (russian: Никола́й Леони́дович Сло́нимский), was a Russian-born American conductor, author, pianist, composer and lexicographer. Best known for his writing and musical reference work, he wrote the ''Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns'' and the ''Lexicon of Musical Invective'', and edited ''Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians''. His life Early life in Russia and Europe Slonimsky was born Nikolai Leonidovich Slonimskiy in Saint Petersburg. He was of Jewish origin; his grandfather was Rabbi Chaim Zelig Slonimsky. His parents adopted the Orthodox faith after the birth of his older brother, and Nicolas was baptized in the Russian Orthodox Church. His maternal aunt, Isabelle Vengerova, later a founder of Philadelphia's Curtis Institute of Music, was his first piano teacher. He grew up in the intelligentsia. After the Russian Revolution of 1917, he moved ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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