The Celestial Sphere
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The Celestial Sphere
''The Celestial Sphere'' is a large scale oratorio for chorus and orchestra by Charles Wuorinen, commissioned by Augustana College (Rock Island, Illinois) for the 100th anniversary of the Handel Oratorio Society, which gave the premiere performance on 25 April 1981 under the direction of Donald Morrison, conductor. The composition was written from January 2 to September 9, 1980, in Baltimore, Binghamton (NY), Buffalo (NY), Gardiner (MA), Iowa City (IA), Jackson Hole (WY), Los Angeles, Middle Valley (NJ), New York City, Rock Island (IL), and San Francisco. The score is published by C.F. Peters, EP 66851. Texts from William Fuller's "Lord, What Is Man?" (1693), Acts of the Apostles The Acts of the Apostles ( grc-koi, Πράξεις Ἀποστόλων, ''Práxeis Apostólōn''; la, Actūs Apostolōrum) is the fifth book of the New Testament; it tells of the founding of the Christian Church and the spread of its messag .... Wuorinen's full title is ''The Celestial Sphere / ...
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Oratorio
An oratorio () is a large musical composition for orchestra, choir, and soloists. Like most operas, an oratorio includes the use of a choir, soloists, an instrumental ensemble, various distinguishable characters, and arias. However, opera is musical theatre, while oratorio is strictly a concert piece – though oratorios are sometimes staged as operas, and operas are sometimes presented in concert form. In an oratorio, the choir often plays a central role, and there is generally little or no interaction between the characters, and no props or elaborate costumes. A particularly important difference is in the typical subject matter of the text. Opera tends to deal with history and mythology, including age-old devices of romance, deception, and murder, whereas the plot of an oratorio often deals with sacred topics, making it appropriate for performance in the church. Protestant composers took their stories from the Bible, while Catholic composers looked to the lives of saints, as w ...
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Charles Wuorinen
Charles Peter Wuorinen (; June 9, 1938 – March 11, 2020) was an American composer of contemporary classical music based in New York City. He performed his works and other 20th-century music as pianist and conductor. He composed more than 270 works, including orchestral music, chamber music, solo instrumental and vocal works, and operas such as ''Brokeback Mountain''. Salman Rushdie and Annie Proulx have collaborated with him. Wuorinen's work has been called serialist, but he came to disparage that term as meaningless. His ''Time's Encomium'', his only purely electronic piece, received the Pulitzer Prize for Music. Wuorinen also taught at several institutions, including Columbia University and Manhattan School of Music. Life and career Background Wuorinen was born on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City. His father, John H. Wuorinen, the chair of the history department at Columbia University, was a noted scholar of Scandinavian affairs, who also worke ...
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Augustana College (Illinois)
Augustana College is a private Lutheran college in Rock Island, Illinois. The college enrolls approximately 2,500 students. Its campus is adjacent to the Mississippi River and covers of hilly, wooded land. History Augustana College was founded as Augustana College and Theological Seminary in 1860 by the Scandinavian Evangelical Lutheran Augustana Synod. Located first in Chicago, it moved to Paxton, Illinois, in 1863 and to Rock Island, Illinois, its current home, in 1875. After 1890, an increasingly large Swedish American community in America promoted a new institutional structure, including a lively Swedish-language press, many new churches, several colleges, and a network of ethnic organizations. The result was to foster a sense of Swedishness with pride in the United States. Thus, there emerged a self-confident Americanized generation. Augustana College put itself in the lead of the movement to affirm Swedish American identity. Early on all the students had been born in Swede ...
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Handel Oratorio Society
George Frideric (or Frederick) Handel (; baptised , ; 23 February 1685 – 14 April 1759) was a German-British Baroque composer well known for his operas, oratorios, anthems, concerti grossi, and organ concertos. Handel received his training in Halle and worked as a composer in Hamburg and Italy before settling in London in 1712, where he spent the bulk of his career and became a naturalised British subject in 1727. He was strongly influenced both by the middle-German polyphonic choral tradition and by composers of the Italian Baroque. In turn, Handel's music forms one of the peaks of the "high baroque" style, bringing Italian opera to its highest development, creating the genres of English oratorio and organ concerto, and introducing a new style into English church music. He is consistently recognized as one of the greatest composers of his age. Handel started three commercial opera companies to supply the English nobility with Italian opera. In 1737, he had a physical br ...
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Edition Peters
Edition Peters is a classical music publisher founded in Leipzig, Germany in 1800. History The company came into being on 1 December 1800 when the Viennese composer Franz Anton Hoffmeister (1754–1812) and the local organist Ambrosius Kühnel (1770–1813) opened a concern in Leipzig known as the "Bureau de Musique." Along with publishing, the new firm included an engraving and printing works and a retail shop for selling printed music and instruments. Among its earliest publications were collections of chamber music works by Haydn and Mozart. When Hoffmeister departed for Vienna in 1805, the firm had already issued several works by the then new Viennese composer, Ludwig van Beethoven (Opp. 19-22; 39-42). Kühnel continued publishing new works, adding those of composers Daniel Gottlob Türk, Václav Tomášek, and Louis Spohr, all of whom went on to have a long relationship with the firm. After Kühnel's death, the enterprise was sold to Carl Friedrich Peters (1779–1827), a Le ...
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William Fuller (bishop)
William Fuller (1608–1675) was an English churchman. He was dean of St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin (1660), bishop of Limerick (1663), and bishop of Lincoln (1667). He was also the friend of Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn. Life He was son of Thomas Fuller, a merchant of London, by his wife, Lucy, daughter of Simon Cannon, citizen and merchant taylor. He was born in London, and was educated at Westminster School, from which he went to Magdalen Hall, Oxford, as a commoner, about 1626, migrating to Edmund Hall, at which he took the degree of B.C.L, about 1632. After taking holy orders he was appointed one of the chaplains or petty canons of Christ Church Cathedral. He was presented by the king to the rectory of St. Mary Woolchurch in the city of London on 30 June 1641, and resigned it on 16 December of the same year, in which he was also appointed to the rectory of Ewhurst, Sussex. When Charles I was besieged in Oxford in 1645, he became chaplain to Edward Littleton, 1st Baron L ...
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Acts Of The Apostles
The Acts of the Apostles ( grc-koi, Πράξεις Ἀποστόλων, ''Práxeis Apostólōn''; la, Actūs Apostolōrum) is the fifth book of the New Testament; it tells of the founding of the Christian Church and the spread of its message to the Roman Empire. It gives an account of the ministry and activity of Christ's apostles in Jerusalem and other regions, after Christ's death, resurrection, and ascension. Acts and the Gospel of Luke make up a two-part work, Luke–Acts, by the same anonymous author. It is usually dated to around 80–90 AD, although some scholars suggest 90–110. The first part, the Gospel of Luke, tells how God fulfilled his plan for the world's salvation through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. Acts continues the story of Christianity in the 1st century, beginning with the ascension of Jesus to Heaven. The early chapters, set in Jerusalem, describe the Day of Pentecost (the coming of the Holy Spirit) and the growth of the ...
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Bell Labs
Nokia Bell Labs, originally named Bell Telephone Laboratories (1925–1984), then AT&T Bell Laboratories (1984–1996) and Bell Labs Innovations (1996–2007), is an American industrial research and scientific development company owned by multinational company Nokia. With headquarters located in Murray Hill, New Jersey, the company operates several laboratories in the United States and around the world. Researchers working at Bell Laboratories are credited with the development of radio astronomy, the transistor, the laser, the photovoltaic cell, the charge-coupled device (CCD), information theory, the Unix operating system, and the programming languages B, C, C++, S, SNOBOL, AWK, AMPL, and others. Nine Nobel Prizes have been awarded for work completed at Bell Laboratories. Bell Labs had its origin in the complex corporate organization of the Bell System telephone conglomerate. In the late 19th century, the laboratory began as the Western Electric Engineering Department, l ...
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Musical America
''Musical America'' is the oldest American magazine on classical music, first appearing in 1898 in print and in 1999 online, at musicalamerica.com. It is published by Performing Arts Resources, LLC, of East Windsor, New Jersey. History 1898–1964 ''Musical America's'' first issue was on October 8, 1898. Its founder was John Christian Freund (1848–1924), who with Milton Weil, also founded ''The Music Trades'' magazine in 1893. Thirty-six issues appeared until June 24, 1899, covering music, drama, and the arts. In 1899 the publication was discontinued for six years due to a lack of financial resources. It reappeared as a weekly from November 18, 1905, until 1929, solely focusing on classical music. In 1921 Musical America published the first "Guide," which later evolved into the International Directory of the Performing Arts, now the Musical America Directory. After John Freund died in 1924, Milton Weil who had been Freund's business partner continued the publication. In June 1 ...
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Rock Island Argus
''The Dispatch–Argus'' is a daily morning newspaper in East Moline, Illinois and circulated primarily throughout the Illinois side of the Quad Cities — Moline, East Moline, Rock Island and Rock Island County, but also for sale in retail establishments on the Iowa side of the Quad Cities — Davenport and Bettendorf. ''The Dispatch'' is circulated in and around Moline while ''The Rock Island Argus'' is circulated in and around that city. The two are essentially the same newspaper, only with different front covers. They have a combined circulation of about 25,000. The newspapers were owned by the Small Newspaper Group, located in Kankakee, Illinois, until 2017, when Davenport-based Lee Enterprises bought the paper and its assets. History ''Rock Island Argus'' The ''Argus'', founded in Rock Island, is one of Illinois' oldest continuously published newspapers. It can trace its origin to 1851 with the founding of a weekly paper called ''The Republican''. It became Rock Island ...
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Quad-City Times
The ''Quad-City Times'' is a daily morning newspaper based in Davenport, Iowa, and circulated throughout the Quad Cities metropolitan area ( Davenport, Bettendorf and Scott County in Iowa; and Moline, East Moline, Rock Island and Rock Island County in Illinois). As it is a regional newspaper, the ''Quad-City Times'' is also circulated and has readership in Cedar, Clinton, Jackson, Louisa and Muscatine counties in Iowa; and Carroll, Henry, Mercer and Whiteside counties in Illinois. According to the Iowa Newspaper Association, the ''Quad-City Times'' has a circulation of 61,366. The newspaper is owned by Lee Enterprises, which is also located in Davenport. History The ''Quad-City Times'' grew from several predecessors, including the ''Democratic Banner'' and ''Blue Ribbon News''. The ''Democratic Banner'' was founded in 1848, was sold in 1855 to a group of businessmen and rechristened the ''Iowa State Democrat''. The ''Iowa State Democrat'' published its first edition ...
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Compositions By Charles Wuorinen
Composition or Compositions may refer to: Arts and literature *Composition (dance), practice and teaching of choreography *Composition (language), in literature and rhetoric, producing a work in spoken tradition and written discourse, to include visuals and digital space *Composition (music), an original piece of music and its creation *Composition (visual arts), the plan, placement or arrangement of the elements of art in a work * ''Composition'' (Peeters), a 1921 painting by Jozef Peeters *Composition studies, the professional field of writing instruction * ''Compositions'' (album), an album by Anita Baker *Digital compositing, the practice of digitally piecing together a video Computer science *Function composition (computer science), an act or mechanism to combine simple functions to build more complicated ones *Object composition, combining simpler data types into more complex data types, or function calls into calling functions History *Composition of 1867, Austro-Hungarian/ ...
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