|
Tzigane
''Tzigane'' is a rhapsodic composition by the French composer Maurice Ravel. It was commissioned by and dedicated to Hungarian violinist Jelly d'Arányi, great-niece of the influential violin virtuoso Joseph Joachim. The original instrumentation was for violin and piano (with optional luthéal attachment). The first performance took place in London on April 26, 1924 with the dedicatee on violin and with Henri Gil-Marchex at the piano (with luthéal). The luthéal was, in Ravel's day, a new piano attachment (first patented in 1919) with several tone-colour registrations which could be engaged by pulling stops above the keyboard. One of these registrations had a cimbalom-like sound, which fitted well with the gypsy-esque idea of the composition. The original score of ''Tzigane'' included instructions for these register-changes during execution. The luthéal, however, did not achieve permanence. By the end of the 20th century the first print of the accompaniment with luthéal was ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Luthéal
The luthéal is a kind of hybrid piano which extended the "register" possibilities of a piano by producing cimbalom-like sounds in some registers, exploiting harmonics of the strings when pulling other register-stops, and also some registers making other objects, which were lowered just above the strings, resound. The instrument became obsolete partly because most of its mechanics were too sensitive, needing constant adjustment. The only pieces in the general repertoire to feature the luthéal are ''L'enfant et les sortilèges'' (1920–25) and ''Tzigane'' (1924), by Maurice Ravel. History The attachment was created by the Belgian organ builder Georges Cloetens, who first patented it on 28 January 1919 and named it the "Jeu de harpe tirée". Cotte, Roger J. V. 2001. "Luthéal iano-Luthéal. ''The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians'', second edition, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell. London: Macmillan Publishers. Maurice Ravel used it in ''Tzigane'' for violin an ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Maurice Ravel
Joseph Maurice Ravel (7 March 1875 – 28 December 1937) was a French composer, pianist and conductor. He is often associated with Impressionism along with his elder contemporary Claude Debussy, although both composers rejected the term. In the 1920s and 1930s Ravel was internationally regarded as France's greatest living composer. Born to a music-loving family, Ravel attended France's premier music college, the Paris Conservatoire; he was not well regarded by its conservative establishment, whose biased treatment of him caused a scandal. After leaving the conservatoire, Ravel found his own way as a composer, developing a style of great clarity and incorporating elements of modernism, baroque, neoclassicism and, in his later works, jazz. He liked to experiment with musical form, as in his best-known work, ''Boléro'' (1928), in which repetition takes the place of development. Renowned for his abilities in orchestration, Ravel made some orchestral arrangements of other compose ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Romani People
The Romani (also spelled Romany or Rromani , ), colloquially known as the Roma, are an Indo-Aryan ethnic group, traditionally nomadic itinerants. They live in Europe and Anatolia, and have diaspora populations located worldwide, with significant concentrations in the Americas. In the English language, the Romani people are widely known by the exonym Gypsies (or Gipsies), which is considered pejorative by many Romani people due to its connotations of illegality and irregularity as well as its historical use as a racial slur. For versions (some of which are cognates) of the word in many other languages (e.g., , , it, zingaro, , and ) this perception is either very small or non-existent. At the first World Romani Congress in 1971, its attendees unanimously voted to reject the use of all exonyms for the Romani people, including ''Gypsy'', due to their aforementioned negative and stereotypical connotations. Linguistic and genetic evidence suggests that the Roma originated ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Samuel Dushkin
Samuel Dushkin (December 13, 1891 – June 24, 1976) was an American violinist, composer, and pedagogue of Polish birth and Jewish origin. Dushkin was born in Suwałki, Poland. He studied at the Conservatoire de Paris, as well as with Leopold Auer in New York City and Fritz Kreisler. He made his European debut in 1918 at the age of twenty-three, and six years later, his American debut with the New York Symphony Orchestra under Walter Damrosch. Dushkin collaborated closely with Igor Stravinsky in the composition of the latter's first work for the violin, the Violin Concerto. He performed the concerto's world and US premieres, and on the debut Vox recording (VLP 6340) with Stravinsky conducting Lamoureux Orchestra. Stravinsky also composed his ''Duo Concertante'' and his ''Divertimento'', both for violin and piano, to play with Dushkin on concert tours. They also worked together on violin transcriptions of other works, such as the ''Suite Italienne'' from Pulcinella. Dushkin g ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jelly D'Arányi
Jelly d'Aranyi, fully Jelly Aranyi de Hunyadvár ( hu, Hunyadvári Aranyi Jelly (30 May 189330 March 1966) was a Hungarian violinist who made her home in London. She was born in Budapest, the great-niece of Joseph Joachim and sister of the violinist Adila Fachiri. She began her studies as a pianist, but switched to violin at the Music Academy in Budapest when Jenő Hubay accepted her as a student. After concert tours of Europe and America as a soloist and chamber musician she settled in London. She formed a notable chamber trio with the Spanish cellist Pablo Casals and the Australian pianist Frederick Septimus Kelly, with whom she was in love, even referring to him as her "fiancé". On memorable occasions, she and Béla Bartók gave sonata recitals together in London and Paris. His two sonatas for violin and piano were dedicated to her; Jelly and Bartók presented them in London in March 1922 (No. 1) and May 1923 (No. 2). She was an excellent interpreter of Classical, Romantic ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Robert Soetens
Robert Soetens (19 July 189722 October 1997) was a French violinist, remembered particularly for premiering the Violin Concerto No. 2 of Sergei Prokofiev in 1935. Biography Robert Soetens was born in Montluçon, France in 1897, into a musical family of Belgian origin. His father had been a student of Eugène Ysaÿe. He played in public at age seven, and at the age of 11 he also studied with Ysaÿe. At 13 he was admitted to the Paris Conservatoire, where he studied under Vincent d'Indy, Camille Chevillard and Lucien Capet. At the age of 16, he played in the premiere of the First String Quartet of Darius Milhaud, a fellow student at the Conservatoire. He left the Conservatoire to enrol in the army during World War I. On his repatriation he became leader-soloist of an orchestra at Aix-les-Bains, and later with orchestras at Cannes (where André Messager was one of the conductors), Deauville, and Angers. He was also playing regularly in Paris, where he became friendly with othe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Exoticism
Exoticism (from "exotic") is a trend in European art and design, whereby artists became fascinated with ideas and styles from distant regions and drew inspiration from them. This often involved surrounding foreign cultures with mystique and fantasy which owed more to European culture than to the exotic cultures themselves: this process of glamorisation and stereotyping is called "exoticisation". History of exoticism The word "exotic" is rooted in the Greek word ''exo'' ("outside") and means, literally, "from outside". It was coined during Europe's Age of Discovery, when "outside" seemed to grow larger each day, as Western ships sailed the world and dropped anchor off other continents. The first definition of "exotic" in most modern dictionaries is "foreign", but while all things exotic are foreign, not everything foreign is exotic. Since there is no outside without an inside, the foreign only becomes exotic when imported – brought from the outside in. From the early 17th century, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pierre Monteux
Pierre Benjamin Monteux (; 4 April 18751 July 1964) was a French (later American) conductor. After violin and viola studies, and a decade as an orchestral player and occasional conductor, he began to receive regular conducting engagements in 1907. He came to prominence when, for Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes company between 1911 and 1914, he conducted the world premieres of Stravinsky's ''The Rite of Spring'' and other prominent works including ''Petrushka'', '' The Nightingale'', Ravel's ''Daphnis et Chloé'', and Debussy's '' Jeux''. Thereafter he directed orchestras around the world for more than half a century. From 1917 to 1919 Monteux was the principal conductor of the French repertoire at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. He conducted the Boston Symphony Orchestra (1919–24), Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra (1924–34), Orchestre Symphonique de Paris (1929–38) and San Francisco Symphony (1936–52). In 1961, aged eighty-six, he accepted the chief cond ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rhapsody (music)
A rhapsody in music is a one- movement work that is episodic yet integrated, free-flowing in structure, featuring a range of highly contrasted moods, colour, and tonality. An air of spontaneous inspiration and a sense of improvisation make it freer in form than a set of variations. The word ''rhapsody'' is derived from the gr, ῥαψῳδός, ''rhapsōidos'', a reciter of epic poetry (a rhapsodist), and came to be used in Europe by the 16th century as a designation for literary forms, not only epic poems, but also for collections of miscellaneous writings and, later, any extravagant expression of sentiment or feeling. In the 18th century, literary rhapsodies first became linked with music, as in Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart's ''Musicalische Rhapsodien'' (1786), a collection of songs with keyboard accompaniment, together with a few solo keyboard pieces. The first solo piano compositions with the title, however, were Václav Jan Tomášek’s fifteen Rhapsodies, the firs ... [...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] |
España (Chabrier)
''España, rhapsody for orchestra'' (french: España, rapsodie pour orchestre or ''Rapsodie España'') is the most famous orchestral composition by French composer Emmanuel Chabrier (1841–1894). Written in 1883 after a trip to Spain, it was dedicated to the conductor Charles Lamoureux, who conducted the first public performance on 4 November 1883, at the Théâtre du Château d’Eau for the Société des Nouveaux Concerts in Paris.Delage R. ''Emmanuel Chabrier''. Fayard, Paris, 1999. Background From July to December 1882, Chabrier and his wife toured Spain, taking in San Sebastián, Burgos, Toledo, Sevilla, Granada, Málaga, Cádiz, Cordoba, Valencia, Zaragoza and Barcelona. His letters written during his travels are full of good humour, keen observation and his reactions to the music and dance he came across – and demonstrate his genuine literary gift.Myers R. ''Emmanuel Chabrier and his circle''. John Dent & Sons, London, 1969. In a letter to Édouard Moullé (1845–1923 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Janissary
A Janissary ( ota, یڭیچری, yeŋiçeri, , ) was a member of the elite infantry units that formed the Ottoman Sultan's household troops and the first modern standing army in Europe. The corps was most likely established under sultan Orhan (1324–1362), during the Viziership of Alaeddin. Janissaries began as elite corps made up through the devşirme system of child levy, by which Christian Albanians, Romanians, Armenians, Bulgarians, Croats, Greeks and Serbs were taken, levied, subjected to circumcision and conversion to Islam, and incorporated into the Ottoman army. They became famed for internal cohesion cemented by strict discipline and order. Unlike typical slaves, they were paid regular salaries. Forbidden to marry before the age of 40 or engage in trade, their complete loyalty to the Sultan was expected. By the seventeenth century, due to a dramatic increase in the size of the Ottoman standing army, the corps' initially strict recruitment policy was relaxed. Civili ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
_-_Gallica.jpg "Click for more on -> Pierre Monteux")
