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Wergo
WERGO is a German record label focusing on contemporary classical music. It was founded in 1962 by German art historian and music publisher (1903–1975) and the musicologist Helmut Kirchmeyer. Their first release, filed under "WER 60001", was Schoenberg's ''Pierrot lunaire'', conducted by Pierre Boulez. The record company is owned by Schott Music, both based in Mainz, Germany. A great number of contemporary composers have been recorded by the label. These include Louis Andriessen, George Antheil, Béla Bartók, Pierre Boulez, Earle Brown, John Cage, Elliott Carter, George Crumb, Morton Feldman, Mauricio Kagel, György Ligeti, Meredith Monk, Conlon Nancarrow, Luigi Nono, Harry Partch, Steve Reich, Wolfgang Rihm, Terry Riley, Kaija Saariaho, Giacinto Scelsi, Dieter Schnebel, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pēteris Vasks, and Walter Zimmermann. Earle Brown was repertory director of an important series of new-music recordings on the Time-Mainstream label re-issued in 2008 on Wergo. Betw ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Earle Brown
Earle Brown (December 26, 1926 – July 2, 2002) was an American composer who established his own formal and notational systems. Brown was the creator of "open form," a style of musical construction that has influenced many composers since—notably the downtown New York scene of the 1980s (see John Zorn) and generations of younger composers. Among his most famous works are ''December 1952'', an entirely graphic score, and the open form pieces ''Available Forms I & II'', ''Centering'', and ''Cross Sections and Color Fields''. He was awarded a Foundation for Contemporary Arts John Cage Award (1998). Life Brown was born in Lunenburg, Massachusetts, and first devoted himself to playing jazz. He initially considered a career in engineering, and enrolled for engineering and mathematics at Northeastern University (1944–45). He enlisted in the U.S. Air Force in 1945. However, the war ended while he was still in basic training, and he was assigned to the base band at Randolph Fi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Luigi Nono
Luigi Nono (; 29 January 1924 – 8 May 1990) was an Italian avant-garde composer of classical music. Biography Early years Nono, born in Venice, was a member of a wealthy artistic family; his grandfather was a notable painter. Nono began music lessons with Gian Francesco Malipiero at the Venice Conservatory in 1941, where he acquired knowledge of the Renaissance madrigal tradition, amongst other styles. After graduating with a degree in law from the University of Padua, he was given encouragement in composition by Bruno Maderna. Through Maderna, he became acquainted with Hermann Scherchen—then Maderna's conducting teacher—who gave Nono further tutelage and was an early mentor and advocate of his music. Scherchen presented Nono's first acknowledged work, the ''Variazioni canoniche sulla serie dell'op. 41 di A. Schönberg'' in 1950, at the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik Darmstadt. The ''Variazioni canoniche'', based on the twelve-tone series of Arnold Sc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Schott Music
Schott Music () is one of the oldest German music publishers. It is also one of the largest music publishing houses in Europe, and is the second oldest music publisher after Breitkopf & Härtel. The company headquarters of Schott Music were founded by Bernhard Schott in Mainz in 1770. Schott Music is one of the world's leading music publishers. It represents many important composers of the 20th and 21st centuries, and its publishing catalogue contains some 31,000 titles on sale and over 10,000 titles on hire. The repertoire ranges from complete editions, stage and concert works to general educational literature, fine sheet music editions and multimedia products. In addition to the publishing houses of Panton, Ars-Viva, Ernst Eulenburg, Fürstner, Cranz, Atlantis Musikbuch and Hohner-Verlag, the Schott group also includes two recording labels, Wergo (for new music) and Intuition (for Jazz), as well as eight specialist magazines. The Schott Music group also includes the printing ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Conlon Nancarrow
Samuel Conlon Nancarrow (; October 27, 1912 – August 10, 1997) was an American- Mexican composer who lived and worked in Mexico for most of his life. Nancarrow is best remembered for his ''Studies for Player Piano'', being one of the first composers to use auto-playing musical instruments, realizing their potential to play far beyond human performance ability. He lived most of his life in relative isolation and did not become widely known until the 1980s. Biography Early years Nancarrow was born in Texarkana, Arkansas. He played trumpet in a jazz band in his youth before studying music first in Cincinnati, Ohio, and later in Boston, Massachusetts, with Roger Sessions, Walter Piston and Nicolas Slonimsky. He met Arnold Schoenberg during that composer's brief stay in Boston in 1933. In Boston, Nancarrow joined the Communist Party. When the Spanish Civil War broke out, he traveled to Spain to join the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in fighting against Francisco Franco. He was in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Giacinto Scelsi
Giacinto Francesco Maria Scelsi (; 8 January 1905 – 9 August 1988, sometimes cited as 8 August 1988) was an Italian composer who also wrote surrealist poetry in French. He is best known for having composed music based around only one pitch, altered in all manners through microtonal oscillations, harmonic allusions, and changes in timbre and dynamics, as paradigmatically exemplified in his ''Quattro pezzi su una nota sola'' ("Four Pieces on a single note", 1959). This composition remains his most famous work and one of the few performed to significant recognition during his lifetime. His musical output, which encompassed all Western classical genres except scenic music, remained largely undiscovered even within contemporary musical circles during most of his life. Today, some of his music has gained popularity in certain postmodern composition circles, with pieces like his "Anahit" and his String Quartets rising to increased prominence. Scelsi collaborated with American comp ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Music Publisher
A music publisher is a type of publisher that specializes in distributing music. Music publishers originally published sheet music. When copyright became legally protected, music publishers started to play a role in the management of the intellectual property of composers. Music print publishing The term music publisher originally referred to publishers who issued hand-copied or printed sheet music. Examples (who are actively in business ) include: * Breitkopf & Härtel, Leipzig, founded 1719 * Schott, Mainz, 1770 * Oxford University Press, Oxford, founded 18th century * Edition Peters, Leipzig, 1800 * Casa Ricordi, Milan, founded 1808 (now owned by Universal Music Publishing Group) * G. Schirmer, Inc., New York, founded 1861 (now owned by Wise Music Group) * Universal Edition, Vienna, 1901 * Bärenreiter, founded 1923 * Boosey & Hawkes, London, founded 1930 (now owned by Concord) * Hans Sikorski, Hamburg, 1935 (now owned by Concord) * PWM, Kraków, founded 1945 * G. Henle ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
George Crumb
George Henry Crumb Jr. (24 October 1929 – 6 February 2022) was an American composer of avant-garde contemporary classical music. Early in his life he rejected the widespread modernist usage of serialism, developing a highly personal musical language which "range in mood from peaceful to nightmarish". Crumb's compositions are known for pushing the limits of technical prowess by way of frequent use of extended techniques. The unusual timbres he employs evoke a surrealist atmosphere which portray emotions of considerable intensity with vast and sometimes haunting soundscapes. His few large-scale works include '' Echoes of Time and the River'' (1967), which won the 1968 Pulitzer Prize for Music, and ''Star-Child'' (1977), which won the 2001 Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Classical Composition; however, his output consists of mostly music for chamber ensembles or solo instrumentalists. Among his best known compositions are '' Black Angels'' (1970), a striking commentary on the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kaija Saariaho
Kaija Anneli Saariaho (; ; born 14 October 1952) is a Finnish composer based in Paris, France. During the course of her career, Saariaho has received commissions from the Lincoln Center for the Kronos Quartet and from IRCAM for the Ensemble Intercontemporain, the BBC, the New York Philharmonic, the Salzburg Music Festival, the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris, and the Finnish National Opera, among others. In a 2019 composers' poll by BBC Music Magazine, Saariaho was ranked the greatest living composer. Saariaho studied composition in Helsinki, Freiburg, and Paris, where she has lived since 1982. Her research at the Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics/Music (IRCAM) marked a turning point in her music away from strict serialism towards spectralism. Her characteristically rich, polyphonic textures are often created by combining live music and electronics. Life and work Saariaho was born in Helsinki, Finland. She studied at the Sibelius Academy under Paavo Hein ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Terry Riley
Terrence Mitchell "Terry" Riley (born June 24, 1935) is an American composer and performing musician best known as a pioneer of the minimalist school of composition. Influenced by jazz and Indian classical music, his music became notable for its innovative use of repetition, tape music techniques, and delay systems. His best known works are the 1964 composition '' In C'' and the 1969 LP ''A Rainbow in Curved Air'', both considered landmarks of minimalism and important influences on experimental music, rock, and contemporary electronic music. Raised in California, Riley began studying composition and performing solo piano in the 1950s. He befriended and collaborated with composer La Monte Young, and later became involved with the San Francisco Tape Music Center. A three-record deal with CBS in the late 1960s, resulting in an LP recording of ''In C'' (1968) and ''A Rainbow in Curved Air'' (1969), brought his work to wider audiences. In 1970, he began intensive studies under Hin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Wolfgang Rihm
Wolfgang Rihm (born 13 March 1952) is a German composer and academic teacher. He is musical director of the Institute of New Music and Media at the University of Music Karlsruhe and has been composer in residence at the Lucerne Festival and the Salzburg Festival. He was honoured as Officier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2001. His musical work includes more than 500 works. In 2012, The Guardian wrote: "enormous output and bewildering variety of styles and sounds". Career Rihm was born on 13 March 1952, in Karlsruhe. He finished both his school and his studies in music theory and composition at the Hochschule fĂĽr Musik Karlsruhe with in 1972, two years before the premiere of his early work ''Morphonie'' at the 1974 Donaueschingen Festival launched his career as a prominent figure in the European new music scene. Rihm's early work, combining contemporary techniques with the emotional volatility of Mahler and of Schoenberg's early expressionist period, was regarded by many ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Steve Reich
Stephen Michael Reich ( ; born October 3, 1936) is an American composer known for his contribution to the development of minimal music in the mid to late 1960s. Reich's work is marked by its use of repetitive figures, slow harmonic rhythm, and canons. Reich describes this concept in his essay, "Music as a Gradual Process", by stating, "I am interested in perceptible processes. I want to be able to hear the process happening throughout the sounding music." To do so, his music employs the technique of phase shifting, in which a phrase is slightly altered over time, in a flow that is clearly perceptible to the listener. His innovations include using tape loops to create phasing patterns, as on the early compositions ''It's Gonna Rain'' (1965) and '' Come Out'' (1966), and the use of simple, audible processes, as on ''Pendulum Music'' (1968) and ''Four Organs'' (1970). The 1978 recording ''Music for 18 Musicians'' would help entrench minimalism as a movement. Reich's work took o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Harry Partch
Harry Partch (June 24, 1901 – September 3, 1974) was an American composer, music theorist, and creator of unique musical instruments. He composed using scales of unequal intervals in just intonation, and was one of the first 20th-century composers in the West to work systematically with microtonal scales, alongside Lou Harrison. He built custom-made instruments in these tunings on which to play his compositions, and described the method behind his theory and practice in his book '' Genesis of a Music'' (1947). Partch composed with scales dividing the octave into 43 unequal tones derived from the natural harmonic series; these scales allowed for more tones of smaller intervals than in standard Western tuning, which uses twelve equal intervals to the octave. To play his music, Partch built many unique instruments, with such names as the Chromelodeon, the Quadrangularis Reversum, and the Zymo-Xyl. Partch described his music as corporeal, and distinguished it from abs ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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