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Harry Lawrence Freeman
Harry Lawrence Freeman (October 9, 1869 – March 24, 1954) was an American neoromantic opera composer, conductor, impresario and teacher. He was the first African-American to write an opera (''Epthalia'', 1891) that was successfully produced. Freeman founded the Freeman School of Music and the Freeman School of Grand Opera, as well as several short-lived opera companies which gave first performances of his own compositions.Kirk, p. 187 During his life, he was known as "the black Wagner."Kirk, p. 186 Biography Harry Lawrence Freeman was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1869, to parents Lemuel Freeman and Agnes Silms-Freeman. Freeman learned to play the piano and was an assistant church organist by the age of 10. At the age of 18, he was inspired to begin composing his own music after attending a performance of Richard Wagner's opera ''Tannhäuser Tannhäuser (; gmh, Tanhûser), often stylized, "The Tannhäuser," was a German Minnesinger and traveling poet. Historically, his biog ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Harry Lawrence Freeman
Harry Lawrence Freeman (October 9, 1869 – March 24, 1954) was an American neoromantic opera composer, conductor, impresario and teacher. He was the first African-American to write an opera (''Epthalia'', 1891) that was successfully produced. Freeman founded the Freeman School of Music and the Freeman School of Grand Opera, as well as several short-lived opera companies which gave first performances of his own compositions.Kirk, p. 187 During his life, he was known as "the black Wagner."Kirk, p. 186 Biography Harry Lawrence Freeman was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1869, to parents Lemuel Freeman and Agnes Silms-Freeman. Freeman learned to play the piano and was an assistant church organist by the age of 10. At the age of 18, he was inspired to begin composing his own music after attending a performance of Richard Wagner's opera ''Tannhäuser Tannhäuser (; gmh, Tanhûser), often stylized, "The Tannhäuser," was a German Minnesinger and traveling poet. Historically, his biog ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
52nd Street (Manhattan)
52nd Street is a -long one-way street traveling west to east across Midtown Manhattan, New York City. A short section of it was known as the city's center of jazz performance from the 1930s to the 1950s. Jazz center Following the repeal of Prohibition in 1933, 52nd Street replaced 133rd Street as "Swing Street" of the city. The blocks of 52nd Street between Fifth Avenue and Seventh Avenue became renowned for the abundance of jazz clubs and lively street life. The street was convenient to musicians playing on Broadway and the 'legitimate' nightclubs and was also the site of a CBS studio. Musicians who played for others in the early evening played for themselves on 52nd Street. In the period from 1930 through the early 1950s, 52nd Street clubs hosted such jazz musicians as Louis Prima, Art Tatum, Fats Waller, Billie Holiday, Trummy Young, Harry Gibson, Nat Jaffe, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Marian McPartland, and many more. Although musici ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Harlem Renaissance
The Harlem Renaissance was an intellectual and cultural revival of African American music, dance, art, fashion, literature, theater, politics and scholarship centered in Harlem, Manhattan, New York City, spanning the 1920s and 1930s. At the time, it was known as the "New Negro Movement", named after ''The New Negro'', a 1925 anthology edited by Alain Locke. The movement also included the new African American cultural expressions across the urban areas in the Northeast and Midwest United States affected by a renewed militancy in the general struggle for civil rights, combined with the Great Migration of African American workers fleeing the racist conditions of the Jim Crow Deep South, as Harlem was the final destination of the largest number of those who migrated north. Though it was centered in the Harlem neighborhood, many francophone black writers from African and Caribbean colonies who lived in Paris were also influenced by the movement, which spanned from about 1918 until ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Scott Joplin
Scott Joplin ( 1868 – April 1, 1917) was an American composer and pianist. Because of the fame achieved for his ragtime compositions, he was dubbed the "King of Ragtime." During his career, he wrote over 40 original ragtime pieces, one ragtime ballet, and two operas. One of his first and most popular pieces, the '' Maple Leaf Rag'', became the genre's first and most influential hit, later being recognized as the archetypal rag. Joplin considered ragtime to be a form of classical music and largely disdained the practice of ragtime such as that in honky tonk. Joplin grew up in a musical family of railway laborers in Texarkana, Arkansas, developing his own musical knowledge with the help of local teachers. While in Texarkana, he formed a vocal quartet and taught mandolin and guitar. During the late 1880s, he left his job as a railroad laborer and traveled the American South as an itinerant musician. He went to Chicago for the World's Fair of 1893, which played a major part i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Legitimate Theater
Legitimate theatre is live performance that relies almost entirely on diegetic elements, with actors performing through speech and natural movement.Joyce M. Hawkins and Robert Allen, eds. "Legitimate" entry. ''The Oxford Encyclopedic English Dictionary.'' Oxford University Press, 1991. pp. 820-821. "''—adj.'' 5. constituting or relating to serious drama (including both comedy and tragedy) as distinct from musical comedy, farce, revue, etc. The term arose in the 18th c. ... It covered plays dependent entirely on acting with little or no singing, dancing or spectacle."Mark Hodin. "The Disavowal of Ethnicity: Legitimate Theatre and the Social Construction of Literary Value in Turn-of-the-Century America." ''Theatre Journal.'' 52.2: May 2000. p. 212. "The expression ''legitimate theatre''...became vernacular within heturn-of-the- 0thcentury amusement market. The legitimate prefix confirmed the fact that conventional stage plays no longer monopolized the definition of legitimate thea ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ballet
Ballet () is a type of performance dance that originated during the Italian Renaissance in the fifteenth century and later developed into a concert dance form in France and Russia. It has since become a widespread and highly technical form of dance with its own vocabulary. Ballet has been influential globally and has defined the foundational techniques which are used in many other dance genres and cultures. Various schools around the world have incorporated their own cultures. As a result, ballet has evolved in distinct ways. A ''ballet'' as a unified work comprises the choreography and music for a ballet production. Ballets are choreographed and performed by trained ballet dancers. Traditional classical ballets are usually performed with classical music accompaniment and use elaborate costumes and staging, whereas modern ballets are often performed in simple costumes and without elaborate sets or scenery. Etymology Ballet is a French word which had its origin in Italian ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Symphonic Poem
A symphonic poem or tone poem is a piece of orchestral music, usually in a single continuous movement, which illustrates or evokes the content of a poem, short story, novel, painting, landscape, or other (non-musical) source. The German term ''Tondichtung (tone poem)'' appears to have been first used by the composer Carl Loewe in 1828. The Hungarian composer Franz Liszt first applied the term ''Symphonische Dichtung'' to his 13 works in this vein. While many symphonic poems may compare in size and scale to symphonic movements (or even reach the length of an entire symphony), they are unlike traditional classical symphonic movements, in that their music is intended to inspire listeners to imagine or consider scenes, images, specific ideas or moods, and not (necessarily) to focus on following traditional patterns of musical form such as sonata form. This intention to inspire listeners was a direct consequence of Romanticism, which encouraged literary, pictorial and dramatic ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cantata
A cantata (; ; literally "sung", past participle feminine singular of the Italian verb ''cantare'', "to sing") is a vocal composition with an instrumental accompaniment, typically in several movements, often involving a choir. The meaning of the term changed over time, from the simple single-voice madrigal of the early 17th century, to the multi-voice "cantata da camera" and the "cantata da chiesa" of the later part of that century, from the more substantial dramatic forms of the 18th century to the usually sacred-texted 19th-century cantata, which was effectively a type of short oratorio. Cantatas for use in the liturgy of church services are called church cantata or sacred cantata; other cantatas can be indicated as secular cantatas. Several cantatas were, and still are, written for special occasions, such as Christmas cantatas. Christoph Graupner, Georg Philipp Telemann and Johann Sebastian Bach composed cycles of church cantatas for the occasions of the liturgical year. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Song Cycle
A song cycle (german: Liederkreis or Liederzyklus) is a group, or cycle (music), cycle, of individually complete Art song, songs designed to be performed in a sequence as a unit.Susan Youens, ''Grove online'' The songs are either for solo voice or an ensemble, or rarely a combination of solo songs mingled with choral pieces. The number of songs in a song cycle may be as brief as two songs or as long as 30 or more songs. The term "song cycle" did not enter lexicography until 1865, in Arrey von Dommer's edition of ''Koch’s Musikalisches Lexikon'', but works definable in retrospect as song cycles existed long before then. One of the earliest examples may be the set of seven Cantiga de amigo, Cantigas de amigo by the 13th-century Galicians, Galician jongleur Martin Codax. Jeffrey Mark identified the group of dialect songs 'Hodge und Malkyn' from Thomas Ravenscroft's ''The Briefe Discourse'' (1614) as the first of a number of early 17th Century examples in England. A song cycle is ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Leah Kleschna
''Leah Kleschna'' is a drama in five acts by C.M.S. McLellan produced for the first time on Broadway by Minnie Maddern Fiske, Harrison Grey Fiske and the Manhattan Company with set design provided by Frank E. Gates and E. A. Morange. The play opened under the direction of Mr. Fiske at the Manhattan Theatre on December 12, 1904, and had an original run of 131 performances. ''Leah Kleschna'' returned to Broadway at the same venue in September 1905 for an additional 24 performances and in 1924 for a short run at the Lyric Theatre with Helen Gahagan as Leah. ''Leah Kleschna'' opened to positive reviews in London on May 2, 1905, at the New Theatre with Lena Ashwell in the title role. The production by Charles Frohman's company resulted in the threat of legal action by Mrs. Fiske who claimed she had purchased the English rights to the play. On December 10, 1913, the silent film ''Leah Kleschna'' premiered with Carlotta Nillson playing Leah, House Peters as Sylvaine and Hale Clar ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Librettos
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. The term ''libretto'' is also sometimes used to refer to the text of major liturgical works, such as the Mass, requiem and sacred cantata, or the story line of a ballet. ''Libretto'' (; plural ''libretti'' ), from Italian, is the diminutive of the word ''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 very detailed description of the ballet's story, scene by sce ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
